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.