Trish, Author at Patricia Roberts-Miller

Teaching with microthemes

Over time, I have evolved to having students submit “microthemes” (the wrong word) before class, and I use them for class prep. I keep getting asked about that practice, so this is my explanation.

Here’s what I tell students in my syllabus.

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Microthemes. Microthemes are exploratory, informal, short (300-700 words) responses to the reading (they can be longer if you want). They have a profound impact on your overall grade both directly and indirectly; doing all of them (even turning in something that says you didn’t one) can help your grade substantially. Since the microthemes are on the same topics as the papers, they also serve as opportunities to brainstorm paper ideas.
The class calendar gives you prompts for the microthemes, but you should understand those are questions to pursue in addition to your posing questions. That is, you are always welcome to write simply about your reaction to the reading (if you liked or disliked it, agreed or disagreed, would like to read more things like it). Students find the microthemes most productive if you use the microtheme to pose any questions you have–whether for me, or for the other students. They’re crucial for me for class preparation. So, for instance, you might ask what a certain word, phrase, or passage from the reading means, or who some of the names are that the author drops, or what the historical references are. Or, you might pose an abstract question on which you’d like class discussion to focus. I’m using these to try to get a sense whether students understand the rhetorical concepts, so if you don’t, just say so.

A “minus” (-) is what you get if you send me an email saying you didn’t do the reading; you get some points for that and none for not turning one in at all. So failure to do a bunch of the microthemes will bring your overall grade down. If you do all the microthemes, and do a few of them well, you can bring your overall grade up. (Note that it is mathematically possible to get more than 100% on the microthemes—that’s why I don’t accept late microthemes; you can “make up” a microtheme by doing especially well on another few.)

Microthemes are very useful for letting me know where students stand on the reading–what your thinking is, what is confusing you, and what material might need more explanation in class (that’s why they’re due before class). In addition, students often discover possible paper topics in the course of writing the microthemes. Most important, good microthemes lead to good class discussions. The default “grade is √, except for ones in which you say that didn’t do the reading, or check plusses, plusses, or check minus. (So, if you don’t get email back, and it wasn’t one saying you hadn’t done the reading, assume it got a √.)

If you get a plus or check plus (or a check minus because of lack of effort), I’ll send you email back to that effect. (I won’t send email back if it’s a minus because you said you didn’t do the reading—I assume you know what the microtheme got.) If you’re uncomfortable getting your “grade” back in email, that’s perfectly fine—just let me know. You’ll have to come to office hours to get your microtheme grade. You are responsible for keeping track of your microtheme grade. There are 26 microtheme prompts in the course calendar; up to a 102 will count toward your final grade. There are five possible “grades” for the microthemes [the image at the top of this page].

Please put RHE330D and micro or microtheme in the subject line (it reduces the chances of the email getting eaten by my spam filter). Please, do not send your microthemes to me as email attachments–just cut and paste them into a message. Cutting and pasting them from Word into the email means that they’ll have weird symbols and look pretty messy, but, as long as I can figure out what you’re saying, I don’t really worry about that on the microthemes. (I do worry about it on the major projects, though.) Also, please make sure to keep a copy for yourself. Either ensure that you save outgoing mail, or that you cc yourself any microtheme you send me (but don’t bcc yourself, or your microtheme will end up in my spam folder).

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I find that I can’t explain microthemes without explaining how I came around to them.

I have three degrees in Rhetoric from Berkeley, for complicated reasons, none of which my ever involved deciding at the beginning of one degree that I would get the next. I always had other plans. And, for equally complicated reasons, I ended up not only tutoring rhetoric but acting as an informal TA (what we now call a Teaching Fellow) for rhetoric classes at some point (perhaps junior or senior year). And then I was the TA (a person who grades something like 3/5 of the papers and taught 1/5 of the course—a great practice) for two years, and then the Master Teacher (graded 2/5 of the papers and taught 4/5 of the course). Berkeley, at that point, was a very agonistic culture, and so “teaching” involved waking into class and asking what students thought of the reading, I was just a kind of ref at soccer game.

The disadvantage of all that time at one place and in one department was that I was very accustomed to a particular kind of student. Teaching rhetoric at Berkeley at that moment in time (rhetoric was not the only way to fulfill the FYC requirement and drew the most argumentative students) meant managing all the students who wanted to argue. And, given my Writing Center training, I spent a lot of time in individual conferences. My teaching load as a graduate student was one class per quarter.

That training prepared me badly in several ways. First, it was a rhetoric program, and the faculty were openly dismissive of research in composition. Second, I was only and always in classrooms in which the challenge was how to ref disagreement. Third, I adopted a teaching practice that relied heavily on individual conferences.

I went from that to teaching a 3/3 (or perhaps 3/2—I was always unclear on my teaching load) in the irenic Southeast. Students would not disagree with each other—if they had to, they would preface their disagreement with, “I don’t really disagree but…” In an irenic culture, people actually disagree just as much as they do in an agonistic one, but they aren’t allowed to say so.

Granted, we can never get students to give us some weird kind of audience-free reaction to the reading (if there is such a thing), but I had lost the ability to get a kind of almost visceral reaction to the reading, a sense of the various disagreements that people might have. I also didn’t have the time to meet with students individually as much.

I tried various strategies, such as students keeping a “sketchbook” (I can’t remember who suggested that), in which students responded to the reading, but I couldn’t read the book (since, in those days, it was a physical book) till after class, by which time it was too late for me to respond to what they’d said. But I did notice that students’ responses to the reading were more diverse than what ever happened in class. For one thing, students writing to me would say things they wouldn’t say in front of class.

Sometimes too much so. There was a problem with students telling me more about how the reading reminded them of very private issues. At some point I tried calling them “reading responses,” but that name flung students too often in the opposite direction, and they just summarized the readings.

I moved on to a place and time with more digital options—discussion boards, blogs—and found that they were great in lots of ways. Introverts who won’t talk in class will post on a blog, but there was an issue of framing. In discussions, of any kind, the first couple of speakers frame the debate, and future speakers generally respond from within that frame. So, as opposed to the “sketchbooks,” the blog posts were dialogic rather than diverse (although there weren’t as many plaints about a romantic partner). And even I recognized that a student could easily fake having done the reading, simply by piggybacking on other posts. The discussion board got me no useful information about how my students had reacted to the reading.

“Reading responses” was too private, but blogs were too much prone to in-group pressures.
I honestly don’t know where I found the term “microthemes,” and it’s still wrong (although less wrong than it used to be). Were I to do my career over, I would find a different term, but I don’t know what it would be.

The problem is that it has the term “theme” in it, and so students who have been trained to write a “theme” try to write a five-paragraph essay. Since fewer high school teachers ask for themes, this problem seems to be dissipating.

There are a lot of models of what makes for good teaching, and one is that a good teacher has students engage with each other—a good teacher is the teacher I was at Berkeley, just letting students argue with each other, and acting as a ref at a soccer game. And, to be honest, that was fine at Berkeley, because, while racists and misogynists and homophobes might have whined (and did) that people disagreed with them, people disagreed with them. Their whingeing was that someone disagreed with them.

It got more complicated in an irenic culture, when students didn’t feel comfortable disagreeing with anything. And, by the time I’d found about the disagreement, it was hard to figure out how to put into the class (I learned that you do it by your reading selections, but that’s a different post). The irenic culture meant that, if a student said something racist, other students didn’t feel comfortable saying anything about it (especially if the racist thing was within the norms of what I always think of as “acceptable racism”).

Behind all of this is that we are at a time when there is a dominant and incoherent model of what makes good teaching: it is about having a powerpoint (meaning you aren’t listening to what these students need, and you’re transmitting knowledge you already think they know) and having discussion in class in which all student views are equally valid.

That model is fine for lots of classes, but it’s guaranteeing a train wreck if you’re teaching about racism, or any issue about which a teacher is willing to admit that racism might have an impact. Since we’re in a racist world, asking that students argue with one another as though their positions are equally valid, when racism ensures they aren’t equally valid, is endorsing racism.

Yet, in a class about racism, it’s important to engage the various forms of racism that are plausibly deniable racism. Most racists don’t burn crosses or use the n word, but they make claims that they sincerely think aren’t racist. As I’ve said, this is rough work, and it really shouldn’t be on the shoulders of POC—white faculty should take on the work of explaining to white racists who think they aren’t racist that they are.

If we think of the discursive space of a class as the moment of the class, then this is almost impossible to do, and it’s racist to think that non-racist students should have to explain to racist students that they’re racist. It’s racist because the notion that a classroom is some kind of utopic space in which the hierarchies of our culture are somehow escaped enables the hierarches to skid past consideration, and thereby, those hierarchies are enabled by “free” discussion.

But, if you’re teaching a class in which you want to persuade people to think about racism, you have to have a class in which people can express attitudes that might be racist. Open discussion won’t work, and blogs still have a lot of discursive normativity, and so you need a way in which students can be open with you and say things they don’t want to say in front of other students.

And so you have microthemes.

Students feel more free to express views that they wouldn’t say in front of other students, and they’ll tell you if they haven’t done the reading, so I walk into class knowing how many students didn’t do the reading.

There are some disadvantages. You can’t reuse old lecture notes; you can’t prepare a powerpoint. And, since I’m the one presenting views that students have, there is a reduction in student to student conversation (it gets me hits on teaching observations but, since student to student interaction is deeply problematic in terms of power, I’m okay with that).

And, since undergraduate lives are, well, undergraduate lives, students don’t always remember what they’ve said in microthemes. And there is a tendency for students (especially graduate students) to feel that, since they’ve already told me what they think, they don’t need to say it in class.

But, still and all, I wish I’d adopted microthemes years before I did, but with a different name.

What happens when we abandon norms of accountability? (Penn talk)

Austrian Jews being deliberately humiliated by Nazia

My area of expertise is what I’ve taken to calling “train wrecks in public deliberation.” I’m interested in times that communities used rhetoric to talk themselves into disastrous decisions—ranging from the Athenian decision to invade Sicily in 5th century BCE to LBJ’s decision to escalate the Vietnam War in the summer of 1965. I came to notice patterns–not of political personalities or even policies but of cultures of discourse— what I came to call demagoguery.

All political issues are policy issues, and we always have a variety of policy options available to us. In these cultures of demagoguery, that rich and nuanced world of policy options was and is denied in favor of framing our cultural problem as a question of a zero-sum battle between two groups: us and them. When we’re in a culture of demagoguery, when everything is framed as two sides, those two sides appear to be on opposite sides of every issue, but they actually agree about quite a lot.

They both agree that there is no legitimate disagreement with their position; they agree that politics is a zero sum battle between us and them. They just disagree as to who is whom. They agree that for every problem there is one solution and that disagreement is the consequence of the presence of people with bad motives. This agreement that disagreement is useless can come from several different positions, but two are important in our era: political narcissism, and political sociopathy.

For some people there is only one legitimate understanding of the common good (mine) and everyone who disagrees is blinded by self-interest, duped by the media, or knowingly advocating a bad policy. To say that there is only one political good, and that I and only I am the one oriented toward that good on every issue[1] is a kind of political narcissism.

Another position is that there is no legitimate political disagreement because none of us is really interested in the common good—there is no common good at all. We are all our for ourselves, and no position is ethically superior to any other–there are just winners and losers, and any political or rhetorical strategy is allowed if it’s oriented toward winning. This is a kind of political sociopathy.

Those aren’t all of the positions possible, but they’re two that I hear a lot when people are arguing for a no-holds barred wrestling match between us and them. I think the people who advocate those positions are sincere. I think that people who argue that they and only they are advocating the one political good in every situation believe that is true; they cannot imagine that any other position might have any legitimacy in any circumstance. They believe that everyone sees the world exactly as they do.

And those who believe that everyone is out for their own good are out for their own good, and they think everyone else is too.

What neither of those two realize is that not everyone is like them—they universalize from their own position, posture, and ideology.

I think we disagree about politics because we disagree. People who privilege disagreement, who see disagreement as an important step toward the best agreements do so for all sorts of reasons, and from all sorts of different positions–such as various forms of relativism, perspectivism, fallibism, and lots of others.

I want to set all that aside in order to talk about what happens in a culture in which all disagreements are framed as a zero sum battle between us and them. And spoiler alert: it isn’t pretty.

This culture of demagoguery often begins as a cunning rhetorical framing of political disagreements as a zero sum battle between two groups because that frame is more motivating and mobilizing for voters, donors, and consumers. But it can easily become what people believe is an accurate description of our political landscape and our policy options.

So, initially, something like the confirmation of a supreme court justice is framed as a battle between us and them because that frame is more likely to get people to contact their representatives, donate to their party, and support their party’s decision. It’s also more likely to motivate people to read articles, watch the news, click on links. This false binary of our political choices benefits political parties and a for-profit media.

The zero-sum battle means that not only is disagreement delegitimated but, eventually and inevitably, disagreement is demonized. Compromise, bargaining, finding common ground — from within this false binary, those are way of trucking with the devil, and I don’t mean in the Grateful Dead sense. One doesn’t compromise with the devil after all; one exterminates him.

So, unless this rhetoric is stopped, the zero-sum us v. them frame for politics results in a rhetoric of extermination. And then the train wrecks.

Once disagreement is demonized and political disagreements are framed as a battle between good and evil, the appointment of the supreme court justice can easily be described as simply one battle in a war of political extermination and existential threat. As soon as one side makes claims of wanting to exterminate the other, then both sides can frame the political situation as one of existential threat.

And once we are in a situation of existential threats, then we are justified in anything we do. We are in Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception” in which we honor the law by suspending or abrogating it. The narrative that enables the suspension of law is that the one group that genuinely honors the law is forced into a situation in which the law must be suspended or violated due to the evil machinations of the other side —the plot of about 80% of Law and Order episodes.

Now, it would seem that once a political party has used the rhetoric of existential threat to get into power, that rhetoric would lose its force. The rhetorical challenge becomes, once you are in power, how do you maintain the rhetoric of threat and victimization that enabled you to gain power?

Paradoxically, the acquisition of power enables this supposedly victimized group to use its propaganda machine, as well as the forces of government, to justify the removal of all checks and balances on the in-group executive, and to transform the government into a single party government by declaring the executive above judicial restraint, exempt from charges of criminal behavior, allowed to use their position not only to protect themselves from accountability, but to profit financially, even obscenely, to use the financial resources of the government to reward loyal political allies, and to use all the financial, investigative, prosecutorial, and coercive resources of the government to exterminate powerful sites of dissent.

Once the procedural constraints have been defanged, and “neutrality” of any institution is falsely politicized as part of a hostile out-group conspiracy, once an executive has made it clear that he refuses to be restrained or held accountable, that he is personally profiting, and openly trying to institute a one-party government (of which he is the head), then it becomes possible to factionalize all parts of the government–especially traditionally neutral parts, such as the military and police forces.

At this point even members of his own party, and his own base, should recognize the danger, and work to check to the overreach of power, and, if they do, as happened with FDR and packing the Supreme Court, we step back from the brink. But, as both How Democracies Die and Why Nations Fail (written from very different political perspectives) both show, the very people who could stop the overreach—that is, the in-group political figures and media, the judiciary, the military, or the base—often don’t. The people who could stop the overreach often choose not to if the executive is doing whatever is necessary to keep the economy benefiting his base, keep his base from listening to criticism of him, continuing to promote — through his loyal propaganda machine–the narrative that all of their problems are caused by Them (the party he is eliminating).

If his propaganda machine can persuade his base of that, then they will believe that they are flying when really he’s just persuaded them to jump out of a window with him.

I’m talking in the abstract, but I think everyone in this room knows that I have a particular political figure, situation, and era in mind: Hitler, and what he did between March 1933 in 1939.

There’re lots of other cases–someone rising to power on the waves created by the cultural demagoguery: Ceaușescu, Stalin, Mugabe, Chavez, and others. Sometimes the structures of checks and balances were weak, sometimes they were strong, and people chose not to enforce them. But in all cases, there was a culture of demagoguery.

[1] We should be passionate about politics, and so a person can be passionately committed to a community solving a problem, and convinced it must be solved, and that isn’t political narcissism, but passionate commitment to a problem. Even if they are passionately committed to one solution to the problem, that’s just passionate commitment. It’s the assumption that their group or political position is right about everything that makes it skid into political narcissism.

Conversation about demagoguery and democracy on “The Open Mind”

Unbecoming a Democracy

Alexander Heffner and I talk about demagoguery and democracy.

Funeral orations and pro-war rhetoric

In The Rhetoric, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E) divided public speaking into three genres: epideictic (ceremonial oratory, such as funeral orations), deliberative (policy determination, such as what takes place in the Assembly), and judicial (court cases). He said that each of these kinds of speeches has a different emphasis—judicial emphasizes guilt or innocence, deliberative speeches emphasize expediency (costs and benefits), and epideictic speeches are about honor or dishonor.

In other words, if we’re arguing about policy, that’s deliberative, and we should argue about the costs or benefits (advantages or disadvantages) of our policy options. We might bring up issues of honor, but those should be secondary. I’ve come to think that Aristotle is right, that one of the characteristics of cultures whose political discourse is a train wreck is that they don’t argue about policies qua policies—they argue about honor, blame, guilt, loyalty. They argue that the out-group is to blame for the current problems (as well as those members of the in-group whose support isn’t passionate enough), that for anyone to disagree with the in-group plan (there is only one) is disloyal, that to provide any evidence that the in-group plan isn’t working or can’t work dishonors the in-group.

This way of thinking about political deliberation makes it extremely unlikely that communities will rectify bad decisions. They can only double down (since, if politics is really a question of loyalty, and criticism dishonors the in-group, then the only available response to a policy failing is to recommit with more will). It also means that communities will commit to a policy without really thinking it through. Because dissent and disagreement are necessary (but not sufficient) for good decisions, communities who rely on epideictic for policy deliberation will make a lot of bad decisions.

In a class on the history of public argument, we were reading Schenck v. US, and two students argued that the decision was right—criticism of a war (or how it was being conducted) should be silenced the second boots are on the ground.

I pointed out that this means that, if the war is a mistake, or it’s being handled badly, then it could mean that more people (especially in the military) in service of a war we shouldn’t have, or shouldn’t be conducting as we are. Their argument was to repeat, “Once boots are on the ground, there’s no more debate.”

That visceral reaction surprised me, especially considering the stances these students had taken on other issues (they were generally skeptical of the government, and very much in favor of transparency and citizen scrutiny).

A few years after that class discussion, I picked up a book about the Battle of Kasserine Pass, where my uncle was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. He died a few weeks later, bombing a Nazi supply train. Family lore about his death had two versions. One was that they didn’t know the train had ammunition, and so he was flying too low to the train to get out of the blast when it went. The second was that he had been mildly injured in the Battle of Kasserine Pass (his shoulder), and he didn’t have quite enough strength to pull the plane up fast enough (apparently it was a model for which that was notoriously difficult).

The book I picked up argued that the Battle of Kasserine Pass was a clusterfuck. It said that the person in charge, Lt. General Lloyd Fredenall, was a coward who had spent most of his time and unit’s energy building him a bunker far from where the combat was likely to take place. Even though he was far away from the action, he micromanaged his subordinates—although he had never had any experience leading troops in battle. He was so obsessed with the possibility of his orders being heard by the enemy (he was using a radio) that they were often incoherent. So, according to this book, he was giving orders that he insisted be followed, that were grounded in poor understanding of the actual combat situation, that were hard to understand, and that he couldn’t modify quickly. Bad orders, badly communicated. The book specifically said that Fredenall’s orders regarding the air corps were especially bad—his incompetence endangered them.

I was overwhelmed with rage.

At the author of the book.

I felt, very strongly, that the author should not have written any of that. My uncle had died in that campaign, and he was a hero. That his heroism might have been necessitated by the incompetence of his superior, that his death might have been caused by that incompetence, that he wasn’t part of a glorious campaign, but an avoidable clusterfuck, that it was a clusterfuck with 10k Allied casualties (there were only 30k in the battle, and 6k of those casualties were US), that, in short, the Kasserine Pass was an example of what happens far too much in war, the way that, even if the war as a whole is admirable and just, many of the casualties are not caused by the enemy’s competence, but our incompetence—all of that was unthinkable for me. Actually unthinkable.

Intellectually, I knew that not every death in war is glorious, that even the good guys screw up. I’d read Goodbye to All That, All Quiet on the Western Front, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, The Great War and Modern Memory, Catch-22, J.D. Salinger and Peter Gay on their war experiences, and various books on Vietnam. I knew all the things the author was saying about Operation Torch were true of wars and even war, but I could not let myself think that they were true of the operation that had killed my uncle.

And that is when I understood what my students had been saying.

If you give a family member over to a war effort, you have to believe that, if they die, it will be in a meaningful and important way, that it will not be the consequence of incompetence, indifference, or internal unit rivalry. You have to believe that the war for which they’re fighting was not only necessary, but just, and actively virtuous. And if they die, you have to believe that they died on the side of the good guys. And good guys aren’t incompetent.

To say that American military died in a war we shouldn’t have started, that we are bungling how it’s being conducted, that the people making decisions are incompetent—that is violating the norms of decorum regarding the cultural (and personal) need to honor the war dead.

But those norms of decorum mean that we can’t deliberate effectively about war. And, what’s worse is that those dead can become warrants for further commitment to a war that might be wrong-headed, incompetently managed, or managed purely in terms of factional goals (we should do this because it will help our party).

If you even dip into The Pentagon Papers, and anything about any other 20th century war (it’s probably true of earlier wars, but we don’t have the records), then you can see that political figures often force the military to make what are bad decisions from a military perspective, but politically useful for the current President. Personally, I find most disturbing the argument that the Bush Administration went for invading Iraq with inadequate troops because the Afghanistan action wasn’t going well (although LBJ’s partisan-motivated decisions about Vietnam, or the various military decisions that Nixon, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton made that were purely factional aren’t far below—and I’m open to the argument that LBJ’s factional treatment of Vietnam is just as bad if not worse).

I mentioned Aristotle at the beginning, and here’s how he’s relevant. A funeral oration has certain standards of decorum. You do not speak ill of the dead.

My mother-in-law died within a year of my father-in-law. It was a rough year for my husband. We had no idea how to handle a funeral, what arrangements needed to be made, or how to make them, and a friend of my husband’s mother stepped in and helped us so much. We later found out her mother had died only a week or so before.

She died suddenly a couple of years later, and we went to her funeral. She lived in a small town, and the funeral had to be moved to a larger town because so many people wanted to come. She had been a teacher for years—she had been that teacher, the one who makes marginal students feel valued, the one who inspires students to think beyond their dreams, the one who is just magically always there. She was that friend in need, the effective and non-judgmental person at your side. On my best days, I don’t even have moments when I’m as good as this woman was. And the packed church was proof of it.

A friend of hers, a pastor, gave the funeral oration. And her speech began with acknowledging that this woman was good, and their long friendship and how this woman had helped in so many ways, and then she said, “But I failed her because I never spoke to her about whether she had a personal relationship with Jesus, and so she might be in Hell.”

That whole point about how she might be in Hell went on for a while, and it turned into what Aristotle would have categorized as a deliberative argument—about what the people in the audience should do (be saved, by the fairly specific terms of the speaker). I don’t know how long she went on, but I know it was long enough for me to consider, very seriously, that I wasn’t known in that area, and so I could tackle her, and then just race out the back door, but I was holding our baby, and I’d have to hand him to our husband, and he was known. I seriously considered the options of tackling a speaker at a funeral.

That pastor did not understand the genre of funeral oration. It is not a deliberative argument, in which you are advocating a policy of action, but one in which you unqualifiedly honor the dead.

When my mother died, a woman who hadn’t attended church in 25 years because she had so completely broken with Catholicism, the priest who spoke at her funeral said, “She had an Irish maiden name, and we know God loves the Irish, so we know she’s in heaven.”

He understood the genre of the funeral oration.

But, and this is our problem, if the funeral oration is all about making the people who are grieving feel that the loved one who has died is in heaven and has died for a worthy cause (or after a long battle), then the funeral oration should be apolitical, and yet it isn’t. If the family needs to hear that the dead have to have died for good reason, then funeral orations have to say it’s a war to which we should continue to be committed, which we should have fought, and which is being conducted in an honorable and competent way.

In other words, funeral orations for the military dead have to be pro-war. So, funeral orations can drift into what Aristotle would call deliberative (or we would call “political”) rhetoric, but only if the rhetoric is pro-war.

Effective deliberative rhetoric depends on a world in which all sorts of policy options can be interrogated. Ineffective deliberative rhetoric sets some policies off as sacred, ones that cannot be disputed. And that is exactly what the funeral oration does.

My uncle died long before I was born, and the military action in which he engaged—in which he was lucky enough not to have died, but which might have incurred the injury that contributed to his death—really was a clusterfuck. The author was right. But the genre of funeral orations means that, even sixty years later (or more), I wasn’t open to rational deliberation about a military action in which an uncle I’d never met had been engaged.

Once the smoke cleared, I realized that the dishonor done to my uncle—and there was dishonor and disloyalty—was not that someone said that he probably died because he was under a Lt. General who was incompetent and cowardly. It was that he was under such a person.

Racism, Motivism, and Disparate Impact

George Wallace

One of the reasons people often don’t try to talk about racism, especially persistent (but kind of low-key) racism, is that the conversations go so badly. And they go badly for two reasons I want to mention here (there are others).

First, it’s that the racism is low-key. By “low-key,” I don’t mean it’s innocuous, or not a big problem. I mean that the racist acts don’t necessarily fit conventional notions of what racists do: there might be a complete absence of racist epithets, an avoidance of even mentioning race, and the people engaged in racism might not be consciously trying to be what they think of as racist. Sometimes it’s done through unconscious passive-aggressive actions and comments, or even behavior that the person thinks is anti-racist (such as endorsing the deficit model of culture). There can be a conscious intent to be “fair,” “objective,” “have high standards” and so on, without the thought “Oh, boy oh boy, how can I make this decision in the most racist way possible?” And it’s persistent. It’s low-key like a low-key note that is playing constantly, that is part of every decision, and therefore tremendously harmful, but it is so constant that people don’t even notice it.

Because it’s constant, it seems normal, and so people can’t see it as racist. And, if you try to name it as racist, they’ll argue it isn’t because it isn’t the open hostility racist epithet kind of racism. Because they can imagine a worse racism, they deflect the criticism that what they’re doing (or enabling) is racist. It’s like saying that because I only robbed one bank, and I know of people who’ve robbed ten, I’m not really a bank robber.

That deflection of racism is the consequence of seeing racism as SO evil that normal people couldn’t possibly engage in it. There’s another odd quality that is the consequence of framing racism as something extreme—the assumption that it must always be at play (leading to the “some of my best friends are X” or “I get along great with this person who is X”). There are some interesting studies from years ago in which people watched videos of a doctor interacting with patients. If the doctor was ethnically out-group and the patient was ethnically in-group, and the interaction went well, then the test subjects (the ones watching the video) were unlikely to mention race. But, if things went badly, the watchers attributed the doctor’s bad behavior to race.

Racism isn’t a feeling; it’s an explanation.

And it’s almost always an explanation about motive. The reason that many white people on public assistance have no problem condemning POC on public assistance as “lazy” and advocating a reduction in the social safety net is that they don’t see themselves as scamming the system—they need the assistance but “those people” don’t. It’s the same behavior (being on public assistance) but judged differently because of the assumption of different motives—the in-group has good motives and the out-group has bad motives.

That’s typical of in-group/out-group explanations, but, when it comes to race, there are tragic consequences. White people on juries are likely to empathize with white defendants and be persuaded by arguments about extenuating circumstances, when they would assume bad motives on the part of POC defendants. And this is all unconscious.

How most people think about racism is so odd—in addition to assuming it has to be conscious, people often assume that it has some weird kind of monocausal quality. So, for instance, if your treatment of me can be shown to have been affected by anything other than racism, then it wasn’t racism. This is the “He isn’t racist, he’s just a jerk” argument. And he may be a jerk, but there’s nothing that keeps someone from being both a jerk and racist.

But, if a person is a jerk to a lot of people, and is a jerk to POC, many people are unlikely to call that bad behavior toward POC racist (“he’s just a jerk”). And they’ll argue it isn’t really racist without looking to see whether there is some kind of difference (it’s more frequent, harsher, has bigger consequences when POC are the object of jerk behavior). It’s a missing stair situation.

The Pervocracy describes a missing stair as:

Have you ever been in a house that had something just egregiously wrong with it? Something massively unsafe and uncomfortable and against code, but everyone in the house had been there a long time and was used to it? “Oh yeah, I almost forgot to tell you, there’s a missing step on the unlit staircase with no railings. But it’s okay because we all just remember to jump over it.”

Some people are like that missing stair. [….] Just about every workplace has that one person who doesn’t do their job, but everyone’s grown accustomed to picking up their slack. A lot of social groups and families have that one person. The person whose tip you quietly add a couple bucks to. (Maybe more than a couple, after how they talked to the server.) The person you don’t bother arguing with when they get off on one of their rants. The person you try really, really hard not to make angry, because they’re perfectly nice so long as no one makes them angry.

The problem is that vulnerable people are more likely to have trouble avoiding the missing stair, and are more likely to get injured. The missing stair affects POC disparately.

It doesn’t matter if the jerk means to treat POC differently; intent doesn’t matter. Even if the jerk was equally a jerk to everyone, if there are greater consequences, regardless of intent, for POC, then it’s disparate impact. And that’s discrimination.

And it’s racist. And it’s racist for someone not to try to stop the jerk from being a jerk if their jerkiness has a disparate impact on POC.

I’m white and argumentative af, privileged, and very hard to intimidate, and even I have given up trying to talk to some people about racism because they are so committed to deflecting the issue to anything other than racism, especially anything other than systemic racism. And if I find it exhausting, then how many other people who are less privileged, less argumentative, and more vulnerable have also given up?

If the case for impeachment is so bad, why won’t Fox let you hear it?

Fox News showing Sekulow instead of House managers making case — From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGVjBoE-zio

Aristotle argued that if people who disagree argue as hard as they can, and the people making the arguments have equal skill, then the truth will prevail. And that’s not a bad argument. It might be a little idealistic. After all, there are lots of situations in which the people arguing (the rhetors) might not have equal skill: a 300-dollar an hour attorney v. you. But, if you’re talking about rhetors who have all the money they need, then Aristotle’s argument makes sense.

People with lots of resources making true arguments don’t worry about their audience being exposed to false arguments because, on the whole, people are sensible, and if the audience is shown something true and something false, they can find the truth. So, a major media source, call it Chester News, doesn’t have to worry about people watching other media, unless watching other media will enable Chester News viewers to realize they’re being lied to. A lot.

People who are lying, however, need to make sure you don’t read other sources because then you’ll figure out they’re lying. So, they spend as much time telling you their lies as they do telling you not to tune in to anyone who might disagree.

Con artists (this book is really interesting about con games), like abusers and cult figures, first isolate you. They spend a lot of time telling you what They believe. The “They” here is a fabricated version of various out-groups that lumps them all into one false image that is both much stronger and weaker than any of the groups are—weaker in the sense that their arguments aren’t presented, but just straw man versions of them, stronger in the sense that They are presented as well-organized, powerful, and incredibly dangerous. Chester News might give cherry-picked quotes or data that, in context, don’t mean what they claim, and they don’t give you the sources so that you can see the full quote in context. Similarly, they give you the clip of This Person (who represents They) saying something outrageous, but they don’t give you a link where you could watch it in context.

And Chester news will, as Benkler et al. and Levendusky show, insist you not listen to anyone else, especially not to any They sources. Why?

It’s like the worst moments in junior high, when someone tells you, “Terry said this terrible thing about you, but don’t ask them about it, because I’ll get in trouble.” If you were sensible, you learned not to listen to them. Don’t believe what Fox tells you “liberals” believe, unless they link to direct sources, and you look at those sources in full context. And don’t believe what MSNBC tells you Fox is arguing, unless they link to direct sources, and you look at those sources in full context.

If the Fox case about impeachment were as good as they claim, they would give you all the sources. They would show you the whole videos, all the documents, all the speeches. They don’t. Fox, Trump, and the GOP are all admitting that they can’t defend themselves if all the evidence is open to their base. That’s important.

And, c’mon, we all know what it means when someone won’t let you look at the data. We’ve all had someone tell us, “Here’s the bill, and I won’t actually explain why I’m right.” And we know it means that they’re lying.

We aren’t talking about someone prying into potential irrelevant details. We’re talking about testimony regarding what Trump said in a phone call. If Trump did nothing wrong in the phone call, then all the people privy to that phone call could testify and he would be exonerated. If they can’t testify, then why not? If Fox won’t let you see that evidence, or the arguments about it, why not? If they had a slam dunk for their interpretation, you know they would share it. They won’t because they’re afraid of it.

If Fox won’t let you see the evidence, their case sucks.

That’s rhetoric 101.

There is no principle here to which any GOP wants to commit. Had HRC won, and had all of this played out, but with HRC substituted for Trump, y’all would be screaming for blood.

And that is how democracies die. They die when people value faction over principle. If we value democracy, we hold our party to the same standards we hold the other party. Otherwise, we’re looking at Athens as it imploded. We’re valuing party loyalty above anything— the truth, fairness, the law, any principles. And if we’re supporting a party whose claims are so weak that they have to make sure their base doesn’t have any direct contact with the opposition arguments, then we’re in real trouble.

Racism isn’t about feelings

Notice that Japanese Americans must report for internment

If you stop someone on the street and ask them, “What does it mean to be racist? And what’s wrong with racism?” you’d probably get an answer something along the lines of, “Racism is a feeling of hostility that some individuals have toward members of other races, and it’s harmful because, when they express that hostility, it hurts the feelings of others.” (Or perhaps, “It offends other people.”) In other words, racism is about individuals having feelings that are likely to create bad feelings in other individuals.

It’s one of the least useful, and most damaging, ways of thinking about racism and what it does.

For instance, it flattens various actions, as though they’re the same—if racism is about hurt feelings, then my feeling hurt that you called me racist seems just as important as your feeling hurt that I said something racist.

It also prohibits third parties from being able to call out racism (or mischaracterizes their objecting to racism as “being offended”–still about their feelings). If racism is a problem because it hurts the feelings of members of the race who’ve been “insulted,” then no third party has the right to say, “Hey, what you said was racist.” After all, they weren’t insulted, so their feelings weren’t hurt. There was no harm.

I have a friend whose mother is from Mexico, and my friend self-identifies as bi-racial Latina, but she doesn’t fit the physical stereotype that racists tend to have about Latinas, and so she has often found herself in a group of people where someone says something racist about “Mexicans.” If she objects to the racism without revealing that they’re insulting her, then she gets called “politically correct” and they double down on their racist claim, saying something like, “Well, you know it’s true.”

If she reveals that she’s in the group they’re attacking, then they apologize. But they don’t apologize for thinking the racist thing, or for saying it, but for saying it in front of her.

Each of those responses—refusing to listen to someone objecting to racism on the grounds that person is just being “politically correct” and apologizing, not for being racist, but for being racist in front of her– seems like a reasonable response to them because, having been taught that racism is harmful because it hurts the feelings of people of that race, it would seem that a person not of that race has no real reason to object, and their only injury to someone of that race was an injury to her feelings by saying racist things in front of her.

But the harm of saying something racist is not that it offends or hurts the feelings of individuals in the maligned race. It isn’t that they say those things that’s the primary problem; it’s that they think them. I’m occasionally mistaken for Jewish, which I’ve discovered when people have tried to make me feel bad by flinging an antisemitic slur at me. What they did is wrong, but not because it hurt my feelings—it didn’t—and not because they expressed hostility to Jews. It’s wrong because racism is not an emotion–it’s a set of beliefs, ones we don’t necessarily know we have. And those beliefs harm our world because anti-semitism is a persistent ideology that erupts periodically into extraordinary violence, and into individual acts of violence on a regular basis.

It isn’t just the feelings; it’s the beliefs. Racism isn’t just about hostility—it’s about beliefs, about Jews as masters of international finance, African-Americans as criminal, Latinx as lazy, Asians as not really American. People are hurt by those beliefs because those beliefs become the basis for how we deliberate on juries, vote, hire, fire, drive, rent.

To frame the problem of racism as though it is a question of individual feelings (racists feel hostility, and objects of racism feel offended) misses the whole point of our shared world being damaged by racism. People who object to racism aren’t doing so because of feeling hurt or offended, but because racism is harmful.

How Trump supporters argue, and a lot of people who don’t support Trump

national enquirer cover

I got interested in demagoguery, and panicky about democracy, in about 2000, when I acquired an acquaintance (call him Chester) who relied entirely on Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the National Academy of Scholars. That acquaintance was helpful for me to understand how some people think about what it means to be informed and how to make political decisions. For instance, it surprised me that, when he would make a claim to me, and I would always prove him wrong, it never made him reconsider his sources. Also, he would later never remember that interaction. He never remembered being wrong. That was interesting.

He was also interesting for letting me know what the new politically correct line was for the GOP. Political correctness originally referred to the way that Stalin would announce a shift in position (Nazis are enemies, Nazis are allies, Nazis are enemies) and people who wanted to have the correct line immediately adopted it. He went from ranting about how terrible Democrats are because they want to invade privacy to enthusiastic support for the PATRIOT Act.

His way of arguing was interesting. Sometimes, what he said was simply wrong, but more often, what he did was to give a datum that was true (“2 + 2 = 4”), and use that datum to support a claim it didn’t actually logically support (which was always “Democrats are evil”). Early on in our acquaintance, he made some claim about nuclear power plants that was simply wrong, and I cited an article in The Economist that showed he was. He didn’t admit he was wrong; he was simply astonished I read The Economist.

He couldn’t imagine that someone like me would read sources with which I disagree. That was projection on his part. He engaged in a lot of that. He never read anything, unless it was required for work, that might trouble his very clear, and very angry, worldview.

He taught me two things. First, people like him–who thought he understood what is a logical argument–really don’t. That the datum is true doesn’t mean the argument is true. The datum might not be logically related to the argument. But that is how a lot of people reason. It’s confirmation bias masking itself as rational argument. He was a complete sucker for any “This Democrat is evil because cars have engines” arguments—that is, arguments about Democrats being terrible supported by data completely unrelated to the claim. But, and this is interesting: he would have seen how bad the logic was had exactly the same argument been made about Republicans.

He was a person thinking himself rational when he was just drowning in confirmation bias and outrage flavor-aid. Confirmation bias means that we scramble around looking for data that support our beliefs, and accept any data that supports our beliefs as objective and true while rejecting as “biased” anything that contradicts what we want to believe. We can’t cite a principle (other than in-group fanaticism) that would explain why we take this datum as proof that They are bad, and exactly similar datum as not relevant to whether We are bad.

That doesn’t make him any different from most of us. And that is the problem. He thought his beliefs were rational and true because he could find evidence to support them. But, even when the data was true, the inference wasn’t. He sucked at logic, but he was fine at facts. It isn’t about facts; it’s about logic.

Second, his commitment to his group was nonfalsifiable. I sometimes (rarely) tried to bring that up, and he deflected the issue of his beliefs being nonfalsifiable by saying “They are just as bad.” Again, that’s completely illogical. His binary of us (people with his pretty narrow political agenda) versus them was illogical, in that it was nonfalsifable, and relied on arguments he would have rejected if applied to him. It was an unprincipled argument.

He couldn’t find a logical principle that would support his judgments, but his judgments were all supported by the ideological principle that They are terrible.

And that “They are terrible” is persuasive in the media sphere in which he was cocooned because of the math of demagoguery.

Imagine that there are two parties: Rottweiler and Pitbull. You vote Rottweiler, and you hate Pitbulls. If you are irrational in your commitment to the Rottweiler party, you will start to engage in a weird kind of accounting. Any instance of Rottweiler misbehavior is erased if you can cite any instance of Pitbull misbehavior. So, if a Rottweiler Senator is caught openly taking bribes from the Squirrel Conspiracy, you will think that doesn’t count because the Assistant Associate Assistant to the Mayor of Peculiar, Missouri is Pitbull, and once let someone buy him a milkshake.

That’s the math of demagoguery. That was Chester’s math.

As lots of people point out, if you falsely categorize the world into us v. them, and you live in the careful cocoon of what your in-group media tells you what they believe, then you are saying that rottweilers are the best because there was this one pitbull that attacked people. You are in the bizarre math of “us v. them” reasoning.

He never listened to anyone who disagreed; everything he knew about what “They” believe came from his in-group sources. He and I once had a conversation about a book that he’d never read, and yet which he was convinced was indefensibly bad. I tried to point out that maybe he should read it, but that went nowhere. That was how he reasoned–his in-group sources told him it was bad because it made [this argument], and even though I told him (and I’d actually read it) that it hadn’t made argument, he wasn’t willing to listen. And he also told me, on two occasions, that all leftists (including Chomsky and Orwell) don’t believe in any kind of realist notion about epistemology or language (they do—he admitted he’d never read either author).

Sometimes he said things that were actively false, and I’d send him links, and he would find ways to dismiss any evidence that his sources were bad. He is the angriest person I know, and the most misinformed.

If you thought this blog post was about how terrible Republicans are, then you’re reasoning like Chester.

I don’t think there are two sides, but I think there is demagoguery, and I think demagoguery is all over the political spectrum (but not equally so).

Demagoguery isn’t a rhetoric that powerful people use to seduce the clueless and powerless objects of persuasion. Demagoguery is how far too many people reason, and how far too much media frames issues.

In a culture of demagoguery, rhetors promoting demagoguery (all over the political spectrum, and in venues from political debates to neighborhood mailing lists):
• insist (and sincerely believe) that our political options are divided between the obviously right option and the one advocated by people with actively bad motives (and the dupes who are seduced into supporting the obviously bad choice) because they only consume media that tells them that is the case;
• argue deductively from in-group premises. So they say that, for instance, “high taxes decrease incentive, so they decrease innovation, so they hurt an economy” or “supporting a centrist candidate is wrong, so if we want a progressive political agenda, we should refuse to support centrists.” Neither of those claims is either falsifiable or empirically defensible.
• argue that they are right because they can find data to support their claims, even if the data is material out of context, actively false, or irrelevant.
• express outrage, pretending that their outrage is principled, when it’s really just outrage about out-group behavior, and not principled outrage about the action.

We are not in a post-fact world. Saying that we are is exactly what got us here. It’s suggesting that a good argument has true facts. Terrible arguments can have true facts.

Engaging in effective and reasonable political deliberation isn’t about whether you have facts. We all have facts.

It’s about whether your facts are relevant to the claim you’re making, whether they prove the point you’re making (as opposed to simply being an illustrative example), whether they mean what you say they mean in context, and whether that “fact” would be just as meaningful if it supported a claim you don’t like.

We aren’t in a post-fact world; we’re in a post-logic one.

“Democratic Deliberation and the Pleasures of Outrage.” (Talk at UGA, Athens, GA)

In 415 BCE, the Athenian Assembly was considering a proposal to invade Sicily. Athens was a few years into a wobbly peace with Sparta, that had been negotiated after ten years of fighting an inconclusive but very destructive war, sprinkled with bouts of plague, and the arguments for the invasion were even more wobbly than that peace.

Invading Sicily was ambitious, to say the least. Triremes couldn’t spend a lot of time in the sea (because of worm that destroyed the wood, see Hale), and so would have to get to Sicily with a series of hops along the coast. More important, they would have to send their ships and troops past their enemy of the last many years, Sparta, thereby leaving Athens vulnerable to invasion. While there are scholars who argue Athens could have succeeded in beating the Syracusans (mainly Victor Davis Hanson, architect of the 2007 surge in Iraq), that a scholar 2500 years later can imagine a way that the Athenians might have won doesn’t mean it would have—that’s the problem with counterfactuals—but Athens didn’t just need a successful invasion; it needed a successful occupation. It’s always the occupation.

Thus, had the Assembly done its job of deliberating, everyone there would have taken seriously the weaknesses in the proposed invasion—regardless of their faction—including such issues as whether sending so many troops so far away was making Athens vulnerable to invasion, but, again, the vexed question of occupation. Instead of deliberating about the risks of the proposal, however, they made the decision to invade, and they did so purely on the basis of political faction.

I’m a scholar of rhetoric. The discipline of rhetoric tends to focus on rhetors who inspired communities to great things (such as MLK Jr.), or to rhetors who were marginalized in their times but we now see as inspirational (such as Ida Wells-Barnett or Cesar Chavez). I was the kind of child who kicked over rocks to see what was under them, and that’s continued for me as a scholar. My area of expertise is how communities talk themselves into bad decisions (unforced errors), and then, and this is important, when they get clear information that they’ve made a bad decision, they recommit with more resources, a greater will to succeed, calls for silencing dissent and purifying the in-group, and refusals to admit, let alone learn from or correct, the error.

In other words, I’m interested in times that, although wildly different in terms of era, issue, participants, and media, people made decisions in the same way—ranging from the debate over the Sicilian Expedition to LBJ’s decision to escalate the war in Vietnam in the summer of 1965. They are all instances that the communities in question later admitted had been wrong, sometimes by pretending they’d never had the position they did, such as Christians in the US refusing to acknowledge our past commitments to slavery and segregation.

For the sake of argument, let’s stick with the Sicilian Expedition.
In the field of political science, there are some who advocate what’s called the deliberative model of policy determination, and others who advocate what’s often called the pluralist model. (There’s a similar argument in rhetoric, but we’ll use the political scientists terms.) Deliberative democracy “requires our engagement with opposing views” whereas “pluralist views of democracy [are] quite comfortable with highly segregated information spaces in which groups contesting for political power define competing positions crisply and resolve their differences not by agreeing, but by peacefully counting votes at the poll” (Benkler et al. 290-1).

So, you have one way that people in a democracy decide—we argue with (and not at) one another, albeit vigorously, vehemently, and not necessarily very nicely, but we genuinely engage the best arguments the oppositions and our critics have actually made, regardless of political faction—the deliberative model. Another way, the pluralist model, is to see democracy as profoundly expressive. The public expresses its approval or disapproval of political figures by voting for or against them when they come up for reelection; that approval or disapproval is assumed to be on the basis of whether those political figures are enacting policies in the self- or in-group interest of the voters. And those interests are assumed to aggregate to good policies—in this model, a “good” policy is one that the most voters want, and that “want” is assumed to be effectively expressed in voting.

What I want to do in this talk is explore the rhetorical problems inherent in each model, specifically the ways that democratic discourse tends to slouch into demagoguery, largely because that’s such an easy way to motivate people, and both models have problems with motivation.

Imagine that the people in this room are composed of four different kinds of groups: some of us are hunters (who make money partially by guiding hunts), some are corn producers, some are involved in the slaughterhouse industry (for the sake of brevity, call them tanners), and some are brewers. Our interests conflict with one another—the tanners want to dump the leftover guts (known as offal) into the rivers and streams because that’s cheap and easy, and brewers don’t want to use offal-filled water. The hunters want free roaming; corn farmers don’t want people (or prey) crashing through their fields. We really disagree.

And that’s an important point—a lot of Americans (a lot of people) believe that we don’t really disagree, that, for every apparently complicated situation, there is a single right answer that is obvious to people of good sense and goodwill. That is, to us. Disagreement, many people believe, is the consequence of them not listening to us—of them being fooled by bad leaders, biased media, and self-delusion. We, on the other hand, have honest leaders, objective media, and an unbiased understanding of the situation. Thus, those of us who are tanners will think it’s obvious that we should be allowed to dump offal into the rivers and streams—we employ a lot of people, and saving money will enable us to profit more. The brewers will think it’s obvious that that’s a terrible idea, and so on. Each of us will believe that ours is the only legitimate position. So, how do we resolve this disagreement?

If we’re going to engage in the deliberative model, we’d have to begin by rejecting that notion that only our position is legitimate; we’d have to value the inclusion of diverse points of view. The deliberative model says that we should take on the extraordinarily difficult task of arguing together, looking for policies that make everyone at least a little unhappy, but that are in the long-term best interest of everyone, or, at the very least, the long-term better interest of everyone. Hanna Pitkin (talking about Hannah Arendt) summarizes the qualities this approach requires: “The ability to fight–openly, seriously, with commitment, and about things that really matter—without fanaticism, without seeking to exterminate one’s opponent” (266).

Perhaps we might all agree that clean water is necessary, and yet the slaughterhouses employ a lot of people, so we don’t want to exterminate them as a group. We might decide that we, as a community, will pay for a water treatment plant, or perhaps agree that the slaughterhouses get tax breaks for installing their own water treatment. Similarly, we might decide that, since the hunting brings in tourists, the community as a whole will help pay for effective fencing around corn fields, or, again, offer tax breaks to farmers who have to put up the fencing. Or some other solution that isn’t perfect for anyone.None of those solutions will make anyone completely happy, but none of them exterminates any group—we will still have a community of tanners, brewers, farmers, and hunters. And, if our cultural rhetoric about rhetoric—that is, the way we talk on neighborhood mailing lists, NextDoor, social media posts, conversations at home and work about what makes a good or bad political decision —says that good decisions are always troubled, complicated, and never fully satisfying to anyone, then these mutually unsatisfying political decisions will be seen as successes.

That model of decision-making has implications for media choices. If we believe we can only make good policy decisions if we’re looking out for people not like us, and with whom we really disagree, then we have to ensure that we are getting our information directly from the best out-group media, or, at the very least, media that give us the best opposition arguments, and the strongest criticisms of our positions and beliefs. Difference is a virtue, and disagreement good.

From the perspective of rhetoric, there is a serious motivational problem with this model. The public has to be motivated to seek out sources of information that tell us we’re wrong, that the ideal policy solution will not be ideal for us, and that making decisions about a disparate and diverse community is complicated and uncertain. Political discourse will be wonky, fairly technical, and kind of boring, so what motivates us to do that work?

If, however, we try to make this decision from within the second model, the pluralist, it’s a very different process. We would see our task in political decision-making as looking out for us and only us; that would almost certainly involve what is called a zero-sum model (aka “the fixed pie bias”)—that any gain for any other group must be a loss for us. Oddly enough, in a highly-factionalized world, this turns into the belief that any loss for them is a gain for us. We are all people at a horrible Thanksgiving dinner trying to make sure no else gets more pie than we do. We might even settle for getting no pie ourselves, as long as doing so keeps it from them.
From within this model, it would seem that the solution for hunters is to chase corn farmers out of the county—to exterminate them as a voice in our political deliberations. That doesn’t necessarily mean killing them, but it does mean delegitimizing, silencing, and possibly exterminating that political position, often through threats of violence. We don’t have to share pie with anyone not at our table, while we share stories about how stupid and terrible They are. This model makes clear the signs of success—we get the policy that is in our narrow self-interest; that policy is the best policy. This model says that you don’t need to listen to anyone who disagrees because their disagreeing means they aren’t in-group, and therefore, they’re “biased.”

The media choices implied from this model are obvious: we can snuggle cheerfully and warmly within the pillow fort of in-group media. Our media only tells us information that confirms the claims of our faction; it presents weak versions of opposition arguments or misrepresents them entirely, bombards us with stories about how terrible They are, and inoculates us against any out-group arguments we might hear, all the while condemning them and their media for being “biased.”

That’s a much more exciting public discourse than policy wonk analyses of our complicated options, but it also has a serious motivational problem. The rhetoric about rhetoric—how people in normal conversation assess a political success—will be about whether the obviously right policy (that is, the one that benefits us) succeeded. It will be about whether we got our way. The overall model of public policy will be that this group is the legitimate real group of the community, and only its concerns should be promoted. But political figures will find themselves with some rhetorical dilemmas.

For instance, the notion that one group in a community is the only real group whose interests merit consideration, and who succeeds to the extent that others fail, is nonsense. Corn famers pay taxes, and employ people, and also provide habitat for the prey the hunters want to hunt. If the hunters succeed in exterminating the corn farmers, and those farms are replaced by malls, the hunters have not actually won. Hurting your enemy does not necessarily mean you gained. If we operate within the pluralist model, setting yourself on fire because it will make your opposition uncomfortably warm seems like a good idea, and that means, oddly enough, that a model of thinking about political decision-making as just looking out for what benefits us can result in our being willing to hurt our group, as long as we believe it will hurt Them more.

A world operating from within the pluralist model (and, by the way, we are) means that every group is engaged in a kind of political narcissism, with brewers feeling that they are the center of the universe, the only group that really counts, and having narcissistic rages if they don’t get their way. We will have a polarized world in which compromise, negotiation, and deliberation are demonized—they are all seen as a willingness to work with the devil, to water down the correct course of action. Extremism, obstructionism, and fanatical refusal to compromise will all be valorized.

Thus, inevitably, the pluralist model of democratic decision-making leads to what Benkler et al. call a propaganda feedback loop, in which “media outlets, political elites, and publics form and break connections based on the contents of statements, and that progressively lowers the cost of telling lies that are consistent with a shared political narrative and increases the costs of resisting that narrative in the name of truth.” (33)

If you are hoping to get elected, or get subscribers (or in our world, clicks and likes) and you’ve got people operating from within the pluralist model, then public discourse has to shift from policy argumentation to arguments about identity, specifically, in-group membership and loyalty—political discourse (on the part of political leaders, pundits, media, and arguments on social media) will be entirely about which faction is better, which political leaders are more passionately loyal to the in-group, and not which policies help our community as a whole. We will be in a culture of demagoguery.

What I’m saying is that there is a rhetorical paradox inherent to the pluralist model. Imagine that you’re a politician, and you want to get elected by us, and, because we really disagree, you can’t win the election with the support of only one group. One option would be to lie to each group by pretending that you are completely loyal to hunters and hate farmers when you’re talking to hunters, and so on. That’s how a lot of political rhetoric used to work. But it blew up if there was a reporter there to record what you’d said, and it also blew up when you went into the state legislature, the Governorship, or the Presidency and failed to fulfill at least ¾ of your promises, because you’d made problems you couldn’t possibly all keep since they conflict.

And what if none of those groups was large enough to get you elected? Then you’d engage in what the rhetoric scholar Kenneth Burke (writing about Adolf Hitler) called “unification through a common enemy.” If you’re operating from within the pluralist model (in which people should only look out for the short-term interest of their group), you can’t appeal to some sense that the tanners and brewers should sacrifice in order to make common cause–unless you rally them both against the corn farmers or hunters. Or, better yet, against some really marginal group—Jews, perhaps (that has a long history), or, the always goto for demagogues, people new to the community (i.e., immigrants), or perhaps a group with literally no presence in your community, such as MS-13 or Latinx gangs (do not get me started on the fear-mongering on my neighborhood mailing list about gangs—in the whitest neighborhood since white was invented).

Demagoguery is a way of approaching policy decisions that evades policy argumentation (explained in a bit) by shifting the stasis (what we’re arguing about) to a non-falsifiable zero-sum set of claims about how good we are and how bad they are. We argue about identity and character rather than deliberate about policy argumentation.

Policy argumentation is relatively straightforward. People engaged in policy argumentation need to argue:
• There is a need, ill, or problem;
• It is significant;
• It will not go away on its own;
• This is the most plausible narrative as to how this problem has come about.
• I have a plan, and
o It will solve the need I have identified;
o It is feasible; and
o It does not have unintended consequences worse than the “ill” we are trying to solve.

So, let’s go back to Athens, and the debate about the Sicilian Expedition. Thucydides reports the speeches of two rhetors: Nikias (opposed to the invasion) and Alkibiades (in favor). They were debating the policy of invading (and occupying) Sicily. So, did they engage in policy argumentation?

Nikias began with policy arguments, such as that the invasion wasn’t feasible, the occupation even less so, and that there would be unintended consequences (restarting the war with Sparta, while leaving Athens vulnerable). Nikias wasn’t just making an argument; he was advocating a way of thinking about how to argue about policies. He was saying that Athenians needed to think about political choices critically, dubiously, and with a consideration of the long-term consequences. That’s policy argumentation, but it’s risky in a culture of demagoguery, in which all arguments end up being about how much better we (our faction) are than they are. In a culture of demagoguery, most rhetoric is some version of “We rule, and they drool.”

And Nikias was not telling his audience that we rule. He was expressing doubt about Athens’ ability to pull off the invasion and occupation, about its ability to beat not just Sparta, but Syracuse; for an audience prone to thinking about public discourse as praise of the in-group (what Aristotle calls the genre of epideictic), Nikias would have seemed to be impugning the honor of Athens. In a culture operating from within the pluralist model, the most effective rhetoric is the kind that persuades the audience that the speaker is completely loyal to the audience; is not only a member of the in-group, but will represent that group passionately. In that kind of rhetorical situation (often a charismatic leadership relationship), the rhetor being irrational and refusing to think pragmatically gives a rhetorical advantage, since it signals blind faith, and therefore blind loyalty to the group. Nikias’ rational assessment of Athens’ options was not the performance of blind loyalty a lot of his listeners wanted.

And he then went on to make a disastrous rhetorical choice: he attacked Alkibiades’ character, and the character of the people who supported Alkibiades. He said that people just wanted to support the invasion because they were either besotted by Alkibiades (who was a handsome and charismatic man) or besotted by the handsome young men who gathered around him. And Alkibiades, he said, was motivated by greed and recklessness.

He was probably right about Alkibiades’ motives, by the way, but whether Alkibiades had good or bad motives was only relevant in a democracy of pluralism and not one of deliberation. That people have bad motives doesn’t necessarily mean they’re promoting bad policies.

Nikias had raised the issue of Alkibiades’ motives and ethical character, and that gave Alkibiades the opportunity to defend himself by showing he was an honorable person, and he took it. In other words, Nikias shifted the stasis—what the argument was about—from whether the proposed policy was a good one to a question of honor, both Athens’ and Alkibiades’ (that is, from deliberative discourse to epideictic). And Alkibiades argued that he had protected Athens’ honor by sending horses to the Olympics and winning, that he (unlike Nikias) was concerned with protecting Athens’ honor by honoring agreements, that he (unlike Nikias) honored Athens by believing that no enemy could beat Athens.

So, what the Athenians were facing was one speaker who was presenting them with various policy wonk arguments as to why an attractive policy wouldn’t actually work because the Athenians couldn’t beat all comers and a dynamic, charismatic, and apparently rich (he wasn’t as rich as they thought) speaker who said Athenians are the best, everyone else sucks, and we just need to beleeeve.

Athenians voted for Alkibiades, they invaded Sicily, and it was a disaster.

You might be wondering why I’m talking about Athens, Sicily, and Sparta, and Nikias and Alkibiades rather than the more obvious and pressing controversies about current political deliberation and the ethics of our political leaders’ rhetorical strategies. Most of you probably don’t care very much about Athens, well, that Athens anyway, Sparta, Sicily, Nikias, or Alkibiades. And that is why I’m talking about it.

The dominant model of decision-making relies on the false binary of emotions v. reason—you’re either emotional, and making decisions based on your feelings, or you have facts to support your case. That isn’t how cognition works, as years of research shows. Some scholars divide it into System 1 and System 2 thinking—System 1 is heavily reliant on cognitive biases, intuition, and shortcuts, whereas System 2 is metacognition, during which we are thinking about our own thinking. We spend most of our time in System 1 thinking, because System 2 is exhausting.

System 1 thinking is complicated though, as far as the various factors that go into our process—it isn’t just about feelings, or gut reactions; it’s also about beliefs, it can have data involved, and we don’t necessarily feel that we’re being emotional. We can think we’re being “rational.” I like this model, which was put together by political scientists Milton Lodge and Charles Taber. What they show is that our deliberation—by which they mean the aspect of decision-making about which we are conscious—happens from within a set of boundaries established by processes about which we are unconscious, such as confirmation bias, in-group favoritism, binary thinking, associative thinking, prior beliefs. So, for instance, if I get my information from within the kind of propaganda feedback loop that is almost certain to exist in a culture operating on the pluralist model, I will have a lot of beliefs about the opposing faction (for one thing, I will believe that there is only one opposing faction).. I will have been exposed to hours of claims about how terrible they are, and will have seen dozens of examples of members of that faction committing crimes, lying, being corrupt. If I am presented with a political leader of that faction making an argument, I will assess that argument unconsciously influenced by those hours and examples.

The outcome is that I would condemn an argument if made by a member of an out-group faction that I might praise as brilliantly argued and persuasive if made by someone in my faction, all the while thinking I’m being rational.

In our culture of demagoguery, we immediately assess the reliability of not only a pundit or political leader on the basis of whether they are in our faction—even if we think we’re doing it on the basis of the quality of their argument—but we do it with speakers, colleagues, neighbors, interlocutors in social media. If political faction is particularly important to your sense of identity, then politics is something that triggers hot cognition. And research is clear that political identity has become a trigger of hot cognition.

Thus, if I came and talked to you about Trump, Biden, Clinton, McConnell, Pelosi, then a large number of people in this room would dismiss me on the grounds that I was out-group the second I even sounded as though I was criticizing their group. And they would do so on the grounds that my being out-group must mean I am “biased” and they don’t need to listen to me because they already know what people like me say (that’s inoculation, an important part of what a propaganda feedback loop does). So, I talked about Athens, Sparta, and Sicily.

I mention this because I think it indicates one route out of our current culture of demagoguery: history. People who think it is a virtue to refuse to listen to any criticism of their in-group can only be reached if we talk about incidents and instances that don’t trigger hot cognition.

It’s important to note that the propaganda feedback loop says, “They are bad and we are good and therefore you shouldn’t listen to anyone who isn’t us, and anyone who tells you something different from what we’re saying is them.” That sets up a non-falsifiable ideology, since it ensures that people aren’t doing the one thing that enables us to see when we are wrong—listening to people who disagree. But we don’t. We shout at them.

Thucydides describes the “general deterioration of character” that happened throughout the Hellenic world between the time that Pericles praised Athenians for their open-ness to new ideas and willingness to argue and the factionalized world of Nikias and Alkibiades. City-states became rabidly factional, Thucydides says, such that people now valued behavior they used to condemn, and now condemned behavior that used to be valued, such as deliberation, careful attention to decisions, looking into issues, reasonable caution—by the time of Nikias and Alkibiades, those virtues were all dismissed as cowardly and unmanly. A culture that was once praised for valuing skill in deliberation and war now condemned thinking. Thucydides says,
Irrational recklessness was now considered courageous commitment, hesitation while looking to the future was high-styled cowardice, moderation was a cover for lack of manhood, while senseless anger now helped to define a true man, and deliberation for security was a specious excuse for dereliction. The man of violent temper was always credible, anyone opposing him was suspect. [.…] Kinship became alien compared with party affiliation, because the latter led to drastic action with less hesitation. For party meetings did not take place to use the benefit of existing laws, but to find advantage in breaking them. [….] Men responded to reasonable words from their opponents with defensive actions if they had the advantage, and not with magnanimity. Revenge mattered more than not being harmed in the first place. And if there were actually reconciliations under oath, they occurred because of both sides’ lack of alternatives, and lasted only as long as neither found some other source of power. [….] All this was caused by leadership based on greed and ambition and led in turn to fanaticism once men were committed to the power struggle. For the leading men in the cities, through their emphasis on an attractive slogan for each side—political equality for the masses, the moderation of aristocracy—treated as their prize the public interest to which they paid lip service and, competing by every means to get the better of one another, boldly committed atrocities and proceeded to still worse acts of revenge, stopping at limits set by neither justice nor the city’s interest but by the gratification of their parties at every stage, and whether by condemnations through unjust voting or by acquiring superiority in brute force, both sides were ready to justify to the utmost their immediate hopes of victory. And so neither side acted with piety, but those who managed to accomplish something hateful by using honorable arguments were more highly regarded. The citizens in the middle, either because they had not taken sides or because begrudged their survival, were destroyed by both factions. (3.82, Lattimore translation)

This is our world.

References
Achen, Christopher H. and Larry M. Bartels. Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.
Benkler, Yochai, Rob Faris, and Hal Roberts. Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. Oxford University Press, 2018.
Burke, Kenneth. “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle.” The Southern Review, vol. 5, 1939, pp. 1-21.
Ellis, Christopher and James A. Stimson. Ideology in America. Cambridge University Press, New York, 2012.
Hale, John R. Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy. Viking, 2009.
Hanson, Victor Davis. A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and the Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War. Random House, 2006.
Hibbing, John R., and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse. Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs about How Government should Work. Cambridge University Press, New York, 2002.
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
Levendusky, Matthew. How Partisan Media Polarize America. The University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Lodge, Milton and Charles S. Taber. The Rationalizing Voter. Cambridge University Press, New York, 2013.
Mason, Lilliana. Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Become Our Identity. The University of Chicago Press, 2018.
Pitkin, Hanna. The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social. University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Roberts-Miller, Patricia. Demagoguery and Democracy. The Experiment, LLC, 2017.
—-. Rhetoric and Demagoguery. Southern Illinois University Press, 2019.
Thucydides, and Steven Lattimore trans. The Peloponnesian War. Hackett Pub. Co, Indianapolis, 1998.

Antisemitism is a thread interwoven into all parts of the political tapestry

German Jews in Berlin

[I’m normally a big advocate of linking for claims. In this post, I won’t, for various obvious reasons—I’m talking about what people on really awful websites are saying, and I’m uncomfortable giving them the traffic. My decision not to include links means that I’m not presenting this as a set of defensible claims in an argument about policy, but a personal reflection based on my wandering around dark corners of the internet. My hope is that it will make people curious so that they will google the various claims I make. If you google, and think I’m wrong, feel free to comment.]

A lot of people are shocked by the current rise in antisemitism, but I’m not, nor is anyone who knows anything about how racism works. It’s confusing to a lot of people because far too much public discourse about politics relies on the false binary of left v. right (a false binary not made any better by pretending it’s a continuum) and actively damaging stereotypes about what racism is.

For people whose (racist) stereotype of Jews is that they’re lefties, it seems puzzling that other “lefties” would be antisemitic. For people who think that racism is undying and relentless hostility, and whose (racist) notion is that Jews are all supporters of the most extreme policies of Israel, then it’s puzzling that anyone on the right would be antisemitic, let alone any supporters of Trump would be, since his daughter and son-in-law are Jewish.

That there is violent antisemitism on the part of people our gerfucked political discourse identifies as left and right gets rabid factionalists biting their own tails and engaging in a lot of no true scotsman, but it really should be seen as the kind of anomaly that gets people to reconsider the taxonomy.

Our culture is demagogic because it makes every issue a question of identity instead of policy, a rhetorical choice openly advocated by the GOP “Southern Strategy” in 1968, but as old as antebellum politics about slavery. As long as we try to understand our political world in terms of left v. right, we will never understand the pernicious strain of antisemitism in American politics. Antisemitic terrorist incidents will be things we fling at one another as proof that Dems or GOP are evil, rather than facing, honestly, that antisemitism is a thread deeply interwoven into American politics, all over the political tapestry.

Antisemitism is often identified as the first racism, and the origin of racism is often placed in the moment that Spain decided to purify itself of Jews and Muslims (which would mean that antisemitism and Islamaphobia are fraternal twins). Selecting that moment in time might seem weird to anyone who is familiar with earlier writings. Julius Caesar was pretty dismissive about various other groups he fought, and John Chrysostom (an early father of the church) flung himself around about Jews. Cicero has a speech in which he argues that certain witnesses should be ignored because, you know, they’re Jews, and you can never believe them. At least one scholar has argued that racism in the Western world started with the Greeks.

The argument for putting the germ of racism in Spain in the era of the converso policies is that this was a moment when assimilation wasn’t enough. This was the moment was policies were grounded in the sense that some people are essentially different and can never really assimilate.

I think that’s a good way to think about racism: it isn’t about personal hostility, nor about stereotyping other groups (even if negatively) but about a sense that those people are essentially different, and can never really assimilate (I think there are weird exceptions made for token whatevers, which I’d like to call poliocentrism, but that’s a different post).

Every group, from your book club to your nation-state, will fuck up. And when it fucks up, you have a lot of choices. You might decide that it fucked up because everyone was engaged in bad ways of making decision. Or, you might decide it wasn’t about how we decided but these decisions, that somehow triggered us too much to decide well. Or, you might decide that it was about that bitch eating crackers who somehow forced a decision on us or seduced those assholes… or something. You’ll scapegoat the bitch for everything.

Sensible people genuinely engaged in processes of good decision-making take the first choice. The rest of us take the third. And, for most of the history of Western Europe, the bitch eating crackers was Jews.

My family (for reasons I still can’t fathom) once took a road trip that involved our driving along I-5 in California right after it was paved. There were signs saying “NEXT GAS 225 MILES.” We were driving a station wagon with luggage strapped (badly) to the roof. At some point, we realized we’d lost a suitcase far too long after it was reasonable to go look for it. For years after, if any of us lost anything, we would tell our mother that it was in that suitcase. We would tell our mother that things had been in that suitcase we didn’t even own when the suitcase was lost. If what we had been claiming was true, that suitcase would at least have been the size of an intercontinental container. Perhaps two.

Jews are the lost suitcase of Europe.

Some have argued that, since Jews and Muslims were essentialized at the same moment, they’re just as much victims of racism as Jews. But, Muslims were never scapegoated for the ills of Europe. They were other, but not Other (although now they are Other).

Once you understand that Jews are the lost suitcase of Europe—that is, a group that can be scapegoated cheerfully free of any rational argument that might involve coherent arguments with actual evidence—then you can understand the role of “Jews” in demagoguery. It’s never about actual people who are actually Jewish who are actually engaged in actual acts. It’s about a kind of Platonic ideal of “Jews” that can be used as a weapon in the factionalized argument you’re having.

There are three narratives about Jews that have been used to argue for their marginalization, expulsion, or extermination, and we’re seeing all of them right now.

First, they aren’t really “us.” Jews are more clannish, less tied to the country than they are to Zion, better at money. Sometimes, this difference is presented as admirable (as in a recent speech of Trump’s); more often, it’s presented as a reason they should be prevented from joining our country, let alone our country club, or actually expelled as dangerous—an argument that was persuasive in such disparate situations as Madison Grant’s successful arguments that there should be severe limits on Jewish immigration in 1924 and Josef Stalin’s successful pursuit of the Doctor’s Trials.

Second, they are Christ-killers, who need to be kept present so that we can convert them at the last minute and thereby enact our (exegetically indefensible) reading of Revelation. This was, until very recently, the official position of the Catholic church, and a lot of pro-Israel anti-Semites share it. What a lot of people don’t know is that much of the current “evangelical” support of Israel—the kind dominant in the Trump Administration–is a consequence of their reading Revelation in an incoherent and intermittently literal way. Granted, these are the same people who read the story of Sodom as a condemnation of homosexuality, so their exegetical skills are not exactly reasonable, and they’re pretty much a case study in confirmation bias and Scriptural cherry-picking, but what matters about them is that they want nuclear war in the middle east.

Many self-described Christians believe that Jesus will come when “the Jews” are converted to Christianity. That’s a belief that has been repeatedly disproven, but we’ll set that aside. (The people who saw themselves as founding a New Jerusalem thought it meant them. It didn’t.) The important point is that there are a lot of people who support confrontational politics in regard to the middle east because they want a nuclear war that would reduce the number of Jews who need to be converted (I think Pence is among them).

So, anti-semitism is deep among a certain kind of evangelical, even if it’s coupled with support for Israel and a weird kinda sorta if you squint support for Jews (whom they hope will either die or convert).

Third, we aren’t expelling or exterminating Jews because of their race, but because Jews all have bad politics (or you can’t trust any single Jew not to have the bad politics of some of them—the poisoned peanut analogy). It’s important to remember that much of the genocide in Central Europe was under the cover of killing “partisans.” People making this kind of argument says it’s about politics (or culture) but that political determination is always based in race, and they’d really appreciate if you didn’t mention that.

And antisemitism sometimes masks itself as praise. I am old enough to remember people saying, “I’m not racist; I admire that colored people are great with children, and have such a wonderful sense of rhythm.” They thought it was praise as it wasn’t saying that all African Americans were bad, but it was racist af because it was praising a group for talents that aren’t valued. And granting African Americans some (only sorta) “good” qualities, was what they seemed to think was a “get out of racism free card” for what they were about to say next. (Much like, “I’m not racist, but….”) In the case of “the Jews” (as though they are all the same), the “praise” is precisely what Trump said: Jews are good with money and ruthless in their pursuit of it.

That “praise” is the fuel for the narrative that equates modernization, globalization, “international banking” and Jews. That false equation is as old a connection as the volkisch myths on which the Nazis drew. The argument is that Jews don’t have a nation, they have a global relationship. The Nazis and neo-Nazis love(d) that narrative, although it’s cheerfully fact free (after all, the same could be said of Christians, Muslims, or any other religious group that claims to value their religion over other ties).

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Nazis, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists would promote old and busted narratives about Jews being involved in global conspiracies to control all the money, but exactly the same narratives are promoted by far too many people who self-identify as lefty.

I crawl around dark corners of the internet, and, for complicated reasons, at one point I found myself crawling around the weirder parts of the anti-globalist rhetorical world, and I found that antisemitism is alive and well there. I found Holocaust deniers (Holohoax, they call it), people citing the Protocols as though that were a reasonable source, promoting exactly the same myths as neo-Nazis (Jews control the media, own more of the world’s wealth than actually exists, and so on). Every once in a while, I’d run across the old and busted claim that none of the Jews who worked in the WTC showed up that day for work (they did).

My point is that antisemitism is all over the political tapestry. It isn’t an issue of left v. right. It’s an issue of antisemitic tropes being ones that people all over the political tapestry find useful because it’s woven in there, and, yet, oddly enough, the accusation that they are antisemitic is also all over the political spectrum.

We need to stop saying that having a Jewish friend or relative means a person can’t be antisemitic—Adolf Eichmann made the first argument, and Magda Goebbels made the second (and it was true in both cases). We need to stop saying that supporting Israel means you aren’t antisemitic—supporting Israel because you want most Jews to die is antisemitism. We need to stop pretending that simply because you have a lefty agenda you couldn’t possibly be endorsing racism.

We need to understand how deep antisemitism runs in our culture, and we need to stop pretending it’s only a problem for them. It’s true; they are antisemitic. But so are we.