Month: February 2020

What happens when we abandon norms of accountability? (Penn talk)

Austrian Jews being deliberately humiliated by Nazia

My area of expertise is what I’ve taken to calling “train wrecks in public deliberation.” I’m interested in times that communities used rhetoric to talk themselves into disastrous decisions—ranging from the Athenian decision to invade Sicily in 5th century BCE to LBJ’s decision to escalate the Vietnam War in the summer of 1965. I came to notice patterns–not of political personalities or even policies but of cultures of discourse— what I came to call demagoguery.

All political issues are policy issues, and we always have a variety of policy options available to us. In these cultures of demagoguery, that rich and nuanced world of policy options was and is denied in favor of framing our cultural problem as a question of a zero-sum battle between two groups: us and them. When we’re in a culture of demagoguery, when everything is framed as two sides, those two sides appear to be on opposite sides of every issue, but they actually agree about quite a lot.

They both agree that there is no legitimate disagreement with their position; they agree that politics is a zero sum battle between us and them. They just disagree as to who is whom. They agree that for every problem there is one solution and that disagreement is the consequence of the presence of people with bad motives. This agreement that disagreement is useless can come from several different positions, but two are important in our era: political narcissism, and political sociopathy.

For some people there is only one legitimate understanding of the common good (mine) and everyone who disagrees is blinded by self-interest, duped by the media, or knowingly advocating a bad policy. To say that there is only one political good, and that I and only I am the one oriented toward that good on every issue[1] is a kind of political narcissism.

Another position is that there is no legitimate political disagreement because none of us is really interested in the common good—there is no common good at all. We are all our for ourselves, and no position is ethically superior to any other–there are just winners and losers, and any political or rhetorical strategy is allowed if it’s oriented toward winning. This is a kind of political sociopathy.

Those aren’t all of the positions possible, but they’re two that I hear a lot when people are arguing for a no-holds barred wrestling match between us and them. I think the people who advocate those positions are sincere. I think that people who argue that they and only they are advocating the one political good in every situation believe that is true; they cannot imagine that any other position might have any legitimacy in any circumstance. They believe that everyone sees the world exactly as they do.

And those who believe that everyone is out for their own good are out for their own good, and they think everyone else is too.

What neither of those two realize is that not everyone is like them—they universalize from their own position, posture, and ideology.

I think we disagree about politics because we disagree. People who privilege disagreement, who see disagreement as an important step toward the best agreements do so for all sorts of reasons, and from all sorts of different positions–such as various forms of relativism, perspectivism, fallibism, and lots of others.

I want to set all that aside in order to talk about what happens in a culture in which all disagreements are framed as a zero sum battle between us and them. And spoiler alert: it isn’t pretty.

This culture of demagoguery often begins as a cunning rhetorical framing of political disagreements as a zero sum battle between two groups because that frame is more motivating and mobilizing for voters, donors, and consumers. But it can easily become what people believe is an accurate description of our political landscape and our policy options.

So, initially, something like the confirmation of a supreme court justice is framed as a battle between us and them because that frame is more likely to get people to contact their representatives, donate to their party, and support their party’s decision. It’s also more likely to motivate people to read articles, watch the news, click on links. This false binary of our political choices benefits political parties and a for-profit media.

The zero-sum battle means that not only is disagreement delegitimated but, eventually and inevitably, disagreement is demonized. Compromise, bargaining, finding common ground — from within this false binary, those are way of trucking with the devil, and I don’t mean in the Grateful Dead sense. One doesn’t compromise with the devil after all; one exterminates him.

So, unless this rhetoric is stopped, the zero-sum us v. them frame for politics results in a rhetoric of extermination. And then the train wrecks.

Once disagreement is demonized and political disagreements are framed as a battle between good and evil, the appointment of the supreme court justice can easily be described as simply one battle in a war of political extermination and existential threat. As soon as one side makes claims of wanting to exterminate the other, then both sides can frame the political situation as one of existential threat.

And once we are in a situation of existential threats, then we are justified in anything we do. We are in Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception” in which we honor the law by suspending or abrogating it. The narrative that enables the suspension of law is that the one group that genuinely honors the law is forced into a situation in which the law must be suspended or violated due to the evil machinations of the other side —the plot of about 80% of Law and Order episodes.

Now, it would seem that once a political party has used the rhetoric of existential threat to get into power, that rhetoric would lose its force. The rhetorical challenge becomes, once you are in power, how do you maintain the rhetoric of threat and victimization that enabled you to gain power?

Paradoxically, the acquisition of power enables this supposedly victimized group to use its propaganda machine, as well as the forces of government, to justify the removal of all checks and balances on the in-group executive, and to transform the government into a single party government by declaring the executive above judicial restraint, exempt from charges of criminal behavior, allowed to use their position not only to protect themselves from accountability, but to profit financially, even obscenely, to use the financial resources of the government to reward loyal political allies, and to use all the financial, investigative, prosecutorial, and coercive resources of the government to exterminate powerful sites of dissent.

Once the procedural constraints have been defanged, and “neutrality” of any institution is falsely politicized as part of a hostile out-group conspiracy, once an executive has made it clear that he refuses to be restrained or held accountable, that he is personally profiting, and openly trying to institute a one-party government (of which he is the head), then it becomes possible to factionalize all parts of the government–especially traditionally neutral parts, such as the military and police forces.

At this point even members of his own party, and his own base, should recognize the danger, and work to check to the overreach of power, and, if they do, as happened with FDR and packing the Supreme Court, we step back from the brink. But, as both How Democracies Die and Why Nations Fail (written from very different political perspectives) both show, the very people who could stop the overreach—that is, the in-group political figures and media, the judiciary, the military, or the base—often don’t. The people who could stop the overreach often choose not to if the executive is doing whatever is necessary to keep the economy benefiting his base, keep his base from listening to criticism of him, continuing to promote — through his loyal propaganda machine–the narrative that all of their problems are caused by Them (the party he is eliminating).

If his propaganda machine can persuade his base of that, then they will believe that they are flying when really he’s just persuaded them to jump out of a window with him.

I’m talking in the abstract, but I think everyone in this room knows that I have a particular political figure, situation, and era in mind: Hitler, and what he did between March 1933 in 1939.

There’re lots of other cases–someone rising to power on the waves created by the cultural demagoguery: Ceaușescu, Stalin, Mugabe, Chavez, and others. Sometimes the structures of checks and balances were weak, sometimes they were strong, and people chose not to enforce them. But in all cases, there was a culture of demagoguery.

[1] We should be passionate about politics, and so a person can be passionately committed to a community solving a problem, and convinced it must be solved, and that isn’t political narcissism, but passionate commitment to a problem. Even if they are passionately committed to one solution to the problem, that’s just passionate commitment. It’s the assumption that their group or political position is right about everything that makes it skid into political narcissism.

Funeral orations and pro-war rhetoric

In The Rhetoric, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E) divided public speaking into three genres: epideictic (ceremonial oratory, such as funeral orations), deliberative (policy determination, such as what takes place in the Assembly), and judicial (court cases). He said that each of these kinds of speeches has a different emphasis—judicial emphasizes guilt or innocence, deliberative speeches emphasize expediency (costs and benefits), and epideictic speeches are about honor or dishonor.

In other words, if we’re arguing about policy, that’s deliberative, and we should argue about the costs or benefits (advantages or disadvantages) of our policy options. We might bring up issues of honor, but those should be secondary. I’ve come to think that Aristotle is right, that one of the characteristics of cultures whose political discourse is a train wreck is that they don’t argue about policies qua policies—they argue about honor, blame, guilt, loyalty. They argue that the out-group is to blame for the current problems (as well as those members of the in-group whose support isn’t passionate enough), that for anyone to disagree with the in-group plan (there is only one) is disloyal, that to provide any evidence that the in-group plan isn’t working or can’t work dishonors the in-group.

This way of thinking about political deliberation makes it extremely unlikely that communities will rectify bad decisions. They can only double down (since, if politics is really a question of loyalty, and criticism dishonors the in-group, then the only available response to a policy failing is to recommit with more will). It also means that communities will commit to a policy without really thinking it through. Because dissent and disagreement are necessary (but not sufficient) for good decisions, communities who rely on epideictic for policy deliberation will make a lot of bad decisions.

In a class on the history of public argument, we were reading Schenck v. US, and two students argued that the decision was right—criticism of a war (or how it was being conducted) should be silenced the second boots are on the ground.

I pointed out that this means that, if the war is a mistake, or it’s being handled badly, then it could mean that more people (especially in the military) in service of a war we shouldn’t have, or shouldn’t be conducting as we are. Their argument was to repeat, “Once boots are on the ground, there’s no more debate.”

That visceral reaction surprised me, especially considering the stances these students had taken on other issues (they were generally skeptical of the government, and very much in favor of transparency and citizen scrutiny).

A few years after that class discussion, I picked up a book about the Battle of Kasserine Pass, where my uncle was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. He died a few weeks later, bombing a Nazi supply train. Family lore about his death had two versions. One was that they didn’t know the train had ammunition, and so he was flying too low to the train to get out of the blast when it went. The second was that he had been mildly injured in the Battle of Kasserine Pass (his shoulder), and he didn’t have quite enough strength to pull the plane up fast enough (apparently it was a model for which that was notoriously difficult).

The book I picked up argued that the Battle of Kasserine Pass was a clusterfuck. It said that the person in charge, Lt. General Lloyd Fredenall, was a coward who had spent most of his time and unit’s energy building him a bunker far from where the combat was likely to take place. Even though he was far away from the action, he micromanaged his subordinates—although he had never had any experience leading troops in battle. He was so obsessed with the possibility of his orders being heard by the enemy (he was using a radio) that they were often incoherent. So, according to this book, he was giving orders that he insisted be followed, that were grounded in poor understanding of the actual combat situation, that were hard to understand, and that he couldn’t modify quickly. Bad orders, badly communicated. The book specifically said that Fredenall’s orders regarding the air corps were especially bad—his incompetence endangered them.

I was overwhelmed with rage.

At the author of the book.

I felt, very strongly, that the author should not have written any of that. My uncle had died in that campaign, and he was a hero. That his heroism might have been necessitated by the incompetence of his superior, that his death might have been caused by that incompetence, that he wasn’t part of a glorious campaign, but an avoidable clusterfuck, that it was a clusterfuck with 10k Allied casualties (there were only 30k in the battle, and 6k of those casualties were US), that, in short, the Kasserine Pass was an example of what happens far too much in war, the way that, even if the war as a whole is admirable and just, many of the casualties are not caused by the enemy’s competence, but our incompetence—all of that was unthinkable for me. Actually unthinkable.

Intellectually, I knew that not every death in war is glorious, that even the good guys screw up. I’d read Goodbye to All That, All Quiet on the Western Front, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, The Great War and Modern Memory, Catch-22, J.D. Salinger and Peter Gay on their war experiences, and various books on Vietnam. I knew all the things the author was saying about Operation Torch were true of wars and even war, but I could not let myself think that they were true of the operation that had killed my uncle.

And that is when I understood what my students had been saying.

If you give a family member over to a war effort, you have to believe that, if they die, it will be in a meaningful and important way, that it will not be the consequence of incompetence, indifference, or internal unit rivalry. You have to believe that the war for which they’re fighting was not only necessary, but just, and actively virtuous. And if they die, you have to believe that they died on the side of the good guys. And good guys aren’t incompetent.

To say that American military died in a war we shouldn’t have started, that we are bungling how it’s being conducted, that the people making decisions are incompetent—that is violating the norms of decorum regarding the cultural (and personal) need to honor the war dead.

But those norms of decorum mean that we can’t deliberate effectively about war. And, what’s worse is that those dead can become warrants for further commitment to a war that might be wrong-headed, incompetently managed, or managed purely in terms of factional goals (we should do this because it will help our party).

If you even dip into The Pentagon Papers, and anything about any other 20th century war (it’s probably true of earlier wars, but we don’t have the records), then you can see that political figures often force the military to make what are bad decisions from a military perspective, but politically useful for the current President. Personally, I find most disturbing the argument that the Bush Administration went for invading Iraq with inadequate troops because the Afghanistan action wasn’t going well (although LBJ’s partisan-motivated decisions about Vietnam, or the various military decisions that Nixon, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton made that were purely factional aren’t far below—and I’m open to the argument that LBJ’s factional treatment of Vietnam is just as bad if not worse).

I mentioned Aristotle at the beginning, and here’s how he’s relevant. A funeral oration has certain standards of decorum. You do not speak ill of the dead.

My mother-in-law died within a year of my father-in-law. It was a rough year for my husband. We had no idea how to handle a funeral, what arrangements needed to be made, or how to make them, and a friend of my husband’s mother stepped in and helped us so much. We later found out her mother had died only a week or so before.

She died suddenly a couple of years later, and we went to her funeral. She lived in a small town, and the funeral had to be moved to a larger town because so many people wanted to come. She had been a teacher for years—she had been that teacher, the one who makes marginal students feel valued, the one who inspires students to think beyond their dreams, the one who is just magically always there. She was that friend in need, the effective and non-judgmental person at your side. On my best days, I don’t even have moments when I’m as good as this woman was. And the packed church was proof of it.

A friend of hers, a pastor, gave the funeral oration. And her speech began with acknowledging that this woman was good, and their long friendship and how this woman had helped in so many ways, and then she said, “But I failed her because I never spoke to her about whether she had a personal relationship with Jesus, and so she might be in Hell.”

That whole point about how she might be in Hell went on for a while, and it turned into what Aristotle would have categorized as a deliberative argument—about what the people in the audience should do (be saved, by the fairly specific terms of the speaker). I don’t know how long she went on, but I know it was long enough for me to consider, very seriously, that I wasn’t known in that area, and so I could tackle her, and then just race out the back door, but I was holding our baby, and I’d have to hand him to our husband, and he was known. I seriously considered the options of tackling a speaker at a funeral.

That pastor did not understand the genre of funeral oration. It is not a deliberative argument, in which you are advocating a policy of action, but one in which you unqualifiedly honor the dead.

When my mother died, a woman who hadn’t attended church in 25 years because she had so completely broken with Catholicism, the priest who spoke at her funeral said, “She had an Irish maiden name, and we know God loves the Irish, so we know she’s in heaven.”

He understood the genre of the funeral oration.

But, and this is our problem, if the funeral oration is all about making the people who are grieving feel that the loved one who has died is in heaven and has died for a worthy cause (or after a long battle), then the funeral oration should be apolitical, and yet it isn’t. If the family needs to hear that the dead have to have died for good reason, then funeral orations have to say it’s a war to which we should continue to be committed, which we should have fought, and which is being conducted in an honorable and competent way.

In other words, funeral orations for the military dead have to be pro-war. So, funeral orations can drift into what Aristotle would call deliberative (or we would call “political”) rhetoric, but only if the rhetoric is pro-war.

Effective deliberative rhetoric depends on a world in which all sorts of policy options can be interrogated. Ineffective deliberative rhetoric sets some policies off as sacred, ones that cannot be disputed. And that is exactly what the funeral oration does.

My uncle died long before I was born, and the military action in which he engaged—in which he was lucky enough not to have died, but which might have incurred the injury that contributed to his death—really was a clusterfuck. The author was right. But the genre of funeral orations means that, even sixty years later (or more), I wasn’t open to rational deliberation about a military action in which an uncle I’d never met had been engaged.

Once the smoke cleared, I realized that the dishonor done to my uncle—and there was dishonor and disloyalty—was not that someone said that he probably died because he was under a Lt. General who was incompetent and cowardly. It was that he was under such a person.