July 2022 - Patricia Roberts-Miller

Jesus doesn’t need liars

an exchange between me and gen apologetics

Genesis Apologetics (GA) is a group that advocates what’s called “Young Earth Creation.” That is, they argue that the earth was created thousands of years ago, and that a correct reading of Scripture requires that we believe that: “The genealogies in Genesis clearly map to Adam who was created by God out of dust just thousands of years ago, and they are even affirmed by the New Testament writers.”

They posted something called the “Seven Myths” , and, as you can see above, I objected. (They’ve since deleted the whole thread for that posting, but they’ve reposted the link.) They recommended another page, one which claims that “Over 50 scientific, peer-reviewed journal articles described 14 bio-organic materials in dinosaur bones that simply should not exist if the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago.”

They don’t cite any articles that show bio-organic materials that shouldn’t exist. They cite, as far as can tell, about five scientific studies, most of which are authored by Mary Schweitzer. And she says they misrepresent her work.

“Young-earth creationists also see Schweitzer’s work as revolutionary, but in an entirely different way. They first seized upon Schweitzer’s work after she wrote an article for the popular science magazine Earth in 1997 about possible red blood cells in her dinosaur specimens. Creation magazine claimed that Schweitzer’s research was “powerful testimony against the whole idea of dinosaurs living millions of years ago. It speaks volumes for the Bible’s account of a recent creation.”

This drives Schweitzer crazy. Geologists have established that the Hell Creek Formation, where B. rex was found, is 68 million years old, and so are the bones buried in it. She’s horrified that some Christians accuse her of hiding the true meaning of her data. “They treat you really bad,” she says. “They twist your words and they manipulate your data.””

In other words, her work does not support their claim. They’re being dishonest by suggesting it does.

Just to be clear: however you read Scripture is between you and God. You can, as does GA, jump among translations to get the reading that supports what you want to believe about Scripture, ignore all the passages that say you’re wrong (Paul said Scripture should be read allegorically), ignore all the many major figures in Christianity who didn’t and don’t read Scripture as does GA. You be you. But, if you want to impose this marginal reading of Scripture on students in schools by claiming it’s science, then suddenly the lies about the research (and Scripture) matter.

When I say this to individuals, they say, “They can’t be lying because they’re good people.” What that means is that they can’t be lying because I trust them. That’s how lying works. The most appalling, and un-Christian, lie is implicit—that their (incredibly cherry-picked and inconsistent) claims are things about which Scripture is “clear” (below I’ll mention the “great beasts” problem) . So, people feel that either they must believe what GA says, or they must reject Scripture as an authority.

Paul didn’t read Scripture literally; why should you?

I am really troubled by how many people I meet who were told, over and over, and so they believe that being Christian means believing, as GA says, that being a Christian requires that they believe their marginal, rigid, internally contradictory, ideologically driven cherry picking, and hermeneutically indefensible reading of Scripture. So, when they realize that much of what they have been told ranges from misleading to false, they think they can’t be Christian.

Honestly, I think that groups like GA create more atheists than Richard Dawkins ever could in his wildest dreams.

They create a falsely stark world of people who believe that Scripture is God’s Truth and Darwinists. There are three problems with that false binary. First, most people who believe that Scripture is God’s Truth don’t believe the claims that GA makes. Second, if what you’re saying is God’s Truth, you don’t have to be deceptive about what’s in Scripture (e.g., dinosaurs and “great beasts”—I’ll get to that). Third, Darwin didn’t invent evolution, but he proposed an explanation that made sense of what people were already observing. Evolutionary biology has evolved far beyond Darwin. Calling evolutionary biology Darwinism would be like calling Christianity “Origenism.”

As Christians, we would resent being characterized by what Origen said. He didn’t invent Christianity, and not all Christians believe everything he said. Origin of Species is not the Bible of evolutionary thinking. Scientists don’t have originary documents to which they refer deferentially.

I’m talking about Origen in order to make two points: there is not a world in which you are either a Christian or a Darwinist; when Christians characterize all believers in evolution as Darwinists we are doing something we would not want done unto us—that is, attributing to them beliefs they don’t have.

Here’s the bigger problem. GA claims that their claims are scientific, and supported by scientific studies. And, as indicated in the Schweitzer quote above, their position is not scientific and not supported by the five studies they cite, let alone the fifty the claim. I’ll just talk about the first three paragraphs of one page because otherwise this post would be way too long (these paragraphs are pretty indicative of how the whole post runs):

I’m not going to spend much time on their problematic Scriptural exegesis, but it’s worth considering. They claim that the Bible is “clear” except they jump around translations to get the reading they need. So “the Bible” isn’t “clear.”

I’ve asked, repeatedly, about their claim that Genesis 1’s mention of “great beasts” is proof of the existence of dinosaurs. As far as I can tell, the few translations that use that term are clear that those creatures are sea creatures.

But, unlike Genesis Apologetics, I’m open to correction on this. If they don’t correct me, then, as I suspect, they’re lying about Scripture. But, let’s go back to the third paragraph quoted above.

The most important claim has three parts: first, that there are bio-organic materials in dinosaur, and second, that these bio-organic materials should not exist, and that there are studies to support these two claims.

For the Genesis Apologetics argument to be true, all three claims have to be responsibly supported—that there are these materials, and that they shouldn’t exist, and that there are fifty peer-reviewed citations that support both of the previous claims. Just to drive home the point of how irresponsible their argument is, their claim is supported by “science” because “some studies” and “other studies” support [something? maybe the argument they’re making? maybe some part of it?]. That isn’t exactly support. That’s how some jerk next to you on an airplane argues. That’s a flunk first-year composition level of citation.

And they cite no studies that say what Schweitzer has found are proof that the standard narrative about evolution is wrong.

If you want to read Scripture in a way that can only be achieved by jumping around among translations, being dodgy about references, and deciding to ignore theologians whose Greek and Hebrew is probably better than yours, you be you.

Here’s the problem. If you take your personal and minority interpretation–even among Christians–reading, and try to make it the basis for public policy (what is taught in schools, what laws we as a public have), then, as someone claiming to be Christian, you should meet two standards. First, you should do unto others as you would do unto them. That is, you should enter the realm of policy argumentation, holding your opponents to the same standards of proof, rationality, civility, and so on as you hold yourself.

If you do that, which GA doesn’t, then this whole reading collapses. GA does not hold itself to the same standards of proof as it holds advocates of evolution. It does not treat them as it wants to be treated.

If you decide that it’s okay to hold your beliefs to different standards of proof than you hold believers in evolution (as GA does), then, someday, you’re going to have to look Jesus straight in the face and tell him that you decided what he very clearly told us to do didn’t apply to you. Good luck with that.

Second, let your yea be yea and your nay be nay. Christians should not be Machiavellians, deciding that dishonesty is okay if we do it because we have a higher truth, or we have a good cause.

Jesus doesn’t need liars on his side.

SCUM Manifesto and What’s Wrong with American Political Discourse

The SCUM Manifesto was written by Valerie Solanas in 1967. The first sentence pretty much sums up the whole piece, in terms of argument, argumentation, genre, and audience:

“Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex.“

At least as “argument” is taught in first year composition classes, that’s an argument. It isn’t argumentation, but a manifesto (which are rarely argumentation), oriented toward an audience open to considering men an out-group. She’s notorious for advocating violence against men, but that part of her manifesto is minimal. Most of it consists of a hyperbolic list of what’s wrong with men, much of which is simply flipping the tired accusations about women of that time, arguing they’re true of men (which is one reason some people find it funny). For instance, she insists that men are eaten up with guilt, shame, and fear about sex, jealous of women, and hating themselves. She goes on to argue that this jealousy and self-loathing lead to what we would now call “toxic masculinity.”

passage from solanas saying that men project weakness onto women

Solanas has two proposals. First is that women step out of the work force, off “the money system,” and leave men (62-3). These actions would to an immediate economic collapse. She admits that many women won’t take those actions (“nice, passive, accepting ‘cultivated,’ polite, dignified, subdued, dependent, scared, mindless, insecure, approval-seeking Daddy’s Girls” 64). So, her second proposal is that SCUM (“dominant, secure, self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, independent, proud, thrill-seeking, free-wheeling, arrogant” 64) become an “unwork” force–taking jobs, and doing them badly–engage in disruptive anarchy and destruction, take over all radio and TV, “bust up” het couples (65-6). SCUM will also “kill all men who are not in the Men’s Auxiliary of SCUM” (66). So, she isn’t in favor of killing all men (#notallmen). At moments, she seems to suggest a world without any men, in which all babies are female, and produced in laboratories.

So, despite being famous for advocating violence against men, even killing, that’s a minor part of the manifesto. Most of it is about what’s wrong with men, and most of her calls for action involve “the money system.” But, the call for violence is there, albeit in somewhat disconnected ways. But, is violence against men really what this text advocates? Is this text really an argument for violence against men? Is it hate speech?

It’s important to try to figure out if a text is likely to incite violence against some group, and so we often have that argument, but we tend to try to answer that question by deflecting from questions about the text and its impact to the author and their group identity (that is, in- or out-group). And that’s what’s wrong with so much current political discourse. It’s a mistake because it tends to makes texts nothing more than Rorschach tests–telling us more about the interpreter than it does about the text.

Some people take the manifesto at face value, and they see it as a man-hating, het-phobic call for violence against men; some people say this manifesto epitomizes feminism. Some people interpret it is a kind of literal hyperbole. What I mean is that they read it as hyperbolic (exaggerated) but also an accurate expression of Solanas’ personal and understandable (given her life experiences) rage, or perhaps hers and all women’s intermittent rage about sexism, and how sexism is systemic, pernicious, and persistent. Some people read it as satire, in the same tradition as Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” which has serious criticisms in its discussion, as does SCUM, but the call for eating babies is intended to shock people into more reasonable solutions. So, calling for hurting men is in the same category as eating Irish babies–not her real argument. Some people think it’s hilarious, and just a Lenny Bruce-kind of humor. It’s supposed to shock us into thinking about our tendency toward false essentializing of men and women. And some people think of it as a perhaps unintentionally genius satire on the genre of manifesto.

Every one of those interpretations is defensible, in the sense that it’s possible to find evidence to support the claims–not necessarily good evidence, and not necessarily logically connected, but evidence. The claim that it epitomizes feminism and the one that it was intended as satire are pretty much impossible to defend reasonably in light of intelligent opposition arguments, but they’re often directed at “in” audiences who don’t particularly want a reasonable argument (which means they’re much like the manifesto itself). All of the interpretations are, ultimately, about a moral (and important) question: is this an unethical, unreasonable, and harmful argument? Is this a responsible way for someone to argue in public?[1]

And we should ask that question about every major public statement. We should ask that about what politicians, pundits, influencers, and we say in the “public sphere,” ranging from what the President tweets to what we say on Instagram.[2]

Here’s what I want to argue in this post: the answer might be complicated. And it’s the word “harmful” that makes it complicated–because, I’ll argue, we don’t focus on “harmful” in terms of consequences; instead, we do so in terms of group membership, and that gets us into a mess. We should focus on harm, rather than whether we think they’re on our team.

Let’s go back to SCUM.

Obviously, the various interpretations mentioned above are incompatible, especially in terms of policy consequences—if it’s seriously calling for killing men, it’s hate speech; if it’s all a joke, then treating it as hate speech is singularly humorless, and Swift was engaged in hate speech (so satire is dead). So, how do we determine whether SCUM is actually, and not just hyperbolically, inciting violence against men? In other words, how do we determine the moral impact of texts? Note that I didn’t say the “morality of texts,” but the “moral impact”–they’re different. (I’ll get back to that.)

Here’s the problem. If we’re sympathetic to feminism, we’re likely to explain Solanas’ rhetoric as hyperbole or satire, and therefore not having a harmful impact at all. The less sympathetic we are to feminism, and the more that we think feminism is necessarily hostility to men, the more likely we are to interpret the text as a sincere call for violence against men and hate speech.

So, our interpretation of whether the text is hate speech or humor is likely (but not necessarily—I’ll get to that) strongly influenced by whether we empathize more with her as a woman and feminist (she’s in-group) or with the group she attacks (men, out-group).

Here I have to engage in what-is-not-actually-a-digression into the question of methods of interpretation. We often think of the “meaning” of the text as the message the author intends to send to an audience, and we think a good reader is one who correctly decodes that message. It’s the transmission model of communication. And, really, that’s a perfectly fine way to think about some parts of communication—we should try to figure out what someone is telling us.

It gets vexed, however, when we are thinking about the moral impact of a text, and that’s what the question of whether Solanas is inciting violence is all about. The problem is that, if we try to determine the impact of the text by decoding the author’s intention, we haven’t necessarily determined its impact (texts often have an impact not intended by the author). Instead, we’re likely to assess the moral impact of the text on the basis of whether we agree or disagree with the author. And that method will tempt us into being sloppy Machiavellians.

By sloppy Machiavellian, I mean the notion that the morality of an act or text is determined by intention–all means are morally neutral. We think that, if the author has moral intentions, it’s a moral text, and if they don’t, then it isn’t. Except, we don’t really think that. We don’t care whether the author meant well by their own lights, but by ours. Too often, what we mean when we say that the morality of a text is determined by the morality of the author’s intention is that in-group members (people who want what we want) write moral texts, and no one else does.

We do this equation of morality and intention because we tend to think about morality through the lens of Christian notions of sin. Christian notions of sin emphasize intention (legitimately, I think)–a person sins by doing something they know to be wrong, or by failing to do something they know they should have done. Sin is always within our ken.

Not all bad things, morally harmful things even, are usefully framed as sin, especially if we’re thinking about public policy and discourse. If we separate harm from sin, then we can think about times and ways that someone might do something harmful and/or immoral all the while thinking they were doing the right thing. They meant well. Meaning well and doing harm can take several forms, from doing something to a person they don’t want done but we think they want (or should want) to granting ourselves moral license because we’re on the side of good. We might make harmful mistakes, or have good intentions but bad information. Harm and sin aren’t identical.

If we separate sin from harm, we can talk and think more clearly and honestly about how people–including Christians who “meant well”– have so often ended up on the wrong side of right and wrong.

When you do the kind of research I do—what rhetoric people used to justify hanging Quakers, banning anyone who disagreed on fine points of Calvinist theology, engaging in massacres of Native Americans, prohibiting the freeing of enslaved people, supporting lynching, silencing legitimate dissent, appeasing or actively supporting Hitler, being Hitler, advocating race-based mass imprisonment—what you learn, very quickly, is that everyone thinks they’re justified in what they do. Everyone, including Hitler, believes they have good intentions. That we believe we are on the side of good doesn’t necessarily mean we are.

Reducing all questions of impact and morality to whether the actor had moral motives has the odd consequence that we explain exactly the same behavior (chasing a squirrel) as moral or immoral on the grounds of what motives we attribute to them. Chester chased the squirrel because he’s aggressive; Hubert chased the squirrel to protect his family. And, typically, we attribute good motives to in-group members (people we think of as “us”) and bad motives to out-group members (them). Solanas was engaged in hyperbole; Solanas wanted men killed. Our politicians are mistaken; their politicians lie (or, “our politicians lie because they have/they’re trying to get good things done” and “their politicians lie because they’re dishonest/greedy/corrupt”).

So, deciding that a text is moral to the extent that the author has good morals often gets us into a circular argument: that person is doing a good thing because they have good motives; I know they have good motives because they are one of us, and people like us have good motives; we have good motives because people like us are good, and good people have good motives.

I’m not saying we should ignore intention altogether; I’m saying that it shouldn’t be the criterion we use for thinking about the impact of public discourse. It might be tremendously important for determining whether someone has sinned, but that determination doesn’t happen to be on my list of job duties. It can also be important in personal relationships for thinking about what happens next. [3] But, if a public figure keeps meaning well and doing harm, that’s a problem regardless of their intentions.

If we think about impact, then we can look at what a text does, or can be plausibly read as likely to do to a majority of audience members. As it happens, those criteria can be assessed straightforwardly when it comes to SCUM: there has never been an incident when a few thousand women committed violence against men, saying they believed they were doing what Solanas wanted, or that they were inspired by her.

Whether a text incites a group to violence depends on the power and authority of the author (the extent to which the author has a base that will do what the author advocates), the extent to which inciting violence is one of several plausible interpretations, the size and makeup of the audience (is there a large audience primed for violence), the target of the violence (does the text reinforce and rely on the audience’s pre-existing belief that the target is a group or member of a group against whom violence is always justified), and a context of legitimation (this violence is framed as legitimate by the in-group). While one of several defensible interpretations of SCUM is that Solanas is advocating violence against men, none of the other characteristics apply. She had little or no power and an outlier argument that readers were (and are) unlikely to read anywhere else, let alone as a dominant narrative for a large community.

I should say that I don’t like the book. I don’t know whether or not Solanas was seriously calling for violence against men–I think she was a troubled and tragic person who may not have been entirely clear about what she wanted. I don’t think it’s funny; I think it’s painful to read. I can understand why some people would find it funny, and I can see it as a brilliant parody of manifestos (a genre I don’t much like). I’m not saying either of those is a bad reading–they just aren’t mine.

The SCUM manifesto is not responsible public discourse–there’s a sense in which hyperbole and satire often aren’t–but that doesn’t necessarily mean it has an immoral impact. And, again, not all public discourse has to be responsible.

Imagine that there had been an incident when a few thousand women felt inspired by SCUM to attack violently a gathering of men, and they said they thought she wanted them to do so. And imagine that people who liked her said that she wasn’t responsible for that behavior because what she said was satire, hyperbole, well-intended, and so on, although she had written something that thousands of people misunderstood. But, if her manifesto did result in a mass of people engaging in violence, then Solanas would need to take responsibility for that impact, as quickly as possible, and try to stop it. The longer she took to clarify her intention, the more irresponsible she was. Even (especially) if she didn’t intend the violence, it would be tragically irresponsible were she not absolutely clear about her intention as soon as the violence started.

If a person might trigger a violent attack they didn’t intend, they’re rhetorically irresponsible. If that attack happens, and they don’t immediately try to clarify their intention, they wanted the attack, didn’t care if it happened, or are outrageously irresponsible. If a few thousand women attack a gathering of men, believing they were doing what Solanas wanted, and a defender said it wasn’t her responsibility because her text was ambiguous, they’re saying she’s irresponsible. The ambiguity of her intention coupled with her audience’s response might be a reason she shouldn’t be prosecuted, but it would also be a reason she shouldn’t be trusted in a position of power.

(Jose Luis Magana / Associated Press) https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-01-07/capitol-violence-dc-riots-how-to-explain-to-kids

[1] By “responsible way to argue” (or “responsible public discourse”) I don’t mean humorless, data-heavy, or anything especially complicated. I just mean discourse for which they take responsibility. So, they try to be honest and accurate and fair to the opposition, and they own up to what their intentions are (see, I said the issue of intentions matters–it just isn’t the only or most important issue).

[2] I don’t think everyone always has to behave responsibly in public discourse–that would be a very boring world–but because we should be wary of trusting the judgment of people who rarely are. We might take great pleasure in what they say and write, retweeting, reposting, sharing, rereading, but we wouldn’t give them the keys to the castle.

[2] It’s also important in personal relations. But, after a while, if a person keeps hurting you or people you love, you’re going to stop caring about whether they meant to, and worry more about how to protect yourself and others.

Deliberation v. Radical Action

We’re at a point when we have clear evidence that the previous President lost reelection, knew he lost reelection, and came up with various plans whereby he could break the law and stay in power. When those didn’t work, he deliberately incited an insurrection that he was hoping would enable him to stay President. The wife of a SCOTUS justice was actively involved in that insurrection. The previous GOP-dominated Senate violated democratic norms by refusing to hold hearings to name a justice, claiming a principle they promptly violated when it would benefit them. Two SCOTUS justices lied under oath, and the highly factional GOP justices are openly intending to roll back constitutional protections for practices that violate their (very narrow) religion.

A lot of people are furious about this. Including me. And I’m finding myself reading a lot of social media memes and posts about how “The GOP is the Uvalde shooter, and Dems are the Uvalde police,” “Dems bring a knife to a gun fight, “Dems have done nothing to stop this from happening, and now they’re asking for money to continue to do nothing more.” The refrain is that there is an obvious course of action that Dems could have done for the last fifty years, and instead dithered. The people sharing these memes often say that they are so frustrated with our political situation that they’re done with deliberation, civility, peaceful protests, taking the high ground, and normal politics (as though those are all the same thing), since it isn’t working, and they want radical action.

That reaction is simultaneously sensible and mistaken. Since 2003, I’ve been worried about our already factional and fraught political culture sliding into actively destroying democracy, so I share the sense of urgency. But we haven’t exhausted the effectiveness of deliberation–we haven’t been able to engage in it for decades. And that’s what this post is about.

I’m going to try to summarize what I think the situation is and what to do about, a project that also involves explaining why I think the above reaction is both sensible and mistaken. It’s going to be cogent to the point of cryptic (I’m actually trying to write a book about it), and so it’s easy for me to express myself badly and/or for various reasons to be understood as making an argument I’m not making. So, bear with me, as I’m going to begin by listing many of the things I’m not arguing.

I’m not saying that “both sides” are just as bad, or endorsing any way of describing our policy options as a binary (or continuum) of the GOP (synonymous with “conservative”) and the Dems (synonymous with the DNC and “liberal”).

I’m not saying that we need to be more compassionate toward people who support the current GOP agenda and behavior, engage in a more conciliatory rhetoric with them, be more understanding of their concerns, try to win them over through empathy, or in any other way endorsing the fantasy that we just need to be “nicer.”

I’m not saying that we need to be patient and trust in the system, look on the bright side, and just get out and vote, or endorsing any other version of Micawberism.

I’m not saying that the Dems (or leftists, or liberals, or critics of the GOP) have ignored the obvious course of action we should have pursued, and I know what it is, or in any way endorsing any other version of anti-pluralism.

I am advocating that we try to work toward policy discourse that is deliberative and pluralist. But, by deliberation, I do not mean a slow, decorous process, in which people civilly examine all the possible data from all possible perspectives, allowing everyone to “have their say” and treating all opinions as equally valid. Discussing complicated issues that way is rarely deliberative (it’s usually very exclusive), and even more rarely useful. It’s also a lively glimpse of Hell to be stuck in an organization that treats deliberation that way.

By deliberation, I mean a process of decision-making that is inclusive, participants are open to persuasion (they can identify the conditions under which they would change their minds), all participants are held to the same rules of “logic,” “evidence,” and so on, there is an attempt to account for common cognitive biases, arguments are internally consistent, and people genuinely engage with the best arguments from other perspectives. It can be vehement (anyone who knows me knows that I go for the jugular), passionate, outraged, rude; it doesn’t have to fit reductive notions of “rationality” (but whatever counts as “rational” for one group counts as “rational” for the other groups).

It’s important for me to say that I don’t think all public and political discourse should be deliberative—there’s plenty of room for epideictic, in the form of marches, speeches, memes, jokes, stories. There should be expressive discourse too. In fact, I don’t even think the majority of our political discourse should be deliberative, but a lot should be. And right now we have pretty much none, anywhere on the political spectrum. So, one way that people are mistaken in saying that they’re done with deliberation, is that they aren’t done, because we haven’t engaged in it for decades.

I’m also in favor of a pluralist model of community. I don’t mean the voting mechanisms often called “pluralist” (I’m agnostic about them) but the first part of the Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies definition, that it is a perspective of politics which assumes “that society is divided into a broad variety of partly overlapping social groups with different ideas and interests. Within pluralism diversity is seen as a strength rather than a weakness” (499, emphasis added). Anti-pluralist models of community, disagreement, and politics assume that diversity of opinion weakens us because there is one right policy (ideology, belief, argument, language), and it’s the one we need to follow. And everyone who has a different policy (and so on) is a bad person who should be silenced.

Basically, there are three parts to the argument I want to make. As I said, although this is long, it’s a truncated version. If folks do want more explanation of some part, let me know.

Part I. GOP re-fashioning of Cold War rhetorical strategies. Cold War rhetoric was a reapplication of a specific strain in white fundagelical discourse that was eschatalogical and apocalyptic. That is said that we are in an absolute war between two groups (one Good and one Evil) that is simultaneously risky and predetermined. Paradoxically, the Good group, because it is Good, is justified in anything it does; it claims and is given moral, rhetorical, and political license. And it can therefore behave exactly like the out-group, doings things for which the out-group is condemned, and still claim the moral high-ground (e.g., misrepresent the opposition, lie, try to steal an election). The rhetoric for exterminating Native Americans had exactly this structure–the extermination was “justified” because it’s what they would do to us. There was often a projection of evil (sometimes explicitly insisting the out-group was in league with Satan). Cold War rhetoric simply changed the characters in this narrative, saying we could engage in anti-democratic actions, and even undermine democracies, in order to save democracy, while condemning the USSR for being anti-democratic.

Claiming it’s a zero-sum battle between Good and Evil, and claiming moral license, are characteristics of demagoguery, and this reframing of a political conflict as an eschatalogical and apocalyptic war is a kind of demagoguery. It is a particularly destructive kind for two reasons. First, because this war is eschatological (meaning it is the conflict toward which all history has been heading), there are no neutrals. People are either fanatically committed to our side, or they are Evil (perhaps unwittingly, but still Evil). Thus, this is always a war of extermination of everyone who doesn’t fanatically agree with us. Second, because this is a war of ideologies (and there are only two ideologies), then including other points of view, valuing difference, wanting to take time to consider options—all of those things are truckling with Satan. So, a variation on “our” ideology, or criticism of anything we’re doing, let alone doing something else, are all attempts to exterminate “us.”

What happens when a community believes it is in a war of extermination, and, if it loses, it will be exterminated, is that norms of fairness, legality, honesty, and reason seem to be unimportant if not actively dangerous. (Think about how many action movies have a moment when the hero breaks all the rules to save his family, country, world.) So, what might start as a morally unconstrained war with another nation because of its ideology (the USSR) necessarily becomes a morally unconstrained political war with other members of our own nation who dissent from or criticize our actions during that war (as happened with Martin Luther King Jr). We start down a path of increasing purification.

This shift to seeing normal political disagreement (such as people disagreeing as to whether this war is a good idea) as an eschatological and apocalyptic war began in the 60s, with how critics of Vietnam were treated (whether “liberal” like Martin Luther King, Jr. or “conservative” like Hans Morgenthau). It became common in pro-GOP political discourse and propaganda in the 90s, with people like Newt Gingrich or Rush Limbaugh engaging in and advocating it. As this kind of demagoguery became more normalized among pro-GOP pundits, politicians, and voters, any attempt at even pretending to engage in deliberation evaporated. This was most striking when GOP candidates didn’t even bother putting forward policy statements in which their policies were rationally argued (the most extreme being Trump in 2016).

So, what began as a foreign war to “contain” communism quickly became a domestic war of purification–exterminating “fifth columnists,” with “fifth columnists” increasingly broadly defined. In the last twenty years, the notion of a traitor to the cause has become so broadly defined, that it’s been a war of purification within the GOP. Normal dissent and disagreement over policies (intra- and inter-party) are treated as battles in that larger war of extermination. If disagreement is treason, then deliberation is impossible, and so is democracy. The GOP is at war with democracy, openly striving for competitive authoritarianism.

Both deliberation and normal politics require that the majority of political parties and actors are engaged in deliberating with one another and holding themselves to democratic norms. And the majority of pro-GOP media, pundits, voters, and candidates have done neither for decades. Thus, critics and opponents of the GOP aren’t “done with deliberation” or “normal politics” because we haven’t, as a political culture, been able to engage in them.

The best way out of this mess is for GOP voters to insist on deliberation and normal politics. But, as any of us who have been trying to deliberate (or argue) with Trump supporters know, that’s unlikely. So, many of the critics and opponents of the GOP say that we should fight fire with fire—that is, if it’s war, let’s win it.

Part II. Kinds of war. And that raises the second point: what kind of war is it? I find the 19th century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz helpful on this point. He argued that most wars have political objectives, and so they can be ended when that objective has been achieved—gaining territory (US war with Mexico), getting or protecting access to a resource (many of Queen Victoria’s “little wars”), enforcing an agreement (Napoleon’s invasion of Russia), secession or independence (US Revolution), and so on. The other kind of war, “absolute” war, is intended to “destroy the adversary, to eliminate his existence as a State” (qtd in Clausewitz, A Very Short Introduction 17). Absolute war has the goal of ensuring that the opponent can never again be a threat, and so it requires, if not physical extermination, then political extermination—the complete destruction of political power.

If we assume that our political landscape is usefully mapped the way that people used to map the “free v. communist” world—that is, if we see politics as a zero-sum battle between two ideologies—then we’re necessarily imagining absolute war. Since that’s how pro-GOP pundits have been describing politics since the 90s (not just war, but an absolute war between “conservatives” and “liberals”), it makes sense that they would describe their goal as reduction of “Democrats” (which means everyone not fanatically pro-GOP) to a powerless party that wins a few elections in a few places. Political scientists call that kind of government “competitive authoritarianism,” and that is, for instance, what Dinesh D’Souza argues for in the unintentionally ironically titled The Big Lie.

The temptation is to decide that, since the GOP has more or less already declared war, and used that declaration of war to gain moral, rhetorical, and political license from its base, then we should do the same. And, so, we should help the GOP destroy democracy in the name of saving it. That strategy didn’t work particularly well in Vietnam—we never did actually save a village by destroying it—and it doesn’t work with democracy.

I’m not arguing that we should just pretend this isn’t happening, and engage in normal politics. That would be like playing tennis with someone, and holding ourselves to regulation tennis rules, when they refuse to acknowledge any faults, refuse to play if it’s our serve, and lie about the score. And they justify their behavior on the grounds that we would do the same if we could, we’re terrible people, they’re on God’s side, no one who plays against them deserves to win, and we probably already did all that.

So, if it isn’t normal politics, is it war? I’m not sure, but I am sure that, if we’re talking war, we need to talk about what kind of war it is. Because here’s the danger: if we decide that it’s war, and we assume that means an absolute war of extermination, and so we are justified in declaring us free from all democratic norms and constraints, who is “we”? And who is exterminated?

The US deciding that it was in an ideological zero-sum war of extermination with the USSR led to it treating its own citizens as enemies, and silencing legitimate dissent. The GOP persuading its base that they were in a similar war led to, first, it declaring Democrats to be traitors, then declaring anyone in the GOP who wanted dissent and deliberation to be the enemy, then anyone not fanatically committed to Trump being the enemy. The GOP is in a Stalinesque purge, essentially an internal war, and the pro-Trump faction is winning. That isn’t good for anyone.

So, who is “we”? Is it everyone who is critical of the current GOP regardless of political affiliation? Do we determine it by practice (that is, only people who reliably vote Dem), ideology (if so, what beliefs?), people who might vote Dem if approached in the right way? Who will decide who really counts as a Dem, and whose views can be dismissed as treason?

If we decide that we’re in an absolute war of two ideologies, then we have to have a pure community with one ideology. And so now we’re anti-pluralist. We’ll end up saying that there is one right policy (ideology, belief, argument, language), and it’s the one we need to follow, and everyone who has a different policy (and so on) is a bad person who should be silenced. I think we’ll end up yelling “SPLITTER!!!” at each other rather than winning elections.

Or, maybe, we could decide it isn’t an absolute war of extermination, and then we don’t have to decide who gets silenced and purged.

Part III. Obvious Politics. When people are frightened, having recently had a big failure or setback, and the situation is uncertain, there is a natural impulse to believe the solution is a more unified in-group; that is, to believe we need to purify it of dissent and doubt. (Much of this research is summarized and cited in Hoagg’s Extremism and the Politics of Uncertainty.) The greater the threat, the more that we are likely to believe that unity is necessary, as is action. If we fall for the false binary of action v. deliberation, then we’re likely to become authoritarian in our decision-making process, refusing to compromise, negotiate, or deliberate with each other.

Because the most frightening kind of tragedy is the one that we could have caused, or that couldn’t have been prevented, we are tempted to believe that this tragedy came about because people didn’t do the obviously right thing. Believing that every problem has an obvious solution, and tragedies only happen because people in power do something that is obviously wrong and refuse to do what is obviously right (because they’re lazy, corrupt, self-serving) is self-serving, anti-deliberative, anti-pluralist, and wrong.

People are suggesting a lot of policies for dealing with the very real threat that Trump and the current GOP present for democracy, and arguing vehemently and passionately for them, and that’s great. But it isn’t great if we do so assuming that the policy we want is the only defensible one, that there are no arguments against those policies or for other ones—that is, if we are anti-pluralist. If we deliberate well, none of us will get what we think is the best policy. Deliberation can’t be oriented toward finding the One Right Policy without ceasing to become deliberation and instead becoming some purging of the unworthies. It seems to me that deliberation involves trying to identify the policies and arguments that are good enough.

If our goal is to get the GOP to go back to behaving like a responsible political party, engaged in normal political discourse and behavior, then we have to make sure their current strategy doesn’t win elections. I don’t see how our (their critics and opponents) engaging in their strategy will do that. I do think that the most effective strategy is probably some version of creating a coalition—that’s what’s worked in the past. But creating a coalition is hard because it means that we compromise with each other on policies.

My preference is that we should talk policy, but I might be wrong. One way to make an effective coalition is to agree on a policy agenda that ensures everyone gets something, although no one gets exactly what they wanted, and no one gets everything. That kind of compromise means that everyone will hate something on the final slate of policies. My concern is that that kind of specific discussion of policy goals is throwing something low and slow over the plate for pro-GOP ads– “Why should you pay for some kid to get a college degree in basket weaving?” “Why should you pay so some lib can drive an electric car?” All they’d have to do is show that one policy is something a voter might hate.

You may have noticed that I haven’t been using the term “conservative” for pro-GOP, and I haven’t assumed that everyone who is not “pro-GOP” is Dem. That isn’t because I think there’s a continuum (there isn’t—that’s just as false as the binary), but because I think the first mistake—and the one that enables the pro-GOP claim that “the libs” are at war with us, and so we’re justified in throwing off the shackles of moral norms—is thinking of our politics as a binary of two groups. It’s false. I’ve talked with more than one self-identified lefty who wanted no restrictions on the sale of guns of any kind, on the grounds that third-world revolutionaries needed all the weapons. If our policy commitments can be described as a binary or continuum of identity, and advocating gun control is a characteristic of “the left,” where do those people fit? I know self-identified “conservatives” who want easy access to birth control and safe abortions–where are they?

That binary/continuum model of our political world assumes that our disagreements with one another are all on a single line, so it’s assuming what’s at stake—that we have a conflict of identity. If we make that mistake, and see the war as between two implacably hostile identities, then we can never have a strategic war about specific achievable policy goals. In fact, if we argue about policy, we’ve got a lot of common ground with people all over the political spectrum, as well as disagreement. Immigration policies, bail reform, decriminalizing addiction, access to health insurance, restrictions on gun ownership—all of these issues don’t actually break neatly into a binary or continuum of identity.

And that’s why I keep coming back to the question of what kind of war. People appalled at what the GOP is currently doing do not have the same ideology or policy agenda. We disagree with each other, passionately and sincerely, and not because everyone except me (or you) is a stooge of some corrupt entity, not really thinking things through, a milquetoast or irresponsible firebrand. We disagree with one another because politics is uncertain, multi-causal, ambiguous, and we really have different interests. If the people critical of the GOP and what it’s doing decide that the solution is for us to be a purer group more radically committed to destroying democratic norms in service of the one course of action that is obviously right, then, at best, we’ll destroy democracy.

And I think we’ll lose even more elections. For one thing, people likely to vote Democrat don’t particularly value in-group loyalty, as both history and Jonathan Haidt suggest, and are unlikely to be motivated by war rhetoric. Non-violent protests (which aren’t necessarily civil at all) tend to be more effective than violent protests or rioting, and that’s a datapoint (for more on that see Chenoweth Why Civil Resistance Works). I also can’t help but note that wars tend to be won by the group with the largest war chest, and the GOP has a lot of billionaires.

When we’re frightened, we want a clear course of action, and I haven’t provided one, and I won’t. That would be a contradiction of everything I’m saying. There have been people who have been predicting this outcome—someone like Trump, a SCOTUS like this, a GOP that would endorse insurrection–for years. This isn’t new. The one thing about which I’m sure is that, at times when a nation was threatened with an authoritarian, anti-democratic, anti-pluralist party and government who clearly indicated they would support a forcible coup in order to gain or stay in power, the more their opponents refused to build a coalition because they instead insisted on in-group purity, the more likely that democracy was over.

At this point, democratic deliberation is radical action.