Seeds Over a Wall: Thoughts on Train Wrecks in Public Deliberation

I’ve spent my career looking at bad, unforced decisions. I describe them as times that people took a lot of time and talk to come to a decision they later regretted. These aren’t times when people didn’t know any better—all the information necessary to make a better decision was available, and they ignored it.

Train wrecks aren’t particular to one group, one kind of person, one era. These incidents I’ve studied are diverse in terms of participants, era, consequences, political ideologies, topics, and various other important qualities. One thing that’s shared is that the interlocutors were skilled in rhetoric, and relied heavily on rhetoric to determine and advocate policies that wrecked the train.

That’s how I got interested in them—a lot of scholars of rhetoric have emphasized times that rhetors and rhetoric saved the day, or at least pointed the way to a better one. But these are times that people talked themselves in bad choices. They include incidents like: pretty much every decision Athens made regarding the Sicilian Expedition, Hitler’s refusal to order a fighting retreat from Stalingrad, the decision to dam and flood the Hetch Hetchy Valley (other options were less expensive), eugenics, the LBJ Administration’s commitment to “graduated pressure” in Vietnam; Earl Warren’s advocacy of race-based mass imprisonment; US commitment to slavery; Puritans’ decision to criminalize Baptist and Quakers.

I’ve deliberately chosen bad decisions on the part of people that can’t be dismissed as too stupid to make good decisions. Hitler’s military decisions in regard to invading France showed considerable strategic skill–while he wasn’t as good a strategist as he claimed, he wasn’t as bad as his generals later claimed. Advocates of eugenics included experts with degrees from prestigious universities—until at least WWII, biology textbooks had a chapter on the topic, and universities had courses if not departments of Eugenics. It was mainstream science. Athenians made a lot of good decisions at their Assembly, and a major advocate of the disastrous Sicilian Expedition was a student/lover of Socrates’. LBJ’s Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was a lot of things, but even his harshest critics say he was smart.

The examples also come from a range of sorts of people. One temptation we have in looking back on bad decisions is to attribute them to out-group members. In-group decisions that turned out badly we try to dismiss on the grounds that they weren’t really bad decisions, they had no choice, an out-group is somehow really responsible for what happened.[1] (It’s interesting that that way of thinking about mistakes actively contributes to train wrecks.) The people who advocated the damming and flooding of the Hetch Hetchy Valley were conservationists and progressives (their terms for themselves, and I consider myself both[2]). LBJ’s social agenda got us the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, Medicare, all of which I’m grateful for. Earl Warren went on to get Brown v. Board passed, for which I admire him.

In short, I don’t want these posts to be in-group petting that makes Us feel good about not being Those People. This isn’t about how They make mistakes, but how We do.

A lot of different factors contributed to each of these train wrecks; I haven’t determined some linear set of events or decisions that happened in every case, let alone the one single quality that every incident shares (I don’t think there is, except the train wrecking). It’s interesting that apparently contradictory beliefs can be present in the same case, and sometimes held by the same people.

So, what I’m going to do is write a little bit about each of the factors that showed up at least a few times, and give a brief and broad explanation. These aren’t scholarly arguments, but notes and thoughts about what I’ve seen. In many cases (all?) I have written scholarly arguments about them in which I’ve cited chapter and verse, as have many others. If people are interested in my chapter and verse version, then this is where to start. (In those scholarly versions, I also cite the many other scholars who have made similar arguments. Nothing that I’m saying is particularly controversial or unique.)

These pieces aren’t in any particular order—since the causality is cumulative rather than linear, there isn’t a way to begin at the beginning. It’s also hard not to write about this without at least some circularity, or at least backtracking. So, if someone is especially interested in one of these, and would like me to get to it, let me know.

Here are some of the assumptions/beliefs/arguments that contribute to train wrecks and that I intend to write about, not necessarily in this order:

Bad people make bad decisions; good people make good ones
Policy disagreements are really tug-of-war contests between two sides
Data=proof; the more data, the stronger the proof
The Good Samaritan was the villain of the story
There is a single (but not necessarily simple) right answer to every problem
That correct course of action is always obvious to smart people
What looks true (to me) is true—if you don’t believe that, then you’re a relativist
Might makes right, except when it doesn’t (Just World Model, except when not)
The ideal world is a stable hierarchy of kiss up/kick down
All ethical stances/critiques are irrational and therefore equally valid
Bad things can only be done by people who consciously intend to do them
Doing something is always better than doing nothing
Acting is better than thinking (“decisiveness” is always an ideal quality)
They cherry-pick foundational texts, but Our interpretations distinguish the transient from the permanent
In-group members and actions shouldn’t be held accountable (especially not to the same degree as out-group members and actions)

There are a few other qualities that often show up:
Binary thinking
Media enclaves
Mean girl rhetoric
Short-term thinking (Gus Johnson and the tuna)
Non-falsifiable conspiracy theories that exempt the in-group from accountability
Sloppy Machiavellianism
Tragic loyalty loops


[1] I’m using “in-“ and “out-“ groups as sociologists do, meaning groups we’re in, and groups against whom we define ourselves, not groups in or out of power. We’re each in a lot of groups, and have a lot of out-groups. Here’s more information about in- and out-groups. You and your friend Terry might be in-group when it comes to what soccer teams you support but out-group when it comes to how you vote. Given the work I do, I’m struck by how important a third category is: non in-group (but not out-group). For instance, you might love dogs, and for you, dog lovers are in-group. Dog-haters would be out-group. But people who neither love nor hate dogs are not in-group, yet not out-group. One of the things that happens in train wrecks is that the non in-group category disappears.

[2] For me, “conservatives” are not necessarily out-group. Again, given the work I do, I’ve come to believe that public deliberations are best when there is a variety of views considered, and “conservatism” is a term used in popular media, and even some scholarship, to identify a variety of political ideologies which are profoundly at odds with each other. Libertarianism and segregation–both called “conservative” ideologies by popular media–are not compatible. Our political world is neither a binary nor a continuum of ideologies.