May 2022 - Patricia Roberts-Miller

Authoritarian Libertarianism and the Freedom to do what I say

[The third RSA paper]

It wasn’t particularly hard to predict that mask-wearing would become a point of contention—considering that our culture of demagoguery weaponizes choices as small as the color of a tie, and that Trump was insistent on associating mask-wearing with weakness. What was somewhat surprising was that the issue wasn’t completely factionalized—that is, mask-wearing became a controversy in communities we don’t necessarily associate with Trump or the Republican Party, such as the wellness community.

In the abstract for this talk, I said that mask wearing was politicized, but that’s wrong—it was depoliticized, in the sense that it was removed from the realm of policy deliberation, and became a performance of in-group identity. There were a lot of factors that contributed to that outcome, but one especially popular explanation is that too many people rejected the advice of experts, instead relying on media pundits, youtube celebrities, or their own strong convictions. I think that explanation is inaccurate and unhelpful; in fact, I’m going to argue that it’s grounded in a way of thinking about knowledge, discourse, and authority that is the source of the problem.

On the contrary, I think the problem was too many people—not necessarily from just one place on the political spectrum—approached the issue from the perspective of what I’ve awkwardly termed “authoritarian libertarianism.” I’m not wed to the term, but also not wild about some of the other available terms.

This paper has two parts—for most of it, I’ll explain what I mean by authoritarian libertarianism, and then I’ll explain why I don’t think it’s usefully characterized as either anti-intellectualism or a kind of populism.

Authoritarian libertarianism uses a rhetoric of freedom and liberty to advocate and enforce policies of control, forcing everyone to abide by what in-group authorities determine is correct behavior and belief. I don’t think the rhetoric is necessarily insincere. My favorite example of authoritarian libertarianism is how the Massachusetts Bay Colony defended its practice of punishing, expelling, and sometimes hanging dissenters as consistent with the “freedom of conscience” guaranteed in its charter. John Cotton’s 300-page The Bloudy Tenent, Washed and Made White in the Bloud of the Lambe (1647), for instance, argued that forcing a person to do what Cotton believed right was not a violation of their conscience, but was allowing them to follow their conscience.

The assumption that he and others made is that there is not really any disagreement about what is right or wrong—a person might be momentarily mistaken (“in error” he says) but will recognize their belief as wrong as soon as they are told so by an authority. If they “persist” in error, they are persisting in doing something even they know to be wrong. (1 Timothy 5:20 is usually the proof-text cited: “As for those who persist in sin, rebuke them in the presence of all, so that the rest may stand in fear.”) As long as someone persists in error, they can be forcibly silenced. Freedom of conscience, for Massachusetts Bay authorities like Cotton, was the freedom to submit to their authority.

This isn’t a disagreement about freedom, but about knowledge—authoritarian libertarianism presumes that determining what’s right is straightforward. And here we get entangled in popular understandings of authority and expertise. As Johanna Hartelius has shown, the expert/expertise connection is complicated and varied, and shouldn’t be seen as question of identity, but of relation. Expertise is not an object or epistemic quality experts autonomously posess, but, as she says, “a social and symbolic process, a relational logic at once real and imagined, theoretical and pragmatic” (164). If you accept her argument, and I think it’s a good one, then being an expert and being right are not synonymous—people, including experts, might be mistaken. If, however, you listen to a lot of popular discourse, the assumption for many—not everyone—is that an expert is right, and the right person is the expert. The term “expert” isn’t always used; sometime “authority” or “prophet” might be the preferred term.

Many people explain the controversy over masks in a simple binary of right and wrong—people refused to listen to what authorities said, and instead relied on amateurs. This explanation is often associated with the narrative of fall—there was a time when people listened to authorities and we no longer do. I think this is wrong on both counts. People who refused to wear masks did listen to authorities—they assessed authority differently. To give just one example: some people believe that God is a micromanager, and so that every thing that happens is because he is willing it in that moment. For them, covid is a religious—not medical—issue. So, for them, the relevant expertise is not epidemiology but prophecy.

I’m not saying looking at covid that way is just as valid as seeing it as a public health issue (it isn’t), but I am saying that telling them to listen to experts isn’t an effective rhetorical or deliberative strategy. They believe they are.

And, really, expert discourse doesn’t have an unblemished history when it comes to decision making. Eugenics was the mainstream discourse of experts who had all the right degrees, and it legitimated forced sterilization, segregation, racist immigration policies, criminalizing inter-racial marriage (Jackson). When I point that out to people who tell me that the problem is that people no longer defer to authorities, they say that the people advocating racialist science weren’t real authorities because they were wrong (i.e., no true Scotsman).

The notion that we should simply do what experts say—Cotton’s argument—denies that experts disagree, and that any major policy decision requires people with wildly different areas of expertise (in the case of masks, constitutional law specialists, epidemiologists, historians, communication scholars, public health scholars). It also denies that coming to the optimal policy doesn’t mean doing The Right Thing, but deliberating about options. And there were and are rarely two.

The fantasy that many people have is that reliable expertise is an identity issue—the “autonomous” model of authority (Hartelius). People believe that we can assess reliability instantly, or with some quick checks of credentials. The Stanford Project on “Evaluating Information” shows that students, even with good instructions to do otherwise, try to assess the credibility of an argument without going “beyond the site itself” (Wineburg et al. 5). Students believe they can assess the reliability of an argument on the basis of whether it looks true, is easy to understand, has statistics (McGrew et al. 4-5).

Checklists—much like the ones we give students in classes—may make the situation worse, because they encourage students to try to assess an argument autonomously. I don’t mean that in the way that Hartelius uses the term, but in the sense used by advocates of New Criticism; that is, treating a text as an autonomous mobile floating in space. McGrew et al. show that, not only is this how many students assess credibility, because it’s what checklists advocate, but so do many professors:
“College students and even professors approached websites using checklist-like behaviors: they scanned up and down pages, they commented on site design and fancy logos, they noted “.org” domain names, and they examined references at the bottom of a web article. They often spent a great deal of time reading the article, evaluating the information presented, checking its internal logic, or comparing what they read to what they already knew. But the “close reading” of a digital source, the slow, careful, methodical review of text online—when one doesn’t even know if the source can be trusted (or is what it says it is)—proves to be a colossal waste of time.” (8)
Achen and Bartels’ research similarly shows that beliefs are partisan, and that we tend to assess information through partisan lenses—regardless of how well-educated we are, or how much we think we are logical—in conditions when asked to treat an argument autonomously. The subjects for their studies included faculty—this is not something only They do. Ryan Skinnell, using a more nuanced reading of “logos” than is in many textbooks (it is not the same as what we call “logic”), points out that an argument can seem perfectly “logical” simply because we agree with the major and minor premises:
“If you accept the stated premise (children are being held as sex slaves in the basement of a pizza parlor), as well as an unstated premise (it is reasonable for an individual to take up arms to confront what they believe is injustice), then the logic of the argument is perfectly reasonable—even eminently moral.” (561)
Assessing arguments as though they were autonomous mobiles in space, and as though expertise is autonomously determined, keeps us free to believe what we already believe.

I’m not using the term “authoritarian” in the sense that Bob Altemyer or the Frankfurt School use it—as an ideology—nor to refer to a kind of regime (as political scientists sometimes use the term). I mean authoritarian as a model of public discourse. Experts—real experts—speak the truth; and normal people (those whose perception isn’t blinded by bias) recognize what they’re saying as true. Thus, credible authorities are always in-group, and always confirming and conforming to in-group beliefs. People who rejected the expertise of epidemiologists believed that scholars with degrees from impressive places who were repeating the major scholarly consenses were only really experts if they were in-group.

This way of thinking about truth, authority, and public discourse isn’t circular as much as a Mobius strip. We should do what authorities say because they speak the Truth; we know they’re speaking the Truth because they’re authorities, and we know they’re authorities because what they’re saying is True. True statements about the world are true on their face, and while the explanation for why they’re true might be complicated (as in some conspiracy theories) there is still the instant resonance that signals Truth. Thus, deliberation is not only unnecessary, but actively dangerous because it’s likely to confuse issues. The more voices there are in the argument, the more likely people will fall for false prophets.

Cotton exemplifies this authoritarian model of public discourse, but this view is not necessarily religious. Secular figures like Richard Dawkins or Donald Trump appeal to it; it’s popular in management literature obsessed with “decisiveness” and charismatic leadership; of course it’s part of cults, and cult-like organizations. Just as it isn’t necessarily religious, it isn’t necessarily political. At least as described in Bad Blood, Theranos was a highly authoritarian organization that described itself as a place of creativity and innovation—that is, freedom. To the extent that it’s a model of political authority and discourse, it isn’t restricted to one place on the political spectrum, nor is it evenly distributed.

But, there do tend to be political implications. Authoritarian libertarianism says that, because we can cite true authorities to support our position, we don’t have to engage in argumentation; we don’t have to deliberate with people who disagree. At its best, it says that we have moral license to disenfranchise some groups; at its worst, it says we have a moral obligation to silence them. So, as with the Massachusetts Bay Colony, communities in which authoritarian libertarianism is dominant often end up with frequent expulsions and witch hunts.

I’ve used the term “expert,” but that isn’t always the term that is used. In fact, many authoritarian libertarians believe that experts—that is, scholars whose expertise comes from deep learning and who present themselves as advocating a scholarly consensus—are blinded or confused by too much learning. For that reason, this way of thinking about discourse and decision-making is sometimes called anti-intellectualism. I’m dubious about that term, though, because many of the people who advocate authoritarian libertarianism present themselves as intellectual, and are proud of their learning. David Duke still brags about his PhD., and as Kiara Walker points out in her dissertation, Richard Spencer bragged during testimony in his recent civil trial that he’d read “quite a bit of Jacques Barzun” and “so much philosophy” (22).

This model is also sometimes called populism because the distinction between those who should be followed and those who should be rejected is so often associated with imagining that the world is broken into a hostile binary of authentic (i.e., directly connected to truth) and corrupt (both dishonest and misled). Cass Mudde defines populism as
“an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people” (Mudde 2004, 543, qtd. in Handbook 29).
In populism, the people v. elite is not necessarily a distinction of class or education. What distinguishes the two groups, according to Mudde, is morality. Someone might be tremendously wealthy or well-educated, and still be “of the people” because they are simply authentic people who got rich or went to school:
“The essence of the people is their purity, in the sense that they are ‘authentic,’ while the elite are corrupt, because they are not authentic. Purity and authenticity are not defined in (essentially) ethnic or racial terms, but in moral terms. It is about ‘doing the right thing,’ which means doing what is right for all the people.” (Handbook 31)
“All the people” is not an empirical claim, but a circular and essentialist one—“the people” being in-group (since they are the only people that really count).

Paul Johnson’s recent and wonderful book I the People makes an elegant case for what he calls “conservative populism,” an ideology that is similarly muckled in terms of domination, submission, and freedom. So, populism might be a better term than authoritarian libertarianism, but I’m not sure. Johnson’s book ties the authoritarianism he’s describing to conservative ideology, and what I’m awkwardly calling authoritarian libertarianism is all over the political spectrum, and often used in non-political situations.

In addition, some of the people who use this approach are openly elite, such as John Cotton or Richard Dawkins, who have fairly nasty things to say about the masses. Cults and authoritarian religions sometimes have a rhetoric of an elect, and various kinds of paternalistic organization or political structures assume an authoritarian system that frees others through control (I’m thinking of Erich Fromm’s argument in Escape from Freedom). I think we should be careful about overextending the concept of populism because it is such a useful one—if every movement is populism, then the term loses its explanatory force.

Although I think it matters what we call it, as I said, I’m not wed to the term. What seems important to me is that we recognize that there is an approach to authority and discourse that is damaging to deliberation, and to which we are all prone. (I cringe to think about how often I probably posted or shared something about what idiots people were for rejecting expertise.) Any term that invites us to see this as something They do is just repeating the same mistake.

I’m also not saying that all experts are equally reliable, and that everyone “has a right” to their own authorities. I mean we do have a right to our own authorities—what would it mean not to have a “right” to an authority?—I’m not talking about rights. I’m making a very pragmatic argument about rhetoric.

It doesn’t work to tell people that they’re wrong to ignore authorities when they think they’re paying attention to true authorities. If we describe the problem with any public policy as a binary of people who did or didn’t submitting to authority, we have a damaging model of authority. What I want to emphasize is that the whole issue of mask wearing got caught in machinery of a system that expels disagreement and deliberation in favor of a binary of us and them. And so we spent and spend a lot of time arguing about whose authorities were or are really authoritative, by which we mean who is in-group and who is out-group—to whom should we submit. And I think that was a mistake. I think that’s the wrong argument.

Achen, Christopher H. and Larry M. Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. Print.

Cotton, John, and Roger Williams. The Bloudy Tenent, Washed and Made White in the Bloud of the Lambe … Wherein the Great Questions of This Present Time Are Handled, Viz. How Farre Liberty of Conscience Ought to Be Given to Those That Truly Feare God? And How Farre Restrained to Turbulen by John Cotton … London: Printed by Matthew Symmons for Hannah Allen …, 1647. Web. Accessed May 16, 2022..

Hartelius, Johnann. Rhetoric of Expertise. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022, Print.

Jackson, John P. Science for Segregation : Race, Law, and the Case Against Brown V. Board of Education. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Print.

Johnson, Paul Elliott. I the People : The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States. 1st ed. University of Alabama Press, 2022. Print.

Mcgrew, Sarah et al. “The Challenge That’s Bigger Than Fake News: Civic Reasoning in a Social Media Environment.” American educator 41.3 (2017): 4–. Print.

Mudde, Cass. “Population: An Ideational Approach.” The Oxford Handbook of Populism / Edited by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo and Pierre Ostiguy. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2017. Print. 27-47.

Richard Spencer testimony. Sines, et al. v. Kessler, et al., 3:17CV72, 11/5/2021 https://files.integrityfirstforamerica.org/14228/1639753607-2021-nov-5-moon-sines-v-kessler-317cv72-cvl-jt-day10-final.pdf

Skinnell, Ryan. “Teaching Writing in the (New) Era of Fake News.” College composition and communication 72.4 (2021): 546–569. Print.

Wineburg, Sam, et al. Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Online Civic
Literacy: Executive Summary. Stanford History Education Group, 2016.

How the pro-GOP media is using a rhetoric of war to radicalize its base

Bill O'Reilly claiming there is a war on Christmas — from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToLdVCb1ezI

[Another paper from the Rhetoric Society of America conference. For the conference, the paper is titled : “The ‘War on Christians’ and Preventive War.”]

This panel came about because of our shared interest in the paradox that advocates of reactionary ideologies often use a rhetoric of return in service of radically new policies and practices. Sometimes they’re claiming to return to older practices that either never existed or that are not the same as what is now being advocated, and sometimes they’re claiming that their new policies are a continuation of current practice when they aren’t. It’s not a paradox that reactionary pundits and politicians would use appeals to the past in order to argue for a reactionary agenda—in fact, pundits and politicians all over the political spectrum use a mythical past to argue for policies, and, if anything, it makes more sense for reactionaries to do it than progressives—the tension comes from appealing to a false past as though it were all the proof one needs to justify unprecedented policies.

The false past is somewhat puzzling in various ways. It’s sometimes about apparently trivial points, such as the myth that everyone used to say “Merry Christmas!” It’s frequently appealing to a strange sense of timelessness, in which words like “Christian” or “white” have always had exactly the same meaning that they do now. It’s sometimes self-serving to the point of silliness– the plaint that “kids these days” are worlds worse than any previous generation. The evidence for these claims is often nothing more than hazy nostalgia for the simple world of one’s youth, so that the fact that as children we were unaware of crime and adultery is taken as proof that they didn’t happen in those days.

At first, when I started running across this odd strategy, I thought the rhetoric of return was essentially a kind of rhetorical diversionary tactic, born of necessity. People are naturally resistant to new policies, especially people likely to be attracted to reactionary ideologies, and engaging in reasonable policy argumentation is hard, especially if you don’t have a very good policy. People rarely demand that a policy be defended through argumentation if it’s the status quo, or a return to past successful policy, and that kind of makes sense. What that audience tendency means is that a rhetor who wants to evade the responsibilities and accountability of policy argumentation can try to frame their new policy as a return to a previously successful one or a continuation of the status quo. This is nostalgia as a diversion from deliberation and argumentative accountability.

But I now think that’s only part of it.

I think it’s a rhetorical strategy oriented toward radicalizing an audience in order to persuade them to engage in a preventive and absolute war, thereby granting in-group rhetors complete moral and rhetorical license. I’m arguing that there is a political strategy with four parts. Reactionary rhetors strategically falsify the past and/or present such that some practice (e.g., celebrating Christmas as we do now) is narrated as something all Americans have always done, and therefore as constituting America. Another strategy is to insist that “liberals” are at war with “America,” as evidenced by their determination to exterminate those mythically foundational practices (such as celebrating Christmas). Because liberals are trying to exterminate America, the GOP should respond with preventive and absolute war—normal political disagreement is renarrated as a zero-sum war in which one or the other group must be exterminated. The goal of those three strategies is to gain the moral and rhetorical license afforded by persuading a base that they are existentially threatened.

I. Strategic Nostalgia

Take, for instance, abortion. The GOP is not proposing returning to the world pre- Roe v. Wade; they are advocating a radically new set of policies, much more extreme than were in place in 1972. In 1972, thirteen states allowed abortion “if the pregnant woman’s life or physical or mental health were endangered, if the fetus would be born with a severe physical or mental defect, or if the pregnancy had resulted from rape or incest” (Guttmacher). Abortion was outright legal in four states. And while it was a hardship, it was at least possible for women to travel to those states and get a legal abortion.

GOP state legislatures are not only criminalizing abortion in all circumstances, even if forcing a woman to continue with a nonviable pregnancy is likely to kill her, but criminalizing miscarriage, criminalizing (or setting bounties for) getting medical treatment (or certain forms of birth control) anywhere, even where it’s legal. And it’s clear that a GOP Congress will pass a Federal law prohibiting abortion under all circumstances, as well as many forms of birth control, in all states. They are not proposing a return.

Or, take another example. In 2003, the Bush Administration proposed a radically new approach in international relations—at least for the post-war US—preventive war. But, as exemplified in Colin Powell’s highly influential speech to the UN (Oddo), this new approach was presented as another instance of preemptive war (the basis of Cold War policy).

II. Preventive War

To explain that point, I need to talk about kinds of war. When rhetors are advocating war, they generally claim it’s one of four kinds: self-defense, preemptive, preventive, and conquest. Self-defense, when another nation has already declared war and is invading, is a war of necessity. The other three are all wars of choice, albeit with different degrees of choice. A preemptive war is when one nation is about to be attacked and so strikes first—it’s preemptive self-defense against imminent aggression. A preventive war “is a strategy designed to forestall an adverse shift in the balance of power and driven by better-now-than-later logic” (Levy 1). Preventive war is about preserving hegemony, in both senses of that word.

Nations or groups engage in preventive war when they believe that their current geopolitical, economic, or ideological hegemony is threatened by an up-and-coming power. And I would note that white evangelicals started pushing a rhetoric of war when their political hegemony in the South was threatened by desegregation and internal migration (Jones); the GOP increasingly appealed to various wars as data came out showing that its base was not far from national minority status (FiveThirtyEight).

While wars of conquest are common, and the US has engaged in a lot, it’s rare to find major political figures willing to admit that they were or are advocating a war of conquest. The only example I’ve found is Alexander the Great at the river Beas, and our only source for that speech was written two hundred years later, so who knows what he said. Even Hitler claimed (and perhaps believed) that his war of conquest was self-defense. Wars of conquest—ones in which the goal is to exterminate or completely disempower another group simply because they have things we want or they’re in our way—are rhetorically a bit of a challenge. So, pundits and politicians advocating wars of conquest avoid the challenge. They claim it’s not a war of choice, but one forced on us by a villainous enemy, and thus either self-defense or preemptive.

Wars of conquest are generally what the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz called “absolute” war,; that is, one in which we are trying to “destroy the adversary, to eliminate his existence as a State” (qtd in Howard 17). Absolute war is not necessarily genocide; but it is oriented toward making the opponent defenseless (77), so that they must do our will. Most wars, according to Clausewitz, can end far short of absolute war because there are other goals, such as gaining territory, access to a resource, and so on, what he calls political ends.

What I am arguing is that the US reactionary right is using strategic nostalgia to mobilize its base to support and engage in an absolute war against “liberals” (that is, any opposition party or dissenters), by claiming “liberals” have already declared such a war on America. Thus, it’s preventive war, but defended by a rhetoric of self-defense.

As Rush Limbaugh said, “And what we are in the middle of now, folks, is a Cold Civil War. It has begun” (“There is no”) and “I think we are facing a World War II-like circumstance in the sense that, as then, it is today: Western Civilization is at stake” (“The World War II”; see also “There is No Whistleblower”). And it is the Democrats who started the war (“What Happened”), actually, a lot of wars, including a race war. Again, quoting Limbaugh, “I believe the Democrat Party, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, whoever, I think they are attempting, and have been for a while, to literally foment a race war. I think that has been the objective” (“Trump’s Running”).

If “conservatives” are at war with “liberals,” then what kind of war? If politics is war, what kind is it? The GOP is not talking about Clausewitz’s normal war, that is of limited time and proximate successes, but complete subjugation.

The agenda of completely (and permanently) subjugating their internal and external opponents is fairly open, as Katherine Stewart has shown in regard to conservative white evangelicals (The Power Worshippers). Dinesh D’Souza, in his ironically-titled The Big Lie, is clear that the goal of Republican action is making and keeping Democrats a minority power, unable to get any policies passed (see especially 236-243).

It is, in other words, a rejection of the premise of democracy.

III. Moral and rhetorical license

The conservative Matthew Continetti concludes his narrative of “the hundred year war for American conservatism” saying:

What began in the twentieth century as an elite-driven defense of the classical liberal principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States ended up, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, as a furious reaction against elites of all stripes. Many on the right embraced a cult of personality and illiberal tropes. The danger was that the alienation from and antagonism toward American culture and society expressed by many on the right could turn into a general opposition to the constitutional order. (411)

(Paul Johnson makes a similar argument in his extraordinary book.) The explicit goal of disenfranchising any political opposition, the valorizing of the attempted insurrection, new processes for confirming SCOTUS nominees, voter suppression—these are a general opposition to the constitutional order. It is clear that many GOP-dominated state legislatures intend to overturn—violently if necessary—any election Democrats win. Georgia’s recent legislation, for instance, “gives Georgia’s Republican-controlled General Assembly effective control over the State Board of Elections and empowers the state board to take over local county boards — functionally allowing Republicans to handpick the people in charge of disqualifying ballots in Democratic-leaning places like Atlanta” (Beauchamp).

GOP pundits and politicians can be open in their attacks on other Americans, American culture, and American society by using strategic nostalgia to renarrate what is American, and thereby gain moral and political license. That is, radicalize their base.

By “radicalize,” I mean the process described by scholars of radicalization like Willem Koomen, Arie Kruglanski, or Marc Sageman, that enable people to believe they are justified in escalating their behavior to degrees of extremism and coercion that they would condemn in an outgroup, and that they would at some point in the past have seen as too much.

Koomen et al. say that “perceived threat is possibly the most significant precondition for polarization [and] radicalization” (161). That a group is threatened means that cultural or even legal norms in favor of fairness and against coercion no longer apply to the ingroup. There are three elements that can serve “both to arouse a (misplaced) sense of ingroup superiority and to legitimize violence”:
“The first is the insistence that the[ir] faith represents the sole absolute truth, the second is the tenet that its believers have been ‘chosen’ by a supreme being and the third is the conviction that divinely inspired religious law outranks secular law” (Koomen et al. 160).
Since they (or we) are a group entitled by a supreme being to dominate, then any system or set of norms that denies us domination is not legitimate, and can overthrown by violence, intimidation, or behaviors that we would condemn as immoral if done by any other group. We have moral license.

One particularly important threat is humiliation, including humiliation by proxy. That’s how the anti-CRT and anti-woke rhetoric functions. If you pay any attention to reactionary pundits and media, you know that they spend a tremendous amount of time talking about how the “woke mob” wants white people to feel shame; they frame discussions about racism (especially systemic racism) as deliberate attempts to humiliate white Christians. This strategy is, I’m arguing, a deliberate attempt to foment moral outrage—what Marc Sageman (a scholar of religious terrorism) says is the first step in radicalizing. He lists three other steps: persuading the base that there is already a war on their religion, ensuring a resonance between events in one’s personal life and that larger apocalyptic narrative, and boost that sense of threat through interpersonal and online networks.

The rhetoric of war, at some point, stops being rhetoric.

And that’s what we’re seeing. 70% of American adults identify as Christian (Pew); it’s virtually impossible for an atheist to get elected to major office; Christian holidays are national holidays. There’s no war on Christians in the US. And the Puritans—the people Christians like to claim as the first founders of the US—prohibited the celebration of Christmas. But the pro-GOP media not only claims there is a war on Christians, but that its base can see signs of this war in their personal life, as when a clerk says “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” And pro-GOP media continually boosts that sense of threat through networks that prohibit serious discussion of policy, different points of view, or lateral reading.

What all this does is make “conservatives” feel that war-like aggression against “liberals” is justified because it is self-defense.

According to this narrative, the GOP has been unwillingly forced into an absolute war of self-defense. This posture of being forced into an existential war with a demonic foe gives the reactionary right complete moral license. To the extent that they can get their base to believe that they are facing extermination of themselves or “liberals,” there are no legal or moral constraints on them.

And that’s what the myths do. The myths take the very particular and often new categories, practices, beliefs, policies, and project them back through time to origin narratives, so that pundits and politicians can make their base feel existentially threatened every time someone says, “Happy Holidays.”

Beauchamp, Zach. “Yes, the Georgia election law is that bad.” Vox Apr 6, 2021, 1:30pm EDT (Accessed May 17, 2022). https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22368044/georgia-sb202-voter-suppression-democracy-big-lie

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D’Souza, Dinesh. The Big Lie : Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, a division of Salem Media Group, 2017. Print.

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Johnson, Paul Elliott. I the People : The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States. 1st ed. University of Alabama Press, 2022. Print.

Jones, Robert P. (Robert Patrick). White Too Long : the Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2020. Print.

Koomen, Wim., J. van der Pligt, and J. van der (Joop) Pligt. The Psychology of Radicalization and Terrorism. London ;: Routledge, 2016. Print.

Kruglanski, Arie W., Jocelyn J. Bélanger, and Rohan Gunaratna. The Three Pillars of Radicalization : Needs, Narratives, and Networks. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019. Print.

“Lessons from Before Roe: Will Past be Prologue?” The Guttmacher Policy Review, 6:1, March 1, 2003. (Accessed May 16, 2022). https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2003/03/lessons-roe-will-past-be-prologue

Levy, Jack S. “Preventive War and Democratic Politics.” International studies quarterly 52.1 (2008): 1–24. Web.

Limbaugh, Rush. “Biden Will Renew Obama’s War on Suburban Property Values.” October 26, 2020. (Accessed May 16, 2022). https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2020/10/26/biden-will-renew-obamas-war-on-suburban-property-values/

“Rush to the Democrats: Stop the War on Police.” May 4, 2021. (Accessed May 16, 2022)https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2021/05/04/rush-to-the-democrats-stop-the-war-on-police/

“Rush Sounds the Alarm on the Democrat War on Policing.” April 26, 2021. (Accessed May 16, 2022) https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2021/04/26/rush-sounds-the-alarm-on-the-democrat-war-on-policing/

“The World War II Challenge We Face.” June 6, 2019. (Accessed May 16, 2022). https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2019/06/06/our-world-war-ii-challenge/

“There is No Whistleblower, Just a Leaker! We’re in the Midst of a Cold Civil War.” September 27, 2019. (Accessed May 17, 2022). https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2019/09/27/were-in-the-midst-of-a-cold-civil-war/

“Trump’s Running to Save Us from a Race War Fomented by Democrats.” August 31, 2020. (Accessed May 17, 2022). https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2020/08/31/trumps-running-to-save-us-from-the-race-war-that-democrats-are-fomenting/

“War on Women! Dems Sponsoring Sex-Trafficking at the Border.” May 26, 2021. (Accessed May 17, 2022) https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2021/05/26/war-on-women-dems-sponsoring-sex-trafficking-at-the-border/

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Oddo, John. Intertextuality and the 24-Hour News Cycle : a Day in the Rhetorical Life of Colin Powell’s U.N. Address. East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 2014. Print.

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Stewart, Katherine. The Power Worshippers : Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. Print.

Human Rights Rhetoric

Eleanor Roosevelt holding a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — from https://www.flickr.com/photos/fdrlibrary/27758131387/

For a supersession on human rights rhetoric.

Arguments about rhetoric and human right tends to focus on the term “rights” and the ethical problems and contradictions inevitably involved in imposing particular Western post-Enlightenment conceptions of universal rights on all other cultures.

The tension arises because so much rhetoric about humans rights has been grounded in Liberalism, with its emphasis on atomistic models of individuality and self-determination. Western Liberalism is not the only possible source for rhetorics of human rights, as much award-winning RSA scholarship has shown, but it does tend to be both foundational and constraining when the issue of human rights comes up in both foreign and domestic policy. Specifically, the problem I want to pursue is that US liberalism frames human rights as a commodity that the US has and has always had in such abundance that the only policy issues are: 1) how much of it to export and to whom, and 2) to what extent do we force others to open their market to our commodity.

In this brief talk, I want to focus on that notion of rights as a commodity because I think it ends up disturbingly redefining human in US political rhetoric

It’s absurd to think that the US has an excessive crop of human rights, or that it ever has. Yet, that notion of the US serving as the model for how to do liberty has been part of American foreign policy and domestic rhetoric at least as far back as US adventures in imperialism in the late 19th century. Woodrow Wilson was far from the first President to advocate foreign military ventures on humanitarian grounds. Similarly, the notion that liberty and property have a causal relationship was the basis of policies as varied as the Dred Scott decision, voting rights, distribution of public lands, forced privatization of tribal lands, and many others.

At the same time, however, there was a rhetoric of human rights, more fundamental and essential than the rights gained by legal citizenship or owning property. What happened with the rise of Social Darwinism and its conflation with “the market” is that we increasingly came to see all human interactions as competitive and individualistic market interactions. As many others have pointed out, the natural consequence of the tendency to see all human interactions as essentially market interactions is to make everything a commodity. As such, everything has a price, and everything can be sold. Since the market is competitive, it’s possible for some people to have none of a good and others to have cornered the market on it.

If human rights are a commodity traded in a free market, then not everyone can afford them, and so some people aren’t human.

This tendency to assume that a “free” market version of capitalism and democracy are necessarily connected became almost hegemonic during the Cold War, during which time we were perfectly willing to ally ourselves with anti-democratic governments, as long as they were open to American capitalism; we were (with a few exceptions such as Israel and some Scandinavian countries) completely unwilling to ally ourselves with even mildly socialist governments, even if they were anti-USSR. Capitalism was more important than democracy.

This was the assumption that meant we rationalize authoritarian governments as “democracies in transition.” It’s also why, with the breakup of the USSR and Soviet bloc, the US was more interested in privatizing everything, even if that immediately led to extreme income inequality and the attendant violations of human rights, than we were in establishing democratic norms and protecting human rights.

One other factor that’s important for thinking about the current US failure to protect the human rights of its own inhabitants is the just world model, and its manifestation in toxic populism and prosperity gospel.

I’ll start with the second. The just world model is a cognitive bias that says that people get what we deserve in this world—that bad things only happen to bad people, who have brought it on somehow, and good things happen to good people. Prosperity gospel is one form of this fantasy, saying that God rewards people of sufficient faith with wealth and good health. Thus, wealth and good health are signs that a person is blessed and honored by God.

Crucial to toxic populism is an imagined binary of people: authentic v. fake. Toxic populism takes the liberal notion of universality of experience and turns it into a singularity of validity. While acknowledging difference, it posits that only the position, values, beliefs, experiences, policy agenda, and so on of one group (the “people”) are “real,” and, as I argued in a different paper yesterday, the fundamental human right is to be a member of that group, with that ideology.

Out-groups don’t have human rights because they aren’t really human. Difference is dehumanizing.

Further, since rights are a commodity, and wealthy people are blessed and honored by God, then wealth should give a person access to more rights; they should be able to have greater buying power in the rights market.

What all this means is that people are willing to tolerate extraordinary injustice because they see it as a kind of justice. They don’t see disparate treatment by police, or deliberately discriminatory voting or housing policies as violating rights, because they don’t think poor people, political opponents, or any other out-groups have rights.

So, what I’m arguing is that we disagree about what specific public policies do in terms of rights because we disagree about who counts as a human deserving of rights. Doug Cloud has argued for shifting our attention to the term “rhetoric” in the phrase human rights rhetoric, and I think that’s astute.

Trying to argue with people assuming that they share our understanding of the distinction between rights and privileges, or they understand humans in the same we do, guarantees that we’ll get nowhere. I’m not certain that having the arguments we need to have will get us very far very fast, but it’s worth a try.

Is Biden responsible for high gas prices? The smartest non-“liberal” sources on the issue

As I’ve said elsewhere, demagoguery breaks a complicated issue with an array of policy options and explanations into two: one is narrowly defined, and everything else is the other. So, for the pro-GOP demagogic sphere, if you don’t support the current GOP, then you’re “liberal” which is, incoherently enough, the same as communist. (When I’m grumpy, I try to get the people who think democratic socialist, progressive, communist, and liberal are the same to explain Weimar Germany. They never do.) There are other demagogic enclaves out there, in which people insist you either completely endorse their agenda or you’re [whatever the extreme Other is], and they irritate me just as much, but they aren’t relevant to this post. So, I’ll stick with listing articles from non-“liberal” sources on the issue of Biden’s responsibility.

I have to admit that I didn’t find a smart, sourced argument that it’s all Biden’s fault. The best argument I found for blaming Biden was neither smart nor sourced, but it was better than a lot of others that were just argle bargle. And, really, that would be a hard argument to make. It’s useful to point out that gas prices have risen worldwide, and Biden is not actually President of the world. So, there’s no reasonable narrative that says it’s him alone. How would he make prices rise in Europe? There must be something else…it’ll come to me. Starts with a U, maybe, or supply issues?

Anyway, I’ve put these together so that, if you find yourself arguing with someone who says it’s all Biden, you can provide sources they’ll have a harder time deflecting.

So, let’s start with the notoriously liberal Journal of Petroleum Technology. It’s a complicated argument, and it’s really about natural gas. I will quote this (it’s important for something later): “A year ago, President Joe Biden and others were focused on priorities such as ending drilling on federally owned land. Now, the federal government is planning a lease sale for onshore drilling rights.”

There are several in Wall Street Journal. “Energy markets were already tight as the global economy rebounded from the pandemic, and gasoline prices have climbed recently as traders, shippers and financiers have shunned supplies of oil from Russia, which is the world’s second-largest exporter of crude oil after Saudi Arabia, according to the International Energy Agency.” There’s also this article of theirs (well worth a read) :
Pull quotes:

“Oil prices, already turbocharged by a rebounding economy after a pandemic-induced slowdown, were pushed even higher when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pulled some three million barrels of Russian oil a day from global supplies.”
“Gasoline prices have hit records as petroleum refiners that had cut back output as the economy slowed still haven’t ramped back up to pre-pandemic levels. The market has lost about one million barrels of daily petroleum-refining capacity since early 2020, when the U.S. was producing about 19 million barrels of refined petroleum a day.
Events in Ukraine caused oil prices to skyrocket, pouring gasoline on what was already a smoldering fire. Brent crude topped $130 a barrel in early March, and gasoline prices recently hit a record $4.331 a gallon, putting them up more than 15% from where they stood a month earlier, according to AAA. Prices have fallen slightly from that record, hitting $4.215 a gallon on Friday, despite the continuing loss of Russian oil.”

And what has Biden done? According to the notoriously liberal WSJ:

“President Biden has said his administration would release millions of barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which has a capacity of 727 million barrels. However, experts say that is unlikely to move the needle very much on the price of gasoline.
Some state and federal officials are also weighing state and federal gas-tax decreases to ease consumers’ pain at the pump. Business groups are pushing back on such moves, saying they could jeopardize infrastructure improvements.
The Biden administration also has held talks, or said it plans to do so, with major oil producing countries about potentially boosting production. Talks with Venezuela, the oil industry of which the U.S. sanctioned in 2019, met opposition from Republicans, as well as some Democrats.
Some Democrats, meanwhile, are pushing to suspend the federal gasoline tax, which amounts to 18 cents a gallon, for the rest of 2022.”

The free-market Economist doesn’t mention Biden. There’s one article from September that predicts problems, even without the war. More recent articles focus on Russia, such as this one.

The only one that tried to argue it is Biden is Heritage , which, seriously, has gone downhill. Not because I disagree with them (I disagree with all the sources I list) but because they stopped providing sources, and are dipping deep into just lying. This page, for instance, doesn’t cite any source for its claim. Its argument is that Biden is responsible for the high prices because he won’t “use all the energy sources we have”—in other words, there are high prices that even they say aren’t his fault. He’s to blame because he isn’t doing what would lower the prices he didn’t cause.

What should he do? Something that won’t immediately lower prices, and is unwise on other grounds.

This is argument by counter-factual, not necessarily a bad argument. But in this case, it is a bad argument, but bad faith. It engages in straw man, motivism, binary thinking, and non sequitur. The argument is: “Even now, with Americans struggling, they want to make it more expensive and difficult to explore for and produce oil, construct and operate pipelines, and access financing and investment. And that means they have to manipulate customer demand by discouraging gasoline use in the long run.”

For one thing, as mentioned above, Biden has eased up on drilling on public lands. What Biden has done is clearly explained in the WSJ article linked above and here. More important, allowing the exploration and production of oil on public lands, forcing people to accept pipelines, and…I don’t even know what the financing argument is—the article doesn’t say…will not result in an increase in oil for several years. So, this isn’t a solution for gas prices now. The whole drill now, drill everywhere argument is the equivalent of saying that we should spend every penny we have if someone in the family loses a job, which is risky at best. In any case, the point is that even the most anti-Biden argument implicitly admits it isn’t Biden, and he can’t solve it immediately. And that’s the best they’ve got. [1]

[1] They also like a heavily-edited Fox interview. Since they cut off what Granholm thinks is hilarious, I’m going to go with she made a reasonable argument.

Preface to Deliberating War

This is the latest version of the preface to the book I’m working on.

One semester, I was teaching Abrams v. US and Schenck v. US—two famous cases about criminalizing dissent in wartime—and I had a couple of students absolutely insistent that people should not be allowed to criticize a war “once boots hit the ground.” I pointed out that refusing to deliberate about a war we were in would mean we were guaranteed to have wars last longer than they needed, and therefore have troops die unnecessarily. They said it didn’t matter—what mattered that you could not criticize a war once people were risking their lives for it. To do so would be to dishonor them and their sacrifice.

My uncle was killed in the 1943 North Africa campaign. He successfully bombed a Nazi supply train, but his plane was downed in the resulting explosion–perhaps because he hadn’t been informed the train had munitions, perhaps because he was unable to pull the plane up fast enough since he’d been injured in the Battle of the Kasserine Pass. He was a hero to me.

Since the speculation was that a contributing factor to his death was an injury he’d gotten during the Kasserine Pass battle, at some point, I looked into it. Anyone familiar with the action knows what I found: “America’s first major battle against the Germans in World War Two would end in shame, disgrace and defeat—and Major-General Lloyd R. Fredendall would bear a great deal of the responsibility for that defeat” (Whiting 114). Histories of the battle have little or nothing good to say about Fredendall. He was “an appallingly inept commander” (Carr 28), whose leadership was “a tangled skein of misunderstanding, duplication of effort, overlapping responsibility, and consequential muddle” (Dear, Oxford Companion 644). His communications were often “incomprehensible,” and he became angry if asked to clarify (Blumenson 85). He “was utterly out of touch with his command […] feuded constantly with his subordinate commanders, and generally broke every known principle of leadership in the employment of his corps” (D’Este 24). He was “ill-informed and far from the scene” (Rutherford 121). Whiting says, “Critical of his superiors, Fredendall was outspoken about the defects of his subordinates, ponderous in action, overbearing in attitude and with a tendency to jump to conclusions—probably more often than not, the wrong ones.” (113) Major General Ernest N. Harmon, tasked by Eisenhower with assessing what went wrong in the battle, reported that Fredendall was “a physical and moral coward” (qtd. Atkinson 400). The book I read particularly noted his poor handling of the Army Air Corps, putting them in considerable and unnecessary danger (including getting fired on by American troops, Blumenson 81-2).

I was enraged.

At the author.

Not because I knew enough about the event to think that what the author was saying was untrue, but because I felt it shouldn’t be said.

I was immediately puzzled by my own rage. It would make sense for me to be outraged that Fredendall might have been an over-promoted coward whose incompetence may have contributed to my uncle’s death. It would make sense for me to be outraged if I believed that the author was being inaccurate or unfair to Fredendall. But, to be honest, neither of those was my first (or even third) reaction. I was outraged because someone was suggesting that my uncle’s death was the consequence of someone’s incompetence. And I felt strongly that that was not something that should be said. It took me a while to understand why I was more angry at someone arguing (even correctly) that his death might have been the consequence of military incompetence than I was at the incompetent who might have caused his death. I was having the same reaction as the students. My almost visceral response was that criticizing how the action was conducted dishonored my uncle because it seemed to say that his death was unnecessary, and therefore meaningless.

What I learned from my rage about the criticism of the Kasserine Pass action is that it is tremendously difficult to consider seriously that someone we love and admire might have died unnecessarily, as a consequence of bad decisions, bad leadership, or even for bad reasons. Yet, as I said to the student, if we can’t admit the bad decisions, bad leadership, or bad reasons, more people will die unnecessarily.

Eventually, of course, I worked around to realizing that some people are incompetent, some decisions are unforced errors, some wars are the consequence of political figures bungling or blustering or trying to stabilize a wobbly base or just having painted themselves into a corner, an irresponsible media, an easily-mobilized or distracted public, a culture of demagoguery, or various other not especially noble factors. Even in a just war (and I do think American intervention in WWII was just) there are unjust actions, bad decisions, incompetence, and failures of leadership, and, if we are to make the conduct of war more just and competent, we have to acknowledge the errors. But that my uncle’s death might have been the consequence of incompetence still hurts.

What I learned from my own reaction is that deliberation about a war is constrained by considerations of honor. I want my uncle honored. And it was hard for me to understand that honoring him is compatible with being willing to be critical about the conditions under which he died. We want our ancestors honored. That we want them honored shouldn’t make us unwilling to think carefully and honestly about how, why, or what for they died. The more we refuse to consider past deliberations critically the more we poison our ability to deliberate about the present, and the more likely it is that others will die.

My uncle was a hero. Fredendall bungled the Battle of the Kasserine Pass, in ways that might have contributed to my uncle’s death. Both of those things can be true at the same time. We have to live in a world in which we honor the military dead without thinking we are prohibited from being critical of the cause for which they fought, the people who led them, or the political discourse that caused them to go to war. Learning from mistakes gives those mistakes meaning.

This isn’t a book about military strategy, or military history; it’s about rhetoric. More specifically, this book is about the vexed relationship of political disagreement, deliberation, demagoguery, and war. And I don’t think we can figure out the right relationship without being willing to admit we’ve sometimes gotten it wrong.

We’re primed to reason badly when it comes to questions about war because the prospect of fighting activates so many cognitive biases, especially binary thinking. Under those circumstances, deliberation can easily be framed as opting for cowardly flight instead of courageous fight, as unnecessary at best and treasonous at worst. It’s precisely because disagreements about war are so triggering, so to speak, that we need to be deliberately deliberative. To say that we should deliberate reasonably before going to war is banal in the abstract, but oddly fraught in the moment, and this book uses several cases to explore why it is that we often evade deliberation even (or especially?) when the stakes are so high.

Many people believe it is counter-productive to deliberate about war before it starts, since they think deliberation might cause us to delay in an urgent situation, will weaken our will, enable cowardice to sneak in the door. But, like my students, many people believe we shouldn’t deliberate about war once it’s started because we shouldn’t have sent people to risk their lives if we’re uncertain that the risk is necessary—we owe them our full commitment, since that’s what they’re giving. My own experience shows the deep aversion to deliberating about a war even long after it’s over, since a critical assessment suggests that lives were wasted. In other words, we are averse to deliberating about war, ever.

But, if war and deliberation are incompatible, then war and democracy are incompatible, because democracy thrives on deliberation. This isn’t to say that every decision about a conflict should be thoroughly deliberated—that would be impossible and unwise—but that deliberation doesn’t weaken the will for war if there is a strong case to be made for that war. If advocates of war can’t make their case through reasonable policy argumentation, then they probably have a bad case, and it’s likely an unnecessary war. War triggers cognitive biases, and so deliberation is necessary to counter the effects of those biases—contrary to popular belief, we can’t simply will ourselves not to rely on biases; deliberating with people who disagree can, however, do some work in reducing the power of the biases. But, not all rhetors want us to reduce the power of cognitive biases. Because we are averse to deliberating about or during war, rhetors engaged in normal political disagreements who are unable or unwilling to advocate a policy rationally are tempted to claim that this isn’t normal politics; it’s war. If they can persuade their base that this situation is war, then they won’t be expected to deliberate. The cognitive biases triggered by war will motivate the audience to believe beyond and without reason, and some political leaders and media pundits want exactly that.

Rhetoric and war have a counterintuitively complicated relationship; after all, we don’t go to war because of what the situation is, but because of what we believe the situation to be—that is, the rhetoric about our situation. Being at war (or even believing ourselves to be at war), as I’ll emphasize in this book, often causes us to think differently about things; it persuades us. It also constrains our rhetoric in ways, such as how much we can be critical of the war or its conduct once boots are on the ground. Invoking war or its prospect can change how we argue, and rhetoric can be treated as a kind of war.
In this book, I’ll argue that the way we argue for a war (that is, the rhetoric) implies the conditions under which we can end it, how it will be conducted, what kind of war it will be, what kind of sacrifices (lives, resources, rights) will be expected on the home front, who and what our enemy is. The rhetoric we use might alienate, neutralize, or mobilize potential allies, gain sympathy and assistance from third parties, generate sympathy and assistance for our antagonist(s), or persuade third parties to remain neutral. It might unify a nation, thereby increasing support and morale, or frame the question in partisan terms, thereby ensuring divided support; it can enable us to deliberate our options, including long-term plans. It might make the military action to be diversionary, an attempt to deflect attention from a regime’s scandals or failures, thereby rousing cynicism rather than enthusiasm.

And war affects rhetoric. As mentioned above, when we’re seriously considering war, it’s easier to persuade people to imagine our complicated situation in binaries—pro-/anti-war, patriotic/traitorous, brave/cowardly, action/talk, confident/defeatist. And we can, I will argue, get into a cycle. Believing we are in danger of being attacked (or are already being attacked) increases in-group loyalty and extremism (see, for instance, Hoag et al.), and so we are less open to hearing nuanced explanations of our situation, holding in- and out-groups to the same standards, realizing that the world does not consist of an in-group and an out-group, or even paying attention to non in-group sources of information. If we imagine there are only two positions (pro- or anti-war) then we are likely to hear any criticism of our war plan—or even calls for deliberation–as “anti-war.” Thus, in the process of talking ourselves into a war, we can talk ourselves out of deliberating about that war, and out of deliberation at all. And then we have more war, less deliberately.