Month: November 2020

Margaret Mead’s definition of civilization

A quote attributed to Margaret Mead is going around, which she may or may not have said. People sharing that quote have had various commenters disagree with Mead about her implicit definition of civilization—as far as I can tell, none of them cultural anthropologists or sociologists. (I’ll come back to that.)

While the quote is very badly sourced, it’s possible that she said something along the lines of the quote, since it’s in line with other things she said. And, if she said it, it was not an invitation to debate the distinction between civilized and non-civilized cultures but her attempt to show that distinction is always grounded in the wrong goals. This is, after all, among the scholars who advocated “cultural relativism.” She was never in favor of anthropology as a justification for imperialism. And it often was, and the civilized v. non-civilized binary was crucial to various projects of imperialism and extermination.

When that binary was popular, and (for complicated reasons) I happen to have read a lot of “scholars” and “experts” who endorsed that binary, none of them put their favored cultures in the “non-civilized” category. That’s one sign that a binary is part of a set of paired terms, in which everything good is associated with the in-group, and everything bad is associated with the out-group. The entry from the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences shows why it isn’t a concept much used by scholars (except for understanding rhetorics of exploitation):

“Thus, the significations accruing to civilization have been the following: European/Western; urban and urbane; secular and spiritual; law-abiding and nonviolent (i.e., limited to legalized violence, both within and between states); polished, courteous, and polite; disciplined, orderly, and productive; laissez faire, bourgeois, and comfortable; respectful of private property; fraternal and free; cultured, knowledgeable, and the master of nature. The uncivilized conversely are: non-Western; rural, or worse, savage; idolatrous, fanatical, literalist, and theocratic; unlawful and violent (i.e., given to violence outside juridical procedure); crude or rude; lazy, anarchic, and unproductive; communistic, poor, and inconvenienced or beleaguered; piratical and thievish; fratricidal (or, indeed, cannibalistic) and unfree; uncultured, ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, and at nature’s mercy. Given this stark set of binaries, it is not surprising that the civilizing mission (a related concept that emerged in the nineteenth century) has often been the ideological counterpart of projects of colonial domination and genocide, especially in the non-Western world, but also in the European hinterland and vis-à-vis European minorities and subaltern classes.” “Civilization.” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by William A. Darity, Jr., 2nd ed., vol. 1, Macmillan Reference USA, 2008, pp. 557-559. Accessed 29 Nov. 2020.

As an aside, I have to note that I keep telling people that what is kind of a throwaway in Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric is actually crucial to understanding public discourse, especially as that discourse crawls up the ladder of demagoguery: the concept of paired terms. The civilized/non-civilized distinction is a great example of why the notion of paired terms is so useful. For each good term, there is a bad one, and so it reinforces the notion that there are two kinds of groups: good (in-group) and bad (out-group).

But, back to the Mead quote. The whole notion that there is some kind of line between civilized and uncivilized cultures is self-serving nonsense, and that was a point she often made. At the time that Mead was working, it would have been easy to notice that genocidal projects relied on this binary, even when it made no sense (Nazi rhetoric framed Slavs and Jews as uncivilized; genocides of indigenous peoples depended on pretending that they didn’t have organized cultures). And she noticed. There are problems with her research, and she was no saint, but, for her era, she was surprisingly aware of the political uses of cultural anthropology, and she tried to resist some of the nastiest uses.

The groups thrown into the “uncivilized” category were actually wildly different from each other. In other words, the distinction itself is demagogic—it’s saying that the complicated and nuanced world of cultures is really a binary. That binary, which was really just a strategically incoherent us v. them binary, “justified” violence against out-groups–all out-groups. Because this out-group is like that out-group, and that out-group is dangerous, all out-groups are dangerous in all the ways any individual out-group is. That’s what this binary does. The whole project of defining a culture as civilized or not is about rationalizing the exploitation, oppression, and/or extermination of some group.

There are two other points I want to make. First, if you pay attention to pro-GOP rhetoric, then you might be aware that they try to employ this same set of paired terms against “liberals.” If, like me, you pay attention to pro-GOP talking points, then you can see that they frame “liberals” (just as much a phantasmagoric construction as “Jews”) as (from the entry above): “non-Western; […] fanatical […] violent (i.e., given to violence outside juridical procedure); crude or rude; lazy, anarchic, and unproductive; communistic, poor, and inconvenienced or beleaguered; piratical and thievish; fratricidal (or, indeed, cannibalistic) and unfree.”

You might notice that I’ve removed “rural, or worse, savage; idolatrous” “literalist, and theocratic” “uncultured, ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, and at nature’s mercy.” Pro-GOP is either silent on those characteristics or actively promotes them as virtues.

And that bring me to the fourth point, and the most complicated.

Many years ago, I was talking with someone who hadn’t taken a history class since high school, but who, on the basis of a paper he wrote in high school, thought he was an expert on Hitler, whose opinion about Hitler was as valid as any actual scholar. Once, in front of a colleague who was a devotee of Limbaugh, I said, “Were I Queen of the Universe, no one could make a Hitler analogy without citing two scholars in support,” and he said, “Oh, so you think common people should be silenced.”

I was speechless. (That doesn’t often happen.) He was projecting his own tendency to think in binaries onto me—knowledge is either lay (true) or expert (head in the sky). That’s a Limbaugh talking point, but it had little to do with what I was saying. I was saying that lay claims about Hitler that were valid could be validated by appealing to experts. I didn’t (and don’t) see a binary of expert v. lay knowledge. After all, a lot of experts endorsed the notion of civilized v. non-civilized cultures. Experts aren’t always right, and they don’t always agree. If no expert supports a claim about Hitler (and there are lots of popular claims about Hitler that no expert supports, such as the notion that he was Marxist or even left-wing) then it’s probably a bad claim.

In addition, what does it mean to have lay knowledge of Hitler? This isn’t an issue for which there is direct experience v. expert (i.e., mediated) knowledge because I doubt there is anyone alive who had direct experience of Hitler. It’s all mediated. It’s all about what people have told us. All we have is what we have been told by teachers, articles we read, papers we wrote in high school. The reason this point matters is that it means that privileging lay knowledge on the grounds that it is more direct (less mediated) is nonsense.

If we acknowledge it’s mediated then we can talk about what mediates it. In other words, cite your sources, and then we can argue about your sources.

If we think about it this way—how good are your sources of information—then we can have a better argument about argument.

We aren’t in a world in which experts are right and non-experts are always wrong or vice versa. We’ve never been in that world because the whole project of responsible scholarship is not about being right, but about making the argument that looks the most right given the evidence we’ve got at this moment.

And here we’re back to people arguing that something that Mead may or may not have said is wrong because, although they aren’t cultural anthropologists, they have beliefs.

They can have those beliefs. And just because Mead has degrees they don’t doesn’t mean they’re wrong. They can engage in argumentation with Mead all they want (and there are a lot of reasons to engage in argumentation with Mead), but flicking Mead away because of something they assert to be true because it’s what they have been told without trying to understand why Mead (might have) said what she did or whether their sources were reliable is exactly what is wrong with our public discourse.

Showing that Mead is wrong in her definition of civilization requires understanding what she (might have) meant in that definition. She almost certainly meant that the civilized/non-civilized binary is nonsense, so saying her position was wrong because the civilized/non-civilized division should have been placed elsewhere doesn’t show she was wrong. It shows she was right.

“Libruls look down on you” and resentment as political rhetoric

pro-dem and pro-gop yard signs


Since I’m a policy geek, it’s long interested me that a tremendous number of people don’t care about policy at all. An awful lot of people’s political affiliations seem to me to be motivated by two things: 1) a sense that being affiliated with this party means you are this sort of person (an ethos they like); and 2) the argument that you should be angry because They are keeping you from getting the things to which you’re entitled, so you should vote against them.

Some day, I’ll write about that first motivation. It’s really weird, and it’s really just my crank theory, based on my trying to talk to people, but I think this mobilizing ideology has been used at least as far back as the eighties. It seems to me to work better for the GOP than other parties, but I have no data to support that. It’s more than just identification, and it isn’t always charismatic leadership. Here’s my crank theory. The GOP doesn’t have a coherent policy agenda, but it has a coherent ethos. It presents itself as the party of people (mostly men) who have no doubts about their position, can see clearly what the right course of action is, will refuse to compromise, and know (and will act on the knowledge) that, in every situation, it is a binary of right or wrong.

And, paradoxically, right or wrong isn’t whether what you’re doing in this moment is right or wrong, but whether you’re endorsing the group that believes right or wrong is binary. If what you’re doing is helping the group that says right or wrong is binary, then your actions are right even if they’re exactly what you condemn the out-group for doing. This is Machiavellianism, in which the ends justify the means, and the ends are just in-group successes. I’ve written about the Machiavellianism part (which is far from particular to pro-GOP rhetors), but not about the extent to which people who support the GOP do so because they see it as the party of the strong and decisive man. But, that isn’t this post.

This post is about the second puzzle for me—that pro-GOP rhetoric (Fox and Limbaugh. are good examples of this) is a rhetoric of grievance, of being wounded, including being victimized by people saying that they are racist (while projecting that living in perpetual grievance onto others, so they can still seem to be strong men, what Paul Johnson calls “masculine victimhood”).

People advocating racist policies resent being called racist. It isn’t just that they dislike it, or that they disagree, but they resent it.

They are filled with and fueled by resentment. They sincerely believe that there is an “elite” of professors and out-of-touch artists who are keeping them down. They resent the power that this “liberal elite” uses against them. Were it not for this “liberal elite” they would… and here things get vague. Deliberately so. Limbaugh et al. never say what, exactly, would happen were this “liberal elite” to lose power because that would involve creating a coherent narrative of the “ill” created by the “liberal elite.” Limbaugh et al. can’t do that, because there isn’t one. And that’s how resentment works; it isn’t an affirming passion that enables progress; it’s entirely negative, about taking power and good things away from an out-group.

I spent a lot of time deep in the arguments that people made for slavery, and it was bizarre to me the extent to which people whose financial situation was grounded in the buying and selling of other humans felt victimized. They were victimized by having to abuse other humans in order to maintain their financial and political situation and by having to hear people point out that they were engaged in abuse. They resented the criticism. Pro-slavery rhetoric was a rhetoric grounded in slavers’ resentment that they were being criticized for being slavers.

But when I looked at scholarship and theorizing of resentment, I kept ending back on Nietzsche’s notion of ressentiment, and it was deeply unsatisfying because his narrative seems to me unhelpfully elitist. And yet it’s common—the notion that resentment is the feeling that inferior people feel about people they secretly believe are better. I don’t think that’s a useful way to think about resentment for several reasons. One of them is that this way of identifying resentment means we’re deep in the world of motives and secret feelings (as well as seeming to accept that some people are better than others), and I think those criteria get us into areas that make self-diagnosis impossible. I’m not saying it’s wrong—I do think the way that resentful rhetoric works is a kind of mean girl strategy. I tell you the mean thing that Heather said about you (which she may or may not have said or even thought) in order to get you to ally with me against her. I tell you that Heather looks down on you, which triggers your defensively looking down on her for looking down on you. That’s the basic plot of a large amount of Limbaugh et al.’s broadcasts. That’s the whole strategy of “libruls look down on you”—it’s oriented toward triggering a kind of polarizing resentment that strengthens in-group commitment.

But an awful lot of political activism begins by pointing out that some group looks down on us, and they think we’re going to continue to put up with their shabby treatment, but we aren’t. So, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if there is a difference in the rhetoric between the “libruls look down on you” and “this group in power is just throwing us crumbs to keep us shut up.” And I think it’s ultimately the point mentioned above—what are we supposed to do with our resentment?

The Limbaugh et al. resentment is purely reactionary and negative—taking power away from “libruls” is winning. As long as they are hurt, we win—the gain is their loss, and that’s the only gain there needs to be. Thus, you can have what is often called “Vladimir’s Choice.” “Vladimir’s Choice” is a term from a Russian tale. God comes to Vladimir and says, “I will give you anything you want, but whatever I give to you, I will give twice that to Ivan.” Vladimir thinks about it for a while, and then says, “Take one of my eyes.” Vladimir so resents Ivan that he is happy to be hurt, as long as Ivan is hurt more.[1]

If we feel that They are denying us something to which we’re entitled, we’ll settle for it being taken away from them. If we think we’re denied the vote, or good healthcare, or a decent wage, then we’ll feel that it’s a win if we deny Them the vote, good healthcare, a decent wage. That’s resentment.

But the other kind of entitlement is (or at least can be) affirming—it’s about gaining certain rights and powers. If we’re being denied the vote, then we don’t want them denied the vote; we want the rights and powers they have. They can keep their healthcare and decent wages, as long as we get those things too.

And here we come back to the point I keep making—how vague the pro-GOP rhetoric is about policies. There are a lot of statements of rigid commitment to slogans (“safe borders,” “pro-life,” “tough on crime”) but there aren’t clear statements of what policies will get us there, let alone policy argumentation to show that those policies will feasibly solve the clear problems. Affirmative entitlement arguments can (and do) make those policy arguments—“defund the police” (a slogan) was backed by detailed policy discussions and arguments. “Build the wall” wasn’t. I’m not saying that I agree with “defund the police”—in fact, there were a lot of very different policies that people meant by that same slogan. My point is that I think there is a useful distinction between affirmative entitlement arguments and resentment, and that resentment is purely reactionary and negative.

I want to end this post by pointing to two different yard signs. The one on the left lists six beliefs, with only one framed as a negative (“no human is illegal”). On the whole, it affirms positive statements. The one on the right has eight claims. It’s mildly incoherent: who doesn’t believe in legal immigration? And if violence is not the answer, isn’t that saying that the police shouldn’t be violent? Isn’t “police” a category of people? More important, notice how negative it is—five of the eight claims are explicitly negative, about what should not happen and how people should not think. It’s about how wrong They are.

pro-dem and pro-gop yard signs






[1] Some studies show that Vladimir’s Choice increases with the perception of intergroup competition and what’s called “social dominance orientation” (essentially, the notion that groups should remain in a stable hierarchy, with “better” groups dominating the “lower” groups), an orientation that correlates to self-identifying as conservative.


“Liberals look down on you” is evil genius rhetoric: on demonizing rational argumentation

In an earlier post, I said that the GOP is, like any other useful political movement, a coalition. Thus, like any other coalition, it has groups with profoundly different policy agenda. The normal way to solve that problem is through bargaining, compromise, and deliberation. But the GOP can’t openly engage in those practices because two of the major members of its coalition believe that compromise is not acceptable (the fundagelicals and neo-Social Darwinists). The GOP has to persuade people whose political agenda is toxic populism, libertarianism only when it helps the wealthy, Dominionism, racism, ethical theatre about abortion, social and cultural reactionary knee-jerking, fundagelical and often end-times politics, and the carceral industry.

So, the GOP has to look tough, rigid, and supportive of regular folks while actually passing policies that do the opposite of what they’re advertised as doing (or the opposite of what they were previously advocating as the only ethical policy), and, above all else, keeping their supporters from looking at non-partisan data about the policies, candidates, or talking points. This coalition is very fragile, and falls apart if the people in it understand the positions of others in it. The last thing the current GOP can stand is policy argumentation.

Not all conservatives, and I sincerely mean that—this isn’t a list of all the sorts of people who vote Republican, but of the ones who create the rhetorical problem solved by “liberals look down on you.” I think our political discourse benefits by having people who are skeptical of social change and ambivalent about globalization, want small government, advocate being really cautious about military intervention (the traditional conservative position, abandoned by the GOP since Vietnam). I’m not saying they’re right, but I think the ideal public sphere has a lot of positions I think are wrong, as long as we’re all abiding by the rules of argumentation. The GOP can’t allow policy argumentation. And the “liberals look down on you” enables them to avoid it completely.

Here’s what I said in the previous post. Loosely, “liberals look down on you” enables GOP loyalists to feel good about having a rationally indefensible position, encourages them to dismiss dissent or uncomfortable information through motivism, makes politics an issue of dominance/submission, encourages GOP loyalists to feel victimized if they’re proven wrong (so the issue shifts from whether they were wrong to whether they were victimized), sets supporters up to make “Vladimir’s Choice” on a regular basis, makes having an irrational commitment seem a better choice than having a rational policy, and allows blazingly partisan standards to seem justified. It is and enables shameless levels of demagoguery.

As I keep saying, the whole “left v. right” false binary enables demagoguery. It enables this demagogic (it isn’t a question of policy but us v. them) move on the part of pro-GOP media because it’s always possible to find a non-GOP (and therefore, by the bizarre logic of the left-right false dilemma “liberal”) person who, for instance, treats disagreement as victimization. So, pro-GOP pundits can say, “Who are they to look down on us when they do it too?”

Were we to have an understanding of politics (and research on political affiliation) that wasn’t begging the question (research grounded in the assumption that “liberals” and “conservatives” reason differently) we could have better discussions about politics. Of course, were I to have a unicorn in my backyard that pooped gold, I could support various causes a lot more than I do. If wishes were horses and all that.

The “liberals look down on you” topos appeals to the epistemological populism (often falsely called “anti-intellectualism”) of the US. And here we get to two problems that puzzled me for years. It’s conventional to say that demagoguery is anti-intellectual, and that it’s grounded in resentment (what Nietzsche called ressentiment) and both of those claims seemed to me true, false, and damaging. Let’s start with the first—anti-intellectualism.

It’s true that demagoguery tends to have a rejection of “eggheads,” but it almost always cites expert sources. It isn’t opposed to expertise, but to a bad kind of expertise:

“Good” expertise confirms what common people know, what you can see by just looking. It shows why what sensible people already believe is right (even if it does so through very complicated explanations—here’s where conspiracy thinking comes in). “Bad” expertise says that what “common people” (and here “common people” is conflated with “in-group”) believe is wrong, that things aren’t exactly as they appear “if you just look.”

So, here we’re back at the point I make a lot. Demagoguery can thrive if we live in a world of argument (in which you have a good point if you can find evidence to support your claim), but it dies in a world of argumentation.

We don’t have a political crisis, but an epistemological one. Pro-GOP media can cite a lot of experts to support their positions, and dismiss as eggheads all the experts who don’t because pro-GOP media appeals to naïve realism and in-group favoritism (the truth is obvious to good people and good people are the ones who recognize this truth). That way of thinking about policy issues (there is a right answer, and it’s obvious to every sensible person, and anyone who presents data it isn’t right is not someone to whom we need to listen because their disagreement is proof that they’re bad) is far from restricted to the GOP, let alone to major political issues. (Do not get me started on my neighborhood mailing list fights about graffiti, putting dog poop bags in someone’s trash can on garbage collection day, bike lanes, or the noise wall).

I’ve spent a lot of time arguing with racists, and they always argue from personal experience.[1] Affirmative action is bad because they didn’t get this job, anti-racist actions in the work place are bad because they got reprimanded for being a racist, there is no racism in policing because (as a white person) they’ve never had trouble with the police. They believe that those datapoints are proof of their position, but a POC getting denied a job, a person failing to get anything useful done about racism in their workplace, a POC having trouble with the police—the same kind of evidence—none of that matters. That’s argument, but not argumentation.

Argumentation would be assessing personal experience as just another kind of data, subject to the same tests as other kinds of data—is it relevant, representative (or an outlier), reliable, and so on. As I said, the GOP can (and does) give its base arguments, but those arguments collapse like a cheap tent in a hurricane if they run into actual argumentation. So, why not give its base talking points that can withstand argumentation? It can’t, for several reasons.

It can’t have rational argumentation about abortion, for instance, because its policies aren’t supported by data. There are other issues on which the data is just plain bad (climate change) and can’t stand up to the weakest questioning. There are also issues for which the accurate and relevant data would make one member of the coalition of the happy, and another very unhappy. One group might be thrilled to find that Trump’s foreign policy has increased the chances of nuclear war in the Middle East, while that would sow doubt in the minds of other members of the coalition.

The GOP can’t actually give its base rational talking points that will serve its base well if they get into it with someone skilled in argumentation. All it’s got is ad hominem, whaddaboutism, and a kind of driveby shooting of data because that’s all it can have. So, what the GOP has to do is make a virtue of its greatest vice—make the ability to defend or attack policy claims through argumentation (what its critics can do and they can’t) a bad thing. Instead of acknowledging that being able to defend your positions through rational argumentation might be a good thing, they characterize it as what libs do. “Liberals look down on you” (for being unable to defend your position through argumentation) makes the inability to engage in rational argumentation a sign of in-group loyalty and a performance of in-group identity.

Just to be clear, I think that lots of “conservative” positions can be supported through rational argumentation. (That an argument can be supported through rational argumentation doesn’t mean it’s true—it just meets a certain standard.) The GOP can’t support its policy agenda through rational argumentation because it has wed itself to an identity of people who refuse to compromise, bargain, or deliberate and it’s a coalition. A coalition has to unify disparate groups with disparate needs and goals. It can do so through openly admitting that there are compromises that need to get made for strategic purposes that will, on the whole, benefit the coalition. There’s another strategy.

In 1939, Kenneth Burke, when talking about Hitler’s strategy in unifying the very disparate group that was the recently-created identity of “German,” said that unification through a common enemy is the easiest strategy with a disparate group. In the case of the GOP, the common enemy is rational argumentation.







[1] They also argue from data that doesn’t actually prove their point. For instance, in order to prove that policing isn’t racist they show data that African Americans are arrested more than white people. Logic isn’t their long suit. That’s why they need to make being bad at logic a good thing.

“Liberals look down on you” is evil genius rhetoric

headline "liberals look down on people"
Headline and image from here: https://stream.org/liberals-look-people-conservatives-look/

If you drift into the pro-GOP public sphere (meaning both the formal media and pundits, but also the people who are repeating the talking points in social media, at Thanksgiving dinner, or yard signs), then you’ve seen the talking point that “liberals look down on you.” It’s evil genius rhetoric.

It does a bunch of things at once, all of which benefit the GOP by distracting potential supporters away from its inability to defend its policy agenda through rational argumentation, while providing a feeling of certainty and self-righteousness. The GOP has five major problems in terms of talking openly about its policies.

First, it has the classic problem that toxic populism always has—wanting to get the support of working classes and the extremely wealthy, but those groups have opposing policy agenda. Any rational defense of particular policies would mean discussing in detail what the costs and benefits of the policy would be, and that would alienate some group. Since the GOP has opted for policies that give the rich material benefits at the expense of the non-elite, they have to keep any public discussion off the material consequences for the non-elite of their policies.

Second, a lot of people in the GOP don’t really want a democracy in which all citizens have equal access to voting and all votes count equally—they want a hierarchy of power, in which their supporters have more power (and more voting power) than any group that doesn’t fully support them. They don’t see any benefit in disagreement, so they want to end it thoroughly. Arguing against democracy in a democracy is tricky, and generally achieved by arguing that some other group has already so corrupted democracy that we need to abandon democracy temporarily to purify it of Them. Then we can get to a democracy of the believers (what Giorgio Agamben so elegantly described as “not-law”—we have to abandon the law to save it).

Third, they want to be seen as the party of principle, as God’s Party (they have to do this to keep the fundagelical vote), but they don’t have consistent principles. Neither do fundagelicals, except the “principle” that they are magically able to read Scripture unmediated, and therefore able to be absolutely certain about what God wants. In other words, the GOP has to hold on to the support of people who mistake rigidity for principle. This unholy alliance with people who value rigidity (and who hide their own compromises and changes by rewriting history) means that the GOP can’t engage in the compromises, negotiations, and deliberations that all healthy groups use to resolve disagreements.[1]

Fourth, GOP rhetoric flips and flops—immigration is good (Reagan) and bad (Trump); Russia is bad (every GOP figure till Trump) and good (Trump); chain immigration is bad (Trump) and good (Trump’s use of chain immigration for his family); the government is too powerful (GOP till 9/11) and should be given all the power (GOP after 9/11). There’s nothing wrong with a party changing position—that’s what they should do. I had a coworker who was a devotee of Rush Limbaugh. I watched that coworker love, hate, love, and hate John McCain, dependent on nothing more than whether Rush Limbaugh said McCain was really a Republican—that is, whether McCain was supporting whatever was the party line for the GOP at that moment. But neither Limbaugh nor the coworker said it that way, as though McCain had changed. Every time the (new) stance was presented as a recognition of McCain’s essence.

Parties change positions all the time—that’s fine, and potentially even good. The problem is that strategic changes of position are in direct conflict with the third desideratum.

Fifth, the GOP has become the party the Founders had nightmares about. The second, third, and fourth problems mean that they really don’t want a democracy. Those problems can only be solved with a one-party state. Democracy is premised on a content-neutral standard for behavior—that whether you’re Whig, Anti-Masonic, Jacksonian Democrat, Federalist, or whatever, you are held to the same standards as every other party. Supporters of the GOP (largely because of the rhetoric created in order to solve the second through fourth problems) don’t believe that the GOP should be held to the same standards as other parties. After all, if you’re the party of God, and they are the party of the Satan, then nothing you can do is wrong, and nothing they can do is right.

So, the GOP has to look tough, rigid, and supportive of regular folks while actually passing policies that do the opposite of what they’re advertised as doing (or the opposite of what they were previously advocating as the only ethical policy), and, above all else, keep their supporters from looking at non-partisan data about the policies, candidates, or talking points.

“Liberals look down on you” solves all those problems, mainly because it keeps people from noticing them, and it guarantees that people will look away if those problems are drawn to their attention. Loosely, it enables people to feel good about having a rationally indefensible position, encourages supporters to dismiss dissent or uncomfortable information through motivism, makes politics an issue of dominance/submission, encourages people to feel victimized instead of wrong, sets supporters up to make “Vladimir’s Choice” on a regular basis, makes having an irrational commitment seem a better choice than having a rational policy, and allows blazingly partisan standards to seem justified. It is and enables shameless levels of demagoguery.

It isn’t just the pro-GOP media machine that uses this kind of strategy (which can also have the form of something like, “They’ll say you’re crazy”)— cults, and cult-y churches, MLM, the skeezier kinds of self-help businesses (not all self-help books or businesses are skeezy) use it; it seems that some tech startups seem to use a version of it (Bad Blood describes it being common at Theranos), and I’ve run across in some fringe political groups. It’s just particularly damaging when it’s embraced by the mainstream media (and the pro-GOP media is the mainstream media). As I’ll argue in the last post in what will be a series (I hope just three, but maybe four posts long) non-GOP media engages in various taxonomies and frames that virtually guarantee the “liberals look down on you” rhetorical strategy works.







[1] The notion that people get their way by “sticking to their principles and refusing to compromise” is all over the political spectrum. Refusing to compromise only works for people who have more power—while throwing tantrums and refusing to settle works in an awful lot of families (and not necessarily on the part of the toddlers), it’s rare that it works in political situations except for people who have a tremendous amount of power. We love stories of individuals who refused to compromise, and thereby toppled oppressive regimes, but I don’t know that there is ever a time that happened. (I have more than once had confusing interactions with people in which I had to explain that FDR compromised—confusing because he was famous for compromising, perhaps too much when it came to issues of race.)




Arguing with Trump supporters: associative thinking

Martin Luther King, Jr. at the March on Washington
MLK Jr. at the March on Washington

Many years ago an acquaintance told me that she was voting for Reagan because his secret security agents loved him. I told her that Hitler’s security guard loved him. She was offended that I had said that Reagan was Hitler.

I was trying to make a point about her major premise. That is, I was looking at her argument from the perspective of argumentation. I was trying to say that her major premise (if your personal guard likes you, then you are a good person) was not one she believed. She understood me to be making an associational argument (which is how she thinks).

For both of us, the question was, how do I know I’m right? For both of us, the question was, can I find evidence to support my belief? For me, the question was, do I agree with my own major premises? For her, the question was, is this thing I believe to be good associated with other things I believe to be good?

Far more people approach issues the way she does than reason the way I do. And, in fact, her way of thinking makes sense under some circumstances. I like this store, and they have this product, and it’s a lot like another product of theirs I like, so I’ll probably like that product too. This person recommended this movie, and I’ve liked other recommendations they’ve made, so I’ll probably like this movie too.

Liking this kind of store, or this kind of movie, or this kind of restaurant, and therefore wanting to find stores, movies, or restaurants like that is a good enough way to make some initial guesses. What I mean by “good enough” is akin to what Winnicott said about “good enough” parenting. If we set our standard as perfectly rational reasoning at all times, we’ll never make any decisions. Relying on associations is a good enough way to start. It becomes problematic, and actively damaging, when

1) our chains of association are unreasonable. For instance, I might decide that, since you and I both like a restaurant (“Chester’ Burgers”), then I’ll like a different restaurant you recommend (“Hubert’s Vegan Noodle House”). That’s a bit weak—it would probably be a stronger way to think about the situation if it’s unusual to like that first restaurant, or you like all the same restaurants I do, but it’s good enough to give the second restaurant a try. If you and I both like a movie, or we vote the same way, or I think you’re a “good” person, then the relevance of your restaurant recommendation is much more tenuous.[1] A lot of people assess the world in that tenuous way (I’ll come back to this)—they decide that people are good or bad, and that a good person is good in every way, and every good thing is associated with good people. Therefore, a person who is a good actor must also be a good President.

2) the preliminary conclusion we come to is then protected at all costs (we aren’t open to changing our minds). The second flawed application of this way of reasoning is if I try the restaurant, and have a bad experience, but refuse to admit it was a bad experience (or decide that you didn’t really like the first restaurant).

3) we rely more on the negative associations than the positive–for instance, if I refuse to go to a restaurant you like because there is a restaurant you like and I don’t. This one also has lots of exceptions, depending on how much alike the two restaurants are. It makes less sense if I won’t go to a restaurant because you like a movie I don’t like, or vote differently, or I think you’re a “bad” person (with the reverse of some of the exceptions noted about the first method).

4) we use this method for all situations (this is particularly damaging if it’s connected with the first). The fourth is self-explanatory—there are times that this kind of associative thinking isn’t very useful. A person might be a very nice person, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re giving you good medical advice.

Obviously, a tremendous number of decisions are based on these sorts of associations. The best way to think about this sort of decision-making is that associations are most useful when they are treated as analogies. The more that the next case is like the previous, the more relevant your judgment is. Thinking about these associations as analogies means that we think about them in terms of degree—how much is this restaurant like the other one? The more that I understand your reasons for liking the first restaurant, the better able I am to determine how much your judgment applies to other restaurants, let alone movies or Presidents.

A lot of people who think associatively don’t approach the associations as analogies, but as equations. This method of thinking is what Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrecths-Tyteca called “philosophical paired terms.” Very few scholars of rhetoric pay attention to them because thinking via paired terms doesn’t fit our normal schemes of argumentation, but they’re important to understand because, if someone is “reasoning” this way, then normal schemes of argumentation won’t work. It took me years to figure that out.

And Hitler analogies are a great way to explain the problem I kept running into when trying to argue with someone who thinks via paired terms.

Normal schemes of argumentation are (more or less) relations of causality. So, the claim that “Reagan is a good President because his secret service agents really like him,” to me, was a claim that there is something that causes secret service agents to like someone that also causes that person to be a good leader. Hitler’s security liked him, and he was not a good leader, so the Hitler example shows there is a not a causal relationship.

Once I realized that people weren’t thinking in causal terms, I thought they were reasoning by signs. In other words, I thought they believed that having a security team that likes you is a sign that you are good. And so I thought we were talking about whether something was a perfect or imperfect sign. I tried to show that it was an unreliable sign, but that didn’t work. And it didn’t work because the person couldn’t get past that I had said Reagan was Hitler. And, of course, I’d said no such thing. People like that really seemed to have trouble understanding the concept of analogy, especially the concept mentioned above—that analogies are valid to varying degrees, depending on the degree of likeness. If you are saying this person is like that person, you aren’t saying they’re the same.

For people who think in paired terms, chains of association are links that equate the two linked identities, concepts, people.[2] They divide the world into good and bad, with all the good things chained to each other and in opposition to the bad (which are also chained to each other). Bad people must be bad in every way, and associated with every other bad thing, and good people must be good in every way, and associated with every other good thing.

Thus, as with another way of reasoning (discussed elsewhere), it’s possible simply to attribute a quality through opposition. What I mean by that is that if I believe that everything can be divided this way, and I’m Christian, and you disagree with me (about anything), then I conclude you must not be Christian. It’s this way of thinking that causes some Trump supporters to accuse everyone who disagrees with them of being a socialist.

There are two ways to try to persuade someone who is thinking in terms of paired terms. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca describe one method—dissociation. You can see MLK engage in dissociation in “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which he tries to take the paired terms of the “Eight Alabama Clergymen” and dissociate them. Loosely, their argument associates their policy (cease protests and try to work slowly with the new Mayor and City Council) with: patience, peace, lawfulness, faithfulness, “insiderness.” Each of those terms is contrasted to the ones they try to associate with King (an outsider, they insist): impatience, violence/conflict, lawbreaking, communism (this one implicitly). King slowly and patiently (thereby performatively refuting one of their claims) argues that his organization’s position shows real patience, peacefulness, and so on, while their position settles for apparent (superficial) instances of those values.

This method generally leaves in place the binaries, and tries to persuade the person they’ve miscategorized things. It didn’t persuade the Eight Alabama Clergymen, but it did persuade others.

I think the reason it didn’t persuade them is that the most important (albeit unstated) term associated in those paired terms is: me. Reagan is good, and I am good for liking Reagan (and for recognizing his goodness). For people who live in the world of paired terms, if you aren’t good, you’re bad. So, by saying Reagan wasn’t in the good category, I was saying she didn’t have good judgment, and she isn’t good.

Paired terms provides a kind of clarity and certainty that is breath-taking. So, the second way of trying to argue with someone who believes that Biden must be a socialist because he isn’t a Republican (an instance of thinking via paired terms) is to try to persuade them that that way of thinking is flawed. As you can guess, that isn’t easy.

You’re trying to take away their clarity and certainty. And you’re telling them that they’re not only mistaken in this instance, but in their whole view of the world. You aren’t just saying that Reagan might not be good; you’re saying they might not be good.

In my experience (I’ve never seen any studies on this issue), people who think this way are often suckers who’ve spent (lost) a lot of money on dodgy cures, bad investments, and get-rich schemes, over and over. I think it’s because they can’t learn from their mistakes, since they can’t admit that this way of making decisions isn’t working for them. They’re often Followers, who idolize (and believe they have perfect insight into) various celebrities. This is also the sort of person with whom I have made the least headway in terms of persuasion. Consistently.

The only thing I’ve sometimes managed to do is point out that connections between two terms are invalid, such as showing that people who claim to be Christian are violating basic dicta of Christianity. But that usually causes them to block me, or to say, “Democrats are the ones who kill kids.” And we’re back to the pretense that Republicans care about abortion.




[1] I can imagine situations in which these connections wouldn’t be so tenuous—perhaps we like the movie because we both really like the star, and you mention that star often goes to the restaurant, or the owners of the restaurant contribute a certain amount of profits to the political party we like, or I think you’re good because you only eat at restaurants with ethically-sourced food. But they’re pretty unusual, if not actually rare.

[2] Another way to think about this is in terms of Venn diagrams. I would map the diagrams as “people who are good leaders” intersecting with “people whose security detail likes them,” but for some people there are only two circles, and they don’t intersect at all. There is the circle of good things/people/concepts, and the circle of bad ones. Having your security detail like you puts you in the good circle. If it puts you in the bad circle, as she understood me to have suggested, then I must be putting Reagan into the same category as Hitler, meaning I’m saying that Reagan killed six million Jews, and he didn’t.