In 415 BCE, the Athenian Assembly was considering a proposal to invade Sicily. Athens was a few years into a wobbly peace with Sparta, that had been negotiated after ten years of fighting an inconclusive but very destructive war, sprinkled with bouts of plague, and the arguments for the invasion were even more wobbly than that peace.
Invading Sicily was ambitious, to say the least. Triremes couldn’t spend a lot of time in the sea (because of worm that destroyed the wood, see Hale), and so would have to get to Sicily with a series of hops along the coast. More important, they would have to send their ships and troops past their enemy of the last many years, Sparta, thereby leaving Athens vulnerable to invasion. While there are scholars who argue Athens could have succeeded in beating the Syracusans (mainly Victor Davis Hanson, architect of the 2007 surge in Iraq), that a scholar 2500 years later can imagine a way that the Athenians might have won doesn’t mean it would have—that’s the problem with counterfactuals—but Athens didn’t just need a successful invasion; it needed a successful occupation. It’s always the occupation.
Thus, had the Assembly done its job of deliberating, everyone there would have taken seriously the weaknesses in the proposed invasion—regardless of their faction—including such issues as whether sending so many troops so far away was making Athens vulnerable to invasion, but, again, the vexed question of occupation. Instead of deliberating about the risks of the proposal, however, they made the decision to invade, and they did so purely on the basis of political faction.
I’m a scholar of rhetoric. The discipline of rhetoric tends to focus on rhetors who inspired communities to great things (such as MLK Jr.), or to rhetors who were marginalized in their times but we now see as inspirational (such as Ida Wells-Barnett or Cesar Chavez). I was the kind of child who kicked over rocks to see what was under them, and that’s continued for me as a scholar. My area of expertise is how communities talk themselves into bad decisions (unforced errors), and then, and this is important, when they get clear information that they’ve made a bad decision, they recommit with more resources, a greater will to succeed, calls for silencing dissent and purifying the in-group, and refusals to admit, let alone learn from or correct, the error.
In other words, I’m interested in times that, although wildly different in terms of era, issue, participants, and media, people made decisions in the same way—ranging from the debate over the Sicilian Expedition to LBJ’s decision to escalate the war in Vietnam in the summer of 1965. They are all instances that the communities in question later admitted had been wrong, sometimes by pretending they’d never had the position they did, such as Christians in the US refusing to acknowledge our past commitments to slavery and segregation.
For the sake of argument, let’s stick with the Sicilian Expedition.
In the field of political science, there are some who advocate what’s called the deliberative model of policy determination, and others who advocate what’s often called the pluralist model. (There’s a similar argument in rhetoric, but we’ll use the political scientists terms.) Deliberative democracy “requires our engagement with opposing views” whereas “pluralist views of democracy [are] quite comfortable with highly segregated information spaces in which groups contesting for political power define competing positions crisply and resolve their differences not by agreeing, but by peacefully counting votes at the poll” (Benkler et al. 290-1).
So, you have one way that people in a democracy decide—we argue with (and not at) one another, albeit vigorously, vehemently, and not necessarily very nicely, but we genuinely engage the best arguments the oppositions and our critics have actually made, regardless of political faction—the deliberative model. Another way, the pluralist model, is to see democracy as profoundly expressive. The public expresses its approval or disapproval of political figures by voting for or against them when they come up for reelection; that approval or disapproval is assumed to be on the basis of whether those political figures are enacting policies in the self- or in-group interest of the voters. And those interests are assumed to aggregate to good policies—in this model, a “good” policy is one that the most voters want, and that “want” is assumed to be effectively expressed in voting.
What I want to do in this talk is explore the rhetorical problems inherent in each model, specifically the ways that democratic discourse tends to slouch into demagoguery, largely because that’s such an easy way to motivate people, and both models have problems with motivation.
Imagine that the people in this room are composed of four different kinds of groups: some of us are hunters (who make money partially by guiding hunts), some are corn producers, some are involved in the slaughterhouse industry (for the sake of brevity, call them tanners), and some are brewers. Our interests conflict with one another—the tanners want to dump the leftover guts (known as offal) into the rivers and streams because that’s cheap and easy, and brewers don’t want to use offal-filled water. The hunters want free roaming; corn farmers don’t want people (or prey) crashing through their fields. We really disagree.
And that’s an important point—a lot of Americans (a lot of people) believe that we don’t really disagree, that, for every apparently complicated situation, there is a single right answer that is obvious to people of good sense and goodwill. That is, to us. Disagreement, many people believe, is the consequence of them not listening to us—of them being fooled by bad leaders, biased media, and self-delusion. We, on the other hand, have honest leaders, objective media, and an unbiased understanding of the situation. Thus, those of us who are tanners will think it’s obvious that we should be allowed to dump offal into the rivers and streams—we employ a lot of people, and saving money will enable us to profit more. The brewers will think it’s obvious that that’s a terrible idea, and so on. Each of us will believe that ours is the only legitimate position. So, how do we resolve this disagreement?
If we’re going to engage in the deliberative model, we’d have to begin by rejecting that notion that only our position is legitimate; we’d have to value the inclusion of diverse points of view. The deliberative model says that we should take on the extraordinarily difficult task of arguing together, looking for policies that make everyone at least a little unhappy, but that are in the long-term best interest of everyone, or, at the very least, the long-term better interest of everyone. Hanna Pitkin (talking about Hannah Arendt) summarizes the qualities this approach requires: “The ability to fight–openly, seriously, with commitment, and about things that really matter—without fanaticism, without seeking to exterminate one’s opponent” (266).
Perhaps we might all agree that clean water is necessary, and yet the slaughterhouses employ a lot of people, so we don’t want to exterminate them as a group. We might decide that we, as a community, will pay for a water treatment plant, or perhaps agree that the slaughterhouses get tax breaks for installing their own water treatment. Similarly, we might decide that, since the hunting brings in tourists, the community as a whole will help pay for effective fencing around corn fields, or, again, offer tax breaks to farmers who have to put up the fencing. Or some other solution that isn’t perfect for anyone.None of those solutions will make anyone completely happy, but none of them exterminates any group—we will still have a community of tanners, brewers, farmers, and hunters. And, if our cultural rhetoric about rhetoric—that is, the way we talk on neighborhood mailing lists, NextDoor, social media posts, conversations at home and work about what makes a good or bad political decision —says that good decisions are always troubled, complicated, and never fully satisfying to anyone, then these mutually unsatisfying political decisions will be seen as successes.
That model of decision-making has implications for media choices. If we believe we can only make good policy decisions if we’re looking out for people not like us, and with whom we really disagree, then we have to ensure that we are getting our information directly from the best out-group media, or, at the very least, media that give us the best opposition arguments, and the strongest criticisms of our positions and beliefs. Difference is a virtue, and disagreement good.
From the perspective of rhetoric, there is a serious motivational problem with this model. The public has to be motivated to seek out sources of information that tell us we’re wrong, that the ideal policy solution will not be ideal for us, and that making decisions about a disparate and diverse community is complicated and uncertain. Political discourse will be wonky, fairly technical, and kind of boring, so what motivates us to do that work?
If, however, we try to make this decision from within the second model, the pluralist, it’s a very different process. We would see our task in political decision-making as looking out for us and only us; that would almost certainly involve what is called a zero-sum model (aka “the fixed pie bias”)—that any gain for any other group must be a loss for us. Oddly enough, in a highly-factionalized world, this turns into the belief that any loss for them is a gain for us. We are all people at a horrible Thanksgiving dinner trying to make sure no else gets more pie than we do. We might even settle for getting no pie ourselves, as long as doing so keeps it from them.
From within this model, it would seem that the solution for hunters is to chase corn farmers out of the county—to exterminate them as a voice in our political deliberations. That doesn’t necessarily mean killing them, but it does mean delegitimizing, silencing, and possibly exterminating that political position, often through threats of violence. We don’t have to share pie with anyone not at our table, while we share stories about how stupid and terrible They are. This model makes clear the signs of success—we get the policy that is in our narrow self-interest; that policy is the best policy. This model says that you don’t need to listen to anyone who disagrees because their disagreeing means they aren’t in-group, and therefore, they’re “biased.”
The media choices implied from this model are obvious: we can snuggle cheerfully and warmly within the pillow fort of in-group media. Our media only tells us information that confirms the claims of our faction; it presents weak versions of opposition arguments or misrepresents them entirely, bombards us with stories about how terrible They are, and inoculates us against any out-group arguments we might hear, all the while condemning them and their media for being “biased.”
That’s a much more exciting public discourse than policy wonk analyses of our complicated options, but it also has a serious motivational problem. The rhetoric about rhetoric—how people in normal conversation assess a political success—will be about whether the obviously right policy (that is, the one that benefits us) succeeded. It will be about whether we got our way. The overall model of public policy will be that this group is the legitimate real group of the community, and only its concerns should be promoted. But political figures will find themselves with some rhetorical dilemmas.
For instance, the notion that one group in a community is the only real group whose interests merit consideration, and who succeeds to the extent that others fail, is nonsense. Corn famers pay taxes, and employ people, and also provide habitat for the prey the hunters want to hunt. If the hunters succeed in exterminating the corn farmers, and those farms are replaced by malls, the hunters have not actually won. Hurting your enemy does not necessarily mean you gained. If we operate within the pluralist model, setting yourself on fire because it will make your opposition uncomfortably warm seems like a good idea, and that means, oddly enough, that a model of thinking about political decision-making as just looking out for what benefits us can result in our being willing to hurt our group, as long as we believe it will hurt Them more.
A world operating from within the pluralist model (and, by the way, we are) means that every group is engaged in a kind of political narcissism, with brewers feeling that they are the center of the universe, the only group that really counts, and having narcissistic rages if they don’t get their way. We will have a polarized world in which compromise, negotiation, and deliberation are demonized—they are all seen as a willingness to work with the devil, to water down the correct course of action. Extremism, obstructionism, and fanatical refusal to compromise will all be valorized.
Thus, inevitably, the pluralist model of democratic decision-making leads to what Benkler et al. call a propaganda feedback loop, 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)
If you are hoping to get elected, or get subscribers (or in our world, clicks and likes) and you’ve got people operating from within the pluralist model, then public discourse has to shift from policy argumentation to arguments about identity, specifically, in-group membership and loyalty—political discourse (on the part of political leaders, pundits, media, and arguments on social media) will be entirely about which faction is better, which political leaders are more passionately loyal to the in-group, and not which policies help our community as a whole. We will be in a culture of demagoguery.
What I’m saying is that there is a rhetorical paradox inherent to the pluralist model. Imagine that you’re a politician, and you want to get elected by us, and, because we really disagree, you can’t win the election with the support of only one group. One option would be to lie to each group by pretending that you are completely loyal to hunters and hate farmers when you’re talking to hunters, and so on. That’s how a lot of political rhetoric used to work. But it blew up if there was a reporter there to record what you’d said, and it also blew up when you went into the state legislature, the Governorship, or the Presidency and failed to fulfill at least ¾ of your promises, because you’d made problems you couldn’t possibly all keep since they conflict.
And what if none of those groups was large enough to get you elected? Then you’d engage in what the rhetoric scholar Kenneth Burke (writing about Adolf Hitler) called “unification through a common enemy.” If you’re operating from within the pluralist model (in which people should only look out for the short-term interest of their group), you can’t appeal to some sense that the tanners and brewers should sacrifice in order to make common cause–unless you rally them both against the corn farmers or hunters. Or, better yet, against some really marginal group—Jews, perhaps (that has a long history), or, the always goto for demagogues, people new to the community (i.e., immigrants), or perhaps a group with literally no presence in your community, such as MS-13 or Latinx gangs (do not get me started on the fear-mongering on my neighborhood mailing list about gangs—in the whitest neighborhood since white was invented).
Demagoguery is a way of approaching policy decisions that evades policy argumentation (explained in a bit) by shifting the stasis (what we’re arguing about) to a non-falsifiable zero-sum set of claims about how good we are and how bad they are. We argue about identity and character rather than deliberate about policy argumentation.
Policy argumentation is relatively straightforward. People engaged in policy argumentation need to argue:
• There is a need, ill, or problem;
• It is significant;
• It will not go away on its own;
• This is the most plausible narrative as to how this problem has come about.
• I have a plan, and
o It will solve the need I have identified;
o It is feasible; and
o It does not have unintended consequences worse than the “ill” we are trying to solve.
So, let’s go back to Athens, and the debate about the Sicilian Expedition. Thucydides reports the speeches of two rhetors: Nikias (opposed to the invasion) and Alkibiades (in favor). They were debating the policy of invading (and occupying) Sicily. So, did they engage in policy argumentation?
Nikias began with policy arguments, such as that the invasion wasn’t feasible, the occupation even less so, and that there would be unintended consequences (restarting the war with Sparta, while leaving Athens vulnerable). Nikias wasn’t just making an argument; he was advocating a way of thinking about how to argue about policies. He was saying that Athenians needed to think about political choices critically, dubiously, and with a consideration of the long-term consequences. That’s policy argumentation, but it’s risky in a culture of demagoguery, in which all arguments end up being about how much better we (our faction) are than they are. In a culture of demagoguery, most rhetoric is some version of “We rule, and they drool.”
And Nikias was not telling his audience that we rule. He was expressing doubt about Athens’ ability to pull off the invasion and occupation, about its ability to beat not just Sparta, but Syracuse; for an audience prone to thinking about public discourse as praise of the in-group (what Aristotle calls the genre of epideictic), Nikias would have seemed to be impugning the honor of Athens. In a culture operating from within the pluralist model, the most effective rhetoric is the kind that persuades the audience that the speaker is completely loyal to the audience; is not only a member of the in-group, but will represent that group passionately. In that kind of rhetorical situation (often a charismatic leadership relationship), the rhetor being irrational and refusing to think pragmatically gives a rhetorical advantage, since it signals blind faith, and therefore blind loyalty to the group. Nikias’ rational assessment of Athens’ options was not the performance of blind loyalty a lot of his listeners wanted.
And he then went on to make a disastrous rhetorical choice: he attacked Alkibiades’ character, and the character of the people who supported Alkibiades. He said that people just wanted to support the invasion because they were either besotted by Alkibiades (who was a handsome and charismatic man) or besotted by the handsome young men who gathered around him. And Alkibiades, he said, was motivated by greed and recklessness.
He was probably right about Alkibiades’ motives, by the way, but whether Alkibiades had good or bad motives was only relevant in a democracy of pluralism and not one of deliberation. That people have bad motives doesn’t necessarily mean they’re promoting bad policies.
Nikias had raised the issue of Alkibiades’ motives and ethical character, and that gave Alkibiades the opportunity to defend himself by showing he was an honorable person, and he took it. In other words, Nikias shifted the stasis—what the argument was about—from whether the proposed policy was a good one to a question of honor, both Athens’ and Alkibiades’ (that is, from deliberative discourse to epideictic). And Alkibiades argued that he had protected Athens’ honor by sending horses to the Olympics and winning, that he (unlike Nikias) was concerned with protecting Athens’ honor by honoring agreements, that he (unlike Nikias) honored Athens by believing that no enemy could beat Athens.
So, what the Athenians were facing was one speaker who was presenting them with various policy wonk arguments as to why an attractive policy wouldn’t actually work because the Athenians couldn’t beat all comers and a dynamic, charismatic, and apparently rich (he wasn’t as rich as they thought) speaker who said Athenians are the best, everyone else sucks, and we just need to beleeeve.
Athenians voted for Alkibiades, they invaded Sicily, and it was a disaster.
You might be wondering why I’m talking about Athens, Sicily, and Sparta, and Nikias and Alkibiades rather than the more obvious and pressing controversies about current political deliberation and the ethics of our political leaders’ rhetorical strategies. Most of you probably don’t care very much about Athens, well, that Athens anyway, Sparta, Sicily, Nikias, or Alkibiades. And that is why I’m talking about it.
The dominant model of decision-making relies on the false binary of emotions v. reason—you’re either emotional, and making decisions based on your feelings, or you have facts to support your case. That isn’t how cognition works, as years of research shows. Some scholars divide it into System 1 and System 2 thinking—System 1 is heavily reliant on cognitive biases, intuition, and shortcuts, whereas System 2 is metacognition, during which we are thinking about our own thinking. We spend most of our time in System 1 thinking, because System 2 is exhausting.
System 1 thinking is complicated though, as far as the various factors that go into our process—it isn’t just about feelings, or gut reactions; it’s also about beliefs, it can have data involved, and we don’t necessarily feel that we’re being emotional. We can think we’re being “rational.” I like this model, which was put together by political scientists Milton Lodge and Charles Taber. What they show is that our deliberation—by which they mean the aspect of decision-making about which we are conscious—happens from within a set of boundaries established by processes about which we are unconscious, such as confirmation bias, in-group favoritism, binary thinking, associative thinking, prior beliefs. So, for instance, if I get my information from within the kind of propaganda feedback loop that is almost certain to exist in a culture operating on the pluralist model, I will have a lot of beliefs about the opposing faction (for one thing, I will believe that there is only one opposing faction).. I will have been exposed to hours of claims about how terrible they are, and will have seen dozens of examples of members of that faction committing crimes, lying, being corrupt. If I am presented with a political leader of that faction making an argument, I will assess that argument unconsciously influenced by those hours and examples.
The outcome is that I would condemn an argument if made by a member of an out-group faction that I might praise as brilliantly argued and persuasive if made by someone in my faction, all the while thinking I’m being rational.
In our culture of demagoguery, we immediately assess the reliability of not only a pundit or political leader on the basis of whether they are in our faction—even if we think we’re doing it on the basis of the quality of their argument—but we do it with speakers, colleagues, neighbors, interlocutors in social media. If political faction is particularly important to your sense of identity, then politics is something that triggers hot cognition. And research is clear that political identity has become a trigger of hot cognition.
Thus, if I came and talked to you about Trump, Biden, Clinton, McConnell, Pelosi, then a large number of people in this room would dismiss me on the grounds that I was out-group the second I even sounded as though I was criticizing their group. And they would do so on the grounds that my being out-group must mean I am “biased” and they don’t need to listen to me because they already know what people like me say (that’s inoculation, an important part of what a propaganda feedback loop does). So, I talked about Athens, Sparta, and Sicily.
I mention this because I think it indicates one route out of our current culture of demagoguery: history. People who think it is a virtue to refuse to listen to any criticism of their in-group can only be reached if we talk about incidents and instances that don’t trigger hot cognition.
It’s important to note that the propaganda feedback loop says, “They are bad and we are good and therefore you shouldn’t listen to anyone who isn’t us, and anyone who tells you something different from what we’re saying is them.” That sets up a non-falsifiable ideology, since it ensures that people aren’t doing the one thing that enables us to see when we are wrong—listening to people who disagree. But we don’t. We shout at them.
Thucydides describes the “general deterioration of character” that happened throughout the Hellenic world between the time that Pericles praised Athenians for their open-ness to new ideas and willingness to argue and the factionalized world of Nikias and Alkibiades. City-states became rabidly factional, Thucydides says, such that people now valued behavior they used to condemn, and now condemned behavior that used to be valued, such as deliberation, careful attention to decisions, looking into issues, reasonable caution—by the time of Nikias and Alkibiades, those virtues were all dismissed as cowardly and unmanly. A culture that was once praised for valuing skill in deliberation and war now condemned thinking. Thucydides says,
Irrational recklessness was now considered courageous commitment, hesitation while looking to the future was high-styled cowardice, moderation was a cover for lack of manhood, while senseless anger now helped to define a true man, and deliberation for security was a specious excuse for dereliction. The man of violent temper was always credible, anyone opposing him was suspect. [.…] Kinship became alien compared with party affiliation, because the latter led to drastic action with less hesitation. For party meetings did not take place to use the benefit of existing laws, but to find advantage in breaking them. [….] Men responded to reasonable words from their opponents with defensive actions if they had the advantage, and not with magnanimity. Revenge mattered more than not being harmed in the first place. And if there were actually reconciliations under oath, they occurred because of both sides’ lack of alternatives, and lasted only as long as neither found some other source of power. [….] All this was caused by leadership based on greed and ambition and led in turn to fanaticism once men were committed to the power struggle. For the leading men in the cities, through their emphasis on an attractive slogan for each side—political equality for the masses, the moderation of aristocracy—treated as their prize the public interest to which they paid lip service and, competing by every means to get the better of one another, boldly committed atrocities and proceeded to still worse acts of revenge, stopping at limits set by neither justice nor the city’s interest but by the gratification of their parties at every stage, and whether by condemnations through unjust voting or by acquiring superiority in brute force, both sides were ready to justify to the utmost their immediate hopes of victory. And so neither side acted with piety, but those who managed to accomplish something hateful by using honorable arguments were more highly regarded. The citizens in the middle, either because they had not taken sides or because begrudged their survival, were destroyed by both factions. (3.82, Lattimore translation)
This is our world.
References
Achen, Christopher H. and Larry M. Bartels. Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.
Benkler, Yochai, Rob Faris, and Hal Roberts. Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. Oxford University Press, 2018.
Burke, Kenneth. “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle.” The Southern Review, vol. 5, 1939, pp. 1-21.
Ellis, Christopher and James A. Stimson. Ideology in America. Cambridge University Press, New York, 2012.
Hale, John R. Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy. Viking, 2009.
Hanson, Victor Davis. A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and the Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War. Random House, 2006.
Hibbing, John R., and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse. Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs about How Government should Work. Cambridge University Press, New York, 2002.
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
Levendusky, Matthew. How Partisan Media Polarize America. The University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Lodge, Milton and Charles S. Taber. The Rationalizing Voter. Cambridge University Press, New York, 2013.
Mason, Lilliana. Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Become Our Identity. The University of Chicago Press, 2018.
Pitkin, Hanna. The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social. University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Roberts-Miller, Patricia. Demagoguery and Democracy. The Experiment, LLC, 2017.
—-. Rhetoric and Demagoguery. Southern Illinois University Press, 2019.
Thucydides, and Steven Lattimore trans. The Peloponnesian War. Hackett Pub. Co, Indianapolis, 1998.
