This explanation begins, as many of my explanations do, with Chester Burnett, aka, “Howlin’ Wolf.” He was an extraordinary blues singer, and a gifted guitarist. One of the enraging aspects of white musicians’ appropriation of blues songs, melodies, riffs, and so on was that so many of them did nothing to ensure that the artists they were plagiarizing got any credit, let alone money (*cough* *cough* Led Zeppelin). Some, however, leveraged their fame to draw attention to the artists whom they admired. And that’s what happened in the “London Sessions.”
Eric Clapton, Charlie Watts, Steve Winwood, and Bill Wyman played with Howlin’ Wolf and his long-time guitarist Hubert Sumlin. For the most part, Wolf didn’t play guitar on the album cuts, but he’d show them how he played the piece.
On the album version, there is a cut called “Little Red Rooster, false start.” Wolf is showing how the guitar for “Little Red Rooster” is supposed to work, and someone, probably Eric Clapton, says he wants Wolf to play along with them because he isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do. “If you played with us, then we’d able to follow you better,” he says, going on to add, “I doubt if I can do it without you playing along.” Wolf says, and I quote, “Aw, c’mon, you ain’t got nothin’ to do but count it off.” And then he gives simple instructions about how to do what he’s doing.
The unintentional irony is that his simple instructions don’t match what he actually does. The instructions are simple, but he does something much more complicated. It might seem simple to him because he’s been playing that way for years, and it’s clearly in the realm of intuition. Perhaps he’s describing what he used to do, or how he thinks about what he’s doing, but it isn’t what he’s doing.
Perhaps Clapton just wanted Wolf on the recording, and so said he needed to follow. But it’s also possible that he genuinely wanted to follow because Wolf was doing something complicated and possibly new. Wolf is working with seasoned guitarists—they aren’t new to the blues, let alone to guitar playing—but it’s possible they’re new to the specific thing he’s doing.
It’s in my signature to remind me about advice. And I think it’s something we should all remember when giving advice.
One of the things about writing a dissertation, academic article, first book, or second book for the first time is that the people doing it are good writers.[1] They’re very accomplished at academic writing. After all, they are faced with writing a dissertation, or first book, or second book because they wrote well enough to get them to that somewhat new challenge. But they are new to this very specific thing they’re now trying to do.
Write for one hour every day, write from four to six a.m., never play music, always play music, never research while you write, write a rigid outline before your start, never outline…and so on aren’t exactly bad pieces of advice, but, like Wolf’s “You just count it off” and “You always stop at the top,” it’s simpler than what we actually do. And I think it’s useful to keep that in mind.
[1] Writing a second book is surprisingly different from writing a first one. I don’t know why.
(Jose Luis Magana / Associated Press)
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-01-07/capitol-violence-dc-riots-how-to-explain-to-kids
I’ve been worried about another civil war since 2003. I now believe that the GOP is dominated by people who actively want one, because they think they’ll win.
That probably sounds hyperbolic to people, so I’ll go through the longer version of how I got here.
The process of publishing a scholarly book in the humanities is (unnecessarily) slow. In 2003, I finished the book that would be published as Deliberate Conflict. It took another two years for the book to come out because of how slow academic publishing is, and it sat, finished, for quite a while. That book argues for the value of agonism, and I implicitly endorsed the narrative that the teaching of rhetoric made a bad shift when it went from being about debate to belletristic appreciation and/or expressive writing. Like a lot of others, I believed it led to problems in public discourse. In 2003 or so, iirc, a graduate student in a seminar asked, “Well, if things were so much better when the teaching of rhetoric was about debate, what about the controversy over slavery?”
So, I started looking into it. At that time, I had a smart, accomplished, rhetoric friend who got all their information from Rush Limbaugh, and it was odd to me that this really smart and very good person could be so wrong about basic facts. One of our first interactions was his claiming as a fact something about power plants in California that was simply wrong; since The Economist had recently had an article about the issue, I pointed out that he was wrong. He said, “Where did you get that? From [some lefty demagogue]?” I said, “The Economist.” He said, “The London Economist?” emphasizing London. He was shocked that I would read something non-lefty. (It’s liberal in the British sense, not American.) Clearly, he couldn’t imagine that anyone would read things with which they disgreed. He just relied on Limbaugh.
We had a lot of interactions like that. He’d repeat as a fact something he’d heard from Limbaugh that was completely false. I’d email him the actual clip from a speech, or studies from “conservative” sites, showing he was wrong. He’d admit he was wrong on that point, sometimes, but never stop relying on Limbaugh. The most striking was when he said that Obama claimed to have solved global warming, and I sent him the clip showing that Obama hadn’t said that at all. He emailed back, “Well, he’s still arrogant.”
This is a man who voted for George Bush, probably the most arrogant President until Trump.
This colleague was (and is) a good and smart person. He really tried to be fair in his dealings with colleagues and with the department; he worked to make the faculty more diverse; he gave good grades to students with whom he disagreed politically. But, when it came to his thinking about politics, it’s as though a switch flipped, and he became a person who was more engaged in believing than thinking. He believed what Limbaugh told him no matter how many times people like me (and I know there were several) pointed out to him that Limbaugh was lying.
2003 was a moment when the most arrogant President until Trump was deliberately lying to the US about Iraq. Even The Economist (which supported invasion of Iraq) said that the best case the Bush Administration could make—Powell’s speech to the UN—had some weak points. In fact, it was a very weak case, as could be seen at the time. But media, including mainstream media, presented Powell’s speech as though he had made his case. Instead of saying “Powell said” or “Powell claimed,” they’d say, “Powell showed.” Verbs matter.
There were so many problems with the case for invasion, but advocates of invasion didn’t see them because people lived in informational enclaves. People who relied on Fox, Limbaugh, and various other sources literally never saw anything that even mentioned the weaknesses in the Bush Administration case. Many people lived in a world of shared emails that referred authoritatively to events that never happened, and urban legends about events that were about to happen that never did. They thought they were getting “objective” information, but they were in a partisan bubble. I found it impossible to argue with them because their whole case was grounded in claims and data they thought were true only because they’d been repeated so much. So, their beliefs weren’t grounded in anything open to disagreement.
Around that same time, I had to come up with a lower-division seminar writing course, and, given how things were, I decided to teach a course on demagoguery.
Back to the graduate student’s question. Because of that question, I had begun reading about the slavery debate, and pretty quickly what I found was that the dominant narrative—the Civil War happened because of fanaticism on both sides—was indefensible.
And they were able to do so because various shifts meant that people were living in partisan informational enclaves (specifically cheap printing and improved mail service). Media repeated and promoted reports of events that never actually happened—the AAS pamphlet mailing, the Murrell plot, poisonings, abolitionist conspiracies, and so many other urban legends.
Since I was teaching a course on demagoguery, and I was drifting around the internet (as I intermittently have for years), as well as reading pro-GOP sources, I got worried.[1] Our current media culture looked a lot like the antebellum media culture—one in which deliberation was actively dismissed as unnecessary and often actively demonized. People could inhabit a media enclave and never see any of the information that might complicate what they were being told.
In the 1830s, the slaver states and politicians declared that the situation was one of existential threat—the vast conspiracy of abolitionists were determined to destroy Southern (aka, slaver) civilization. The demagoguery of pro-slavery media insisted that, if any President were elected who was not actively pro-slavery, the Federal Government would abolish slavery. Pro-slavery political figures enacted a gag rule in Congress–silencing any criticism of slavery–and many started advocating secession. Like the Iraq invasion, this was was advocated as preemptive when it was actually preventive (that matters, and I’ll come back to it). When Lincoln was elected, the demagoguery was comparable to what happened when Obama was elected. The difference was that, when Lincoln was elected, slaver states began seceding.
Buchanan tried to negotiate with them, as did Lincoln. But the slaver states wanted war, and nothing could have stopped them from getting their war. That’s important.You can’t appease people who are determined on war.
From the 1830s on, there were a lot of people in and out of the slaver states that were engaged in what scholars in International Relations call “defensive avoidance“–they didn’t like any of their options, so they did nothing, and hoped it would solve itself. There were people who didn’t own slaves, objected to slavery in their area (often for racist reasons), but who didn’t really care about what “the South” did, since they thought it didn’t affect them, and so didn’t want to do anything to “provoke” slavers. Some people really objected to slavery, and especially the “Slave Power”—the way that slavers, although a numerical minority, could silence criticism of slavery, force “free” states to institute proslavery “black codes,” and enable the enslavement of free people through the Fugitive Slave Law. But even some of people who resented the Slave Power were hesitant to “provoke” slavers.
And that’s interesting. There were violent anti-slavery actions, ranging from Bloody Kansas to John Brown’s raid, but there was no public discussion about the need to keep from provoking abolitionists. And, really, that’s how concern about “provoking” violence works–people worry about “provoking” authoritarians, but no one worries about policies that might “provoke” other groups. Violent protests help authoritarians, whether the protests are pro- or anti-authoritarian.
Another form of defensive avoidance was to declare that “both sides are just as bad.” People who just wanted to avoid war thereby enabled and ensured one. Again: it is pointless to try to placate people who are determined to use violence to get what they want. You aren’t preventing violence, but just delaying it.
The slaver states always had the pretense of being democratic, as did the segregationist states (which weren’t just in the “South”), but it was a democracy of the faithful. Like the USSR or GDR, which also claimed to be democracies, it was a democracy of people who remained within a limited realm of disagreement. It was “law and order” only insofar as the law wasn’t applied equally. It was the notion of justice that Plato famously criticized: justice is helping my friends and hurting my enemies. Jesus also criticized that notion of justice, but neither slavers nor segregationists cared very much about Jesus.
Nor does the current GOP. The GOP has gone full authoritarian and anti-democratic; “law and order” doesn’t mean holding everyone equally to the law (why did Clinton have to testify before Congress, but not any of Trump’s appointees?), but of using the power of the law to protect the in-group and punish everyone else. And they’re justifying their exempting themselves from following democratic norms and the law on the grounds that this is war–so, like Bush, and like the slavers, they’re engaged in preventive war (trying to keep Democrats from gaining power) while claiming it’s a preemptive (Democrats are about to kick down your doors and take your guns).
Slaver states were determined to get a war in order to have a nation purely and completely committed to slavery. After about 1850, there was probably no way to stop them from starting that war. What could have been different, and what might have prevented a Civil War was if the various people who didn’t support slavery, and didn’t want a war for it, had been more openly committed in their opposition to slavery. There was no way to placate slavers. In the antebellum period, there were a lot of political figures whom the proslavery media and rhetors called “doughfaces.” They were political figures whom the proslavery media and rhetors could force to say anything they wanted.
The doughfaces were mostly out for their own political careers, but, like all careerists, they might have told themselves it was for the greater good. They could have prevented the war. They didn’t. The current doughfaces, who are going along with what they know to be lies about the 2020 election, need to stop thinking about their careers and think about democracy.
We are in a situation in which Trump has already once tried to incite his base to violence in order to force a coup. He almost succeeded. The GOP has decided to back his play, but in ways that aren’t quite as crude—they’re moving to allow state legislatures to assign electoral candidates different from how the popular vote would suggest, for instance, or find ways to inhibit or disempower non-GOP voters. People who care about democracy need to stop that–regardless of your political party.
There is nothing that will stop Trump or his supporters from violence. Nothing. That’s their plan. So, there is no reason to keep from doing the right thing because it might provoke them.
As I hope is clear from this post, I’m interested in how various rhetorical practices have worked out historically[2]. And I can say that reasoning deductively (this practice will work because it should work) is exactly the wrong choice. We need to look at what has worked in the past.
There are actions that might alienate the hand-wringing people engaged in deflective avoidance. There are people who don’t like Trump, but don’t like the Dems, or who don’t like Trump but like tax breaks, or who think politics doesn’t matter. Violent protest alienate them. And, to be honest, violent protest helps the “law and order” crowd. It shouldn’t but it does. It doesn’t mobilize allies, and it alienates potential allies. (That’s a historical claim—if anyone wants to show times that, in the US, violent protests have helped non-authoritarian policies, I’m open to it.)
We can’t find a rhetoric that will persuade his fanatical supporters that they’re wrong. There is none. They’re in a cult. But, there are actions that have worked in the past to topple dictators, and that’s what we should be engaged in now: holding him and his supporters (whether our state rep or our drunk uncle) accountable, non-violent protesting, making common cause with other opponents, voting, giving money and time to his opponents, boycotting his supporters, being willing to violate norms of politeness with his supporters, telling stories that complicate what he’s saying.
Trump and the GOP fully intend to use the police, mobs, a GOP Congress, and GOP-dominated state legislatures to force him into the Presidency. We need to stop that.
[1] In 2003, I started writing a book about demagoguery; since the proslavery book was my first concern, the ms. wasn’t done until 2013. It was rejected by the press. (One reviewer said it was a dead issue.) But, Martin Medhurst had published an article of mine about demagoguery, although the readers were unanimous it should not be published. He published it, and their responses in 2004 or so.
In 2016, when people were interested in demagoguery, that article was one of few things out there, and so I was asked to write a short book about it. I did. That generated interest, and so the rejected ms. was accepted by SIUP and published in 2017.
I mention all this simply because I think it’s a cautionary tale about how the unnecessary delays in scholarly publishing virtually ensure the irrelevance of our work. We should be faster. No one actually takes six months to read an ms.
[2] Every once in a while, I run across someone who says I can’t be an authority on history because I don’t have a degree in history. Meanwhile, they make claims about rhetoric, without any degrees in rhetoric. As it happens, I took two classes as an undergrad and two as a graduate student on the rhetoric of history (not offered by the history department at Berkeley). Two of my committee members had degrees in history, another had a degree in American Studies (from Yale), and my director was a student of Kuhn’s. The other member was a Romanticist, which mattered since I was writing about John Muir.
It’s common for people to talk about how, in our polarized world, everything gets politicized—whether you wear a mask, a red hat, if you have “impossible” burgers in your buffet. But that’s actually wrong. What’s wrong with our world right now is that everything gets depoliticized.
Instead of deliberating, arguing, negotiating, and so on about what policies we should adopt, in a culture of demagoguery, everything is about being loyal to Us and hating on Them. Demagoguery looks like political discourse—it’s about “political parties” and their candidates, after all—but it isn’t. The wide array of policy options is reduced to what the demagogue advocates and the stupid shit The Other proposes (or is doing). And the demagogue’s proposal isn’t argued at any length; it’s hyperbolically asserted to be obviously right, just as the demagogue’s own personal history is hyperbolically asserted as a long string of almost magically effective and decisive actions. The hyperbole is rhetorically important, since it gives the demagogue and their supporters the ability to deflect criticism.
When a rhetor speaks hyperbolically, they are shifting away from the issue to the rhetor’s own passionate commitment. The “issue” is no longer about the policies that might solve the problem, but the conviction of the rhetor, their complete (even irrational) loyalty to the in-group. Hyperbole is about belief, not facts. Thus, hyperbole enables the deflection of policy discourse practices—it depoliticizes political issues.
Demagoguery is all about deflection. It’s especially about deflecting rhetorical responsibilities (especially of accuracy, consistency, and fairness), and accountability (for past and future errors, failures, lies, incompetence, corruption). Hyperbole enables deflection because it is a figure of speech, much like metaphor or simile. If I say, “He got so mad he just charged in there like a tiger,” it would be weird for you to say, “He isn’t a tiger; he’s human.” You would be showing that you don’t understand how simile works.
Hyperbole enables the demagogue to make outrageous and mobilizing claims without having to provide evidence for them—in fact, if someone asks for evidence, or points out that the claims are false, that person looks petty. Hyperbole enables someone to lie without being seen as a liar. It also enables a rhetor to announce or advance extraordinary policies that are beyond criticism, because criticizing the policies would require taking them literally, and that would come across as a kind of humorless nitpicking. The demagogue offers a world of passionate commitment, clarity, triumph, and the pleasures of membership in a unified group.
To criticize the rhetor who has created that sense of immersion is to try to pull the discourse back to the uncertainty and frustration of policy argumentation, and so it’s enraging to people who enjoy the depoliticized world of politics as pep rallies.
The speech is a great example of toxic populism, appealing to what the scholar of populism Paul Taggart calls “unpolitics,” and the political scientists John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse call “stealth democracy.” Taggart defines “unpolitics” as “the repudiation of politics as the process for resolving conflict” (81). Like Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, Taggart points out that many people believe that politics—that is, arguing and bargaining with people who disagree—is unnecessary. Those people (call them toxic populists) believe that there is no such thing as legitimate disagreement; for every problem there is a straightforward solution obvious to regular people. We are prevented from enacting that obvious solution by an “elite” who deliberately slow things down and obstruct problem solving in order to protect their own jobs, line their pockets, follow pointless rules, and get lost in overthinking and details. Toxic populists can be all over the political spectrum, and people can be toxic populists about non “political” problems (health, business, personal finance, institutional practices)—what’s shared is their perception that we should just stop arguing and act. We should put in place someone who will cut through the crap and get ‘er done.
In other words, we should put in place someone who will violate all the norms, the checks and balances, the restrictions; we need someone who will not listen to what anyone else has to say.
And people think that will work out well. It never has. The checks and balances are there for a reason.
But, back to the speech. Trump lies a lot in it, as he generally does, but they’re the kind of lies that his base likes. He says, for instance, that in 2020, “we had a booming economic recovery like nobody’s seen before, the strongest and most secure border in US’s history, energy independence, and even energy dominance, historically low gas prices, as you know, no inflation, a fully rebuilt military and a country that was highly respected all over the world by other leaders, by other countries, highly respected.” He doesn’t even try to give the numbers that would support any of his claims, probably because there aren’t any. Every single claim is untrue. But it would look like humorless nitpicking to point out what’s wrong with each one, and involve explanations and require thinking. I’ll point out just one. In 2020, the pro-Trump media was engaging in alarmism about the southern border of the US, using “invasion” rhetoric (they’ve been doing this every election year for some time). Here’s one example. So, either Trump was lying in 2022, or he and supporting media were lying in 2020.
When it’s pointed out to Trump supporters that he lies, they tend to respond in one of two ways. The most common is, “All politicians lie; I just care about whether they get things done.” The second most common, in my experience, is, “Well, here’s a lie that Biden said.” The second is just deflection, but the first is more interesting. It looks pragmatic and reasonable, but it’s neither. If Trump lies about everything, and his media repeats his lies, how do you know whether he’s really getting things done? The only way to know is to step out of the pro-Trump bubble, and check the numbers, but I have yet to meet a Trump supporter who will even look at any information from sources anything less than fanatically supportive of him.
So, what they’re actually saying is, “I like Trump lies.” As I said, that’s neither pragmatic nor reasonable.
The most concerning aspect of toxic populism—regardless of where on the political spectrum it is—is the always implicit and sometimes explicit authoritarianism. “Authoritarian” is one of those words that people use to mean nothing more than “someone who is trying to make me do something I don’t want to do.” It’s always solipsistic; there are no in-group authoritarians—our leaders are decisive, but theirs are authoritarian. That’s a useless way to think about authoritarianism.
Authoritarian regimes are ones in which “no channels exist for opposition to contest legally for executive power” (Levitsky et al. 7); and there’s reason to believe that Trump is openly advocating a version of it: “competitive authoritarianism.” But I’m more interested in authoritarianism as an ideology. Authoritarian ideology is best understood as at one end of a continuum with pluralism on the other side. Imagine a person who is a dog lover—the more authoritarian they are, the more they will believe that everyone should be forced to love dogs, and that people who don’t love dogs should be exterminated or at least expelled. The more pluralist they are, the more they will believe that not loving dogs is also a legitimate position, and that it’s actively good to have people who disagree about dogs.
The more authoritarian someone is, the harder it is for them to understand what it means not to be authoritarian. They can’t imagine having a belief or behaving a particular way without forcing others to share that belief and behave that way—they think that’s how everyone thinks. For instance, authoritarian “complementarians” understand allowing “gay marriage” to be forcing people into such marriages—that they don’t want such a marriage must mean not letting anyone have it. A pluralist complementarian would believe that their marriage is complementary, but not everyone wants that kind of marriage or should be forced into it.
Authoritarians never see themselves as authoritarian, because they think they’re forcing people to do what’s right, and authoritarianism is forcing people to do what’s wrong. So, when it comes to political authoritarianism, they think that bypassing all the constitutional checks and balances in favor of an authority forcing his (it’s almost always “his”) will on everyone is a great idea.
And that’s what Trump is advocating—no constraints, on police officers (13-19), prosecutors, and, most of all, on himself: “To drain the swamp and root out the deep state, we need to make it much easier to fire rogue bureaucrats who are deliberately undermining democracy, or at a minimum just want to keep their jobs. They want to hold onto their jobs. (01:09:28) Congress should pass historic reforms, empowering the president to ensure that any bureaucrat who is corrupt, incompetent, or unnecessary for the job can be told, did you ever hear this? You’re fired? Get out. You’re fired. Have to do it. [inaudible 01:09:49]. Washington will be an entirely different place.“ What he wants, and what a GOP Congress will give him, is the power to fire any person in government who tries to hold him accountable.
