Author: Trish

Be nicer to Hitler, and he’ll stop being Hitler: The Marquess of Londonderry’s Ourselves and Germany (1938)

In March of 1938, The Marquess of Londonderry published an argument that Britain had failed to respond to Germany’s often (and still) outstretched hand for peace, that Germany wanted nothing but that to which it was due, and that Hitler was a leader with reasonable goals that could be met (although Londonberry also mentions that he frequently asked German leaders to list their policy goals explicitly and clearly, and it never happened). Londonderry’s argument was that British foreign policy had caused Germans to be extremist because the British hadn’t been accommodating enough to the Germans who only wanted [keep in mind he’d never gotten German leaders to say what they wanted].

Londonderry published two versions of this book. One after the “Anschluss,” when Hitler forcibly annexed Austria (something Londonderry blames on Kurt von Schuschnigg, basically for resisting). While the annexation appears to have been popular in both Germany and Austria, the celebration consisted of extraordinary brutality toward the Jews. That violence was very public.

March 1938 was also long after the Nuremburg Laws (1935), after Hitler’s violations of various treaties and agreements and his going back on multiple promises, and over ten years after he published Mein Kampf, which clearly lays out his eliminationist, militaristic, and hegemonic goals. That agreement is generally considered a disaster, that emboldened Hitler, betrayed Czechoslavkia, and cemented his popularity with Germans.

Penguin published the book in October of 1938, with a new preface. On September 30, 1938, Chamberlain had signed the “Munich Agreement,” which gave Hitler a large chunk of Czechoslovakia because Hitler promised, for realz this time, that he wouldn’t try to get any more territory and wanted peace.

Londonderry says, in that preface to the October 1938 edition, that the disastrous Czechoslovakia agreement represented “the fulfillment of my hopes,” that “the international barometer […] is at ‘Set Fair’,” and “ I can only have a feeling of great happiness at this moment that all I have advocated has been brought about in a moment of time” (xi, xiii). He believed that the events of September proved he had been right all along. He had the outcome he had long wanted, the outcome he thought was success, and so he concluded the process—relentless appeasement on the part of Britain—was a good one.

Londonderry is a great example as to why what might be called “folk pragmatism” (“the proof is in the pudding”) is a disastrous way to think about policy deliberation.

Londonderry’s argument was that the Versailles Treaty dishonored Germany (he wasn’t making an economic argument), and denied Germany the right to be treated as an equal in regard to decisions about Europe. (t’s interesting to think about why Londonderry assumed that Germany was entitled to be treated as an equal to France and Britain.) There are, and have long been, lots of arguments as to why WWI (aka, “The Great War”) happened, and the scholarly consensus is that it wasn’t mono-causal, but the consensus is also that Germany bore a large portion of the responsibility. There is also a consensus that the conditions imposed on Germany were no worse than what Germany had imposed on Russia, in the Brest-Litovsk Treaty,  or on France, after the Franco-Prussian War.

Londonderry wasn’t the only major British political figure who supported the policy of appeasement, and the British policy of appeasement was supported for very complicated reasons (best explained by Benny Morris, Abraham Ascher, Tim Bouverie, and Ian Kershaw). But Londonderry’s argument wasn’t particularly complicated: Londonderry accepts the Nazi victim narrative that Germany being treated as it had treated France is so dishonoring of Germany that its putting Hitler in power is the fault of the British. Londonderry argues that Nazis want to be the friend of Britain. Nazi Germany can be an ally, and that we need to stop engaging in rhetoric that alienates them. Londonderry’s argument is, at its heart, an argument about feelings: the Versailles Treaty made Germans feel bad; Hitler is acting the way he is because he feels bad; if we make him and Germans feel better, they’ll have different policies. We can changes their policies by changing their feelings.

Londonderry postures himself as a reasonable person willing to look at both sides, but notice that France’s position is not one of the “sides” that needs understanding. He doesn’t need to understand the feelings of the French or the people opposed to his policies.

In fact, he argues that Germany and Britain have far more in common than Britain and France because “There are many points of similarities between our two countries [Britain and Germany], and there is a racial connection which in itself establishes a primary friendly feeling between us which cannot be said to exist between us and the French” (19).

Not only is that statement racist, but it’s typical of how incoherent racism is. “Racial” categories are always just politically useful ways of grouping people that racists want to believe are real. Madison Grant—the man who wrote “Hitler’s Bible,” whose arguments about race meant we sent away boats of Jews trying to escape Nazi Germany, and who was still being cited as an expert in the 1960s–was very clear that “race mixing” was bad, by which he meant a “Nordic” and a “Mediterranean.” For Grant, and people like him, Italians, Poles, Czechs, Romanians weren’t really white, so a Pole marrying a Brit would lead to the downfall of civilization just as much as a Brit and an African. I mention this just because I routinely run across people with Polish, Ukrainian, Greek, or Italian last names who claim praise Grant as a credible source.

White supremacists aren’t very good at reading comprehension.

But, back to Londonderry. He has two points to his argument. First, the current problems between Britain and Germany, he says, can “only” be solved “by a sympathetic understanding” of the German position.

As far as the first, Londonderry’s book makes clear something I’m not sure he himself saw—he repeatedly asked Nazis to say exactly what they wanted, and they never did. Yet, he insisted that Germany had continually extended the hand of friendship to Britain, and it had been rejected. In other words, Londonderry thought the world of politics was one in which people need to feel good about each other, and feel respected by one another. And that was his mistake. He thought the problem with Germany was not that its culture had a victim narrative of being entitled and encircled, that powerful political groups (including the Catholic party, communists, monarchists, fascists, and nationalists) wanted to make sure that democracy failed, but that Germans felt bad, and therefore they advocated aggression. If we treated them more honorably, they wouldn’t feel bad, and so they wouldn’t be so aggressive.

I’m all for understanding exactly what the other sides are saying. I believe to my core that effective deliberation—political, personal, professional—requires that people really understand the arguments that other people are making. Understanding those arguments doesn’t necessarily mean that you think they have any legitimacy; understanding how a bad argument works is like understanding how a bridge collapsed. But that isn’t what Londonderry means.

And it’s interesting to think about just what arguments he argued needed understanding. Hitler’s arguments about honor needed understanding. Arguments about Nazi genocidal policies didn’t. Londonderry exemplifies one way that people argue for a dodgy in-group policies. Londonderry argued for “fairness” regarding Nazis because he didn’t really have any problem with their political agenda, as far as he understood it.

He includes in his book, after a long description of how charming his 1936 visit to Germany was, a letter to Ribbentrop he wrote February 21, 1936. In that letter he says,

“As I told you, I have no great affection for the Jews. It is possible to trace their participation in most of those international disturbances which have created so much havoc in different countries, but on the other hand one can find many Jews strongly ranged on the other side who have done their best with the wealth at their disposal, and also by their influence, to counteract those malevolent and mischievous activities of fellow Jews” (97)

This is a perfect example of someone making what appears to a gesture of fairness, but is actually just a tone of fairness, all the while endorsing Nazis. Fairness shouldn’t be a tone, but an ethic.

There are people (and I try to be one of them) who can say, “I disagree completely with this argument, but it is a valid argument.” This is kind of old-school logic: being true and being valid aren’t the same. That appeal to fairness is wildly different from what Londonderry is here doing. He is engaged in the kind of bothsidesism that nurtures genocide. He is saying that, on the whole, the logic of the Nazis genocidal policy is legit, but don’t go overboard.

Londonderry argued for listening to Nazis, not because he was, in principle, committed to listening to all groups, let alone holding all groups to the same ethical or rhetorical standards—he didn’t try to be fair to the French, let alone to Churchill. He didn’t argue for listening to Nazis in order to understand how to argue against them. He argued for sympathizing with Nazis because he didn’t really have a problem with their wanting a country free of Jews.

As it turns out, being nice to Hitler didn’t change Hitler’s policies. It rarely does. Hitler’s rhetoric (public and interpersonal) was all about feelings; he was all about making “Germans” (his supporters) feel that he was looking out for them, and he enacted policies that got his supporters short-term benefits. He was like a con artist who seduces someone by wining and dining them, all the time on the credit cards he’s stolen from the mark. What mattered about Hitler wasn’t how he felt about Germany, whether he made people feel proud to be Germans, or even, really, how he felt about Jews or Poles or Sinti or Slavs—what mattered is that his policies ensured that Germany would find itself in a two-front war, a kind of war it couldn’t win, unsustainable economic policies, serial genocides. As they say, fuck Hitler’s feelings.

When someone says we should be nicer to Nazis as though that will persuade Nazis to be less Nazi, they’re saying they don’t really have a big problem with Nazi policies. What’s wrong with Nazis isn’t how Nazis feel; it’s the policies they support. We should stop arguing about Nazis’ feelings, and just oppose policies that help Nazis. Fuck their feelings.

The SF Resolution, the NRA, and our culture of demagoguery

A really smart friend recently asked me about the SF Board of Supervisors Resolution about the NRA.  Her question was:

While I think this is a really unhelpful designation that just feeds into the persecuted minority identity I think the NRA likes to use, I’m actually also really interested in this idea of what terrorism/inciting violence actually is. By creating a brand/identity/environment that’s welcoming to white right-wing terrorists, are they effectively inciting violence?

Great question. Technically, four great questions–exactly the questions to ask.

The portions of the resolution (pdf) relevant to the NRA are:

• WHEREAS, The National Rifle Association musters its considerable wealth and organizational strength to promote gun ownership and incite gun owners to acts of violence, and
• WHEREAS, The National Rifle Association spreads propaganda that misinforms and aims to deceive the public about the dangers of gun violence, and
• WHEREAS, The leadership of National Rifle Association promotes extremist positions, in defiance of the views of a majority of its membership and the public, and undermine the general welfare, and
• WHEREAS, The National Rifle Association through its advocacy has armed those individuals who would and have committed acts of terrorism
[…]
• WHEREAS, The United States Department of Justice defines terrorist activity, in part, as, “The use of any…explosive, firearm, or other weapon or dangerous device, with intent to endanger, directly or indirectly, the safety of one or more individuals or to cause substantial damage to property;” and
• WHEREAS, The United States Department of Justice further includes any individual or member of an organization commits an act that the actor knows, or reasonably should know, affords material support, including communications, funds, weapons, or training to any individual has committed or plans to commit a terrorist act…

My friend was really asking four questions: 1) whether this designation contributes to the NRA fantasy of being gun owners being a persecuted minority; 2) whether the NRA is a domestic terrorist organization; 3) whether this designation is helpful; 4) whether the NRA incites violence.

As far as the first, a major theme in NRA rhetoric is victimization (if you want to get pedantic, masculine victimhood). Gun owners (who are dog whistled as white males in NRA rhetoric) are victimized by crime, Obama kicking down their doors and taking their guns (in 2008 and 2012), not being able to own all the guns, criticism. Those claims of victimization are disconnected from actual events, so nothing the SF Board of Supervisors could make NRA’s base supporters feel more victimized. They’ve already got that turned up to eleven.

The question of whether the NRA is a domestic terrorist organization because it supports domestic terrorism is interesting because it points to how vague (perhaps strategically) the definitions of terrorism are. Technically, the NRA does fit the definition presented in the resolution. Of course, the resolution hasn’t presented all the characteristics that constitute the DOJ definition, but that’s typical of how arguments work in our culture of demagoguery: if you can find one characteristic of a definition or historical analogy that the out-group fits, then you can declare them that thing. Hitler was a charismatic leader, so the out-group charismatic leader is Hitler (but not our in-group leader).

We could consider more criteria than the SF resolution does. And it’s still plausible to argue that the NRA fits the DOJ definition.

The other criteria are:
(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State;
(B) appear to be intended—
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping;

We are in a world of domestic terrorism, and the NRA is engaged in actions that could argue enable that terrorism, and so, technically, the NRA does fit the DOJ definition, and that’s why the DOJ definition is a bad definition. It’s much too broad, and would mean that, for instance, the truck driver who drove through protestors was a domestic terrorist, and therefore his employer was a supporter of terrorism and could be condemned as such by an over-active prosecutor. What he did was assault (perhaps even attempted murder), and his employers should be subject to civil suits.

This designation of the NRA as a domestic terrorist organization is sheer political theatre (unless it’s in service of arguing that the DOJ definition is too vague), a performance of in-group loyalty that is about looking right rather than being effective. So, as far as the third part of the question, no, this isn’t effective.

People think this kind of political theatre is “effective” because they have weird (and generally false) narratives about political change and how it happens.

This hope that “if we take an irrational stance and commit to it passionately that will have an important impact” appeals to the false narrative that political change happens because an individual or small group stands up and says, “This is wrong.” That makes great theatre, fiction, and movies, but that hope is harder to defend historically. Political theatre, that is, the political power of taking an irrational and anti-pragmatic stance, works very well on behalf of parties in power.

The Birmingham bus boycott didn’t happen because Rosa Parks suddenly one day decided she was done with segregation refused to change her seat. It happened because there was an organization that had made pragmatic plans about how and when to have a boycott. That doesn’t make her individual protest any less brave or important—she risked a tremendous amount, and her actions cost her (and the other protesters) a lot—it makes her protest smart. The Stonewall riots were part of an arc of gay rights political action. Again, they were crucial, and brave and dangerous, but they neither began nor ended the struggle for gay rights.  the beginning of a political movement. Martin Luther may or may not have nailed his theses to a door, but what caused the Reformation wasn’t Luther’s standing tall before the Diet—Jan Huss had done the same thing and been killed for it—but that he had important political support. What Luther did was brave and risky, and it worked because he had a movement behind him, not because he engaged in political theatre. Political theatre is effective when it’s part of an effective political movement.

Henry David Thoreau spent a night in jail protesting the Mexican-American war, rightly recognizing it as being a war fought so that slavery could expand. And he wrote a great essay. And no one else spent a night in jail. And he only spent a night. And most people reading his essay don’t even know it was about slavery. There was very little cost to him for this protest—it wasn’t even that bad a jail. His piece had little or no impact on American history until it was picked up much later, the 1900s.

The SF resolution isn’t a Rosa Parks moment. I don’t even think it’s a Thoreau moment. This resolution has no cost for the SF Board of Supervisors. The resolution is demagoguery.  And while demagoguery isn’t always harmful, this one might be, but not because it could alienate supporters of the NRA.

It does, however, aid the rhetorically cunning strategy of the NRA to try to get “gun owners” and “NRA” equated. The NRA  has a lot of problems, including that it really isn’t a political organization as much as representative of manufacturers. The political base of the NRA is shrinking, so they’re trying to expand it by persuading gun owners that everyone is out to get them—that gun owners face existential threat. The NRA rhetoric is that it represents all gun owners. It doesn’t. It represents a minority of gun owners.  Their claim that the world is divided between gun owners who agree with them and people who want Obama to kick down their doors and take all the guns is sheer demagoguery. The NRA’s extremist policies don’t represent all gun owners, even ones who are very pro-GOP and pro-gun, and gun owners aren’t necessarily supporters of the NRA all guns all the time solution to everything.

This leaves the fourth question of whether the NRA incites violence. And that’s complicated. NRA rhetoric has long involved claims of apocalypses that didn’t happen, demagoguery, fear-mongering. (I was going to link to those claims, but I’m really not comfortable doing that–you can go onto the NRA site and go back in their archives or google Obama take our guns). The NRA can’t support its arguments with rational argumentation, and so it doesn’t even try. The NRA never accurately represents opposition arguments.

The NRA isn’t alone in that move. We’re in a culture of demagoguery and an economy of attention, in which our dominant political imaginary is that every side can be reduced to two sides (good v. bad people, aka us v. them), and, therefore, the best way to get vote, donations, clicks, likes, and shares is to say that there are only two options–us or them.

Trump advocated a second amendment solution in regard to Clinton. Anyone who can get two neurons to fire and is not wrapped in a mummy cocoon of ideology knows he was approving of someone shooting Clinton. But here is what is important about what Trump said: had Clinton said there was a second amendment solution to Trump, Trump supporters would have eaten their own heads off in rage. As would have the NRA talking heads. Did Trump really mean it? That doesn’t matter. What matters is that his supporters would have condemned exactly the same behavior on the part of Clinton.

NRA rhetoric is irresponsible, rabidly demagogic, blazingly tribal, voraciously demagogic, and gleefully evasive of what Christ said we should do. That kind of rhetoric, especially when it’s culturally dominant, fosters violence against the outgroup(s) insofar as it encourages people to believe that violence is an appropriate strategy for dealing with every conflict. But the NRA is hardly alone in its demagoguery, and it’s scapegoating to pretend it is.

That’s what makes the SF resolution political theatre, or virtue signalling, or performance of in-group loyalty, or whatever term you want to use. But the NRA condemning the SF Board for engaging in propaganda and sound-bite (sic) political action is such unprincipled in-group factionalism it could make a cat laugh.

The best evidence is that mass shootings are performances of in-group loyalty on the part of people who live in rhetorical swamps that breed toxic masculinity, the disease of notoriety , our culture of rage.

Does that mean the NRA is off the hook for their demagoguery? Not at all. The NRA might not be directly and explicitly responsible for persuading someone to shoot up a temple , synagogue,  baseball game, places with women but it is doing everything it can to persuade anyone who will listen to them that the people who do want to shoot up places should have access to all the guns.

Whether the NRA incites violence is complicated, especially given how violent our everyday rhetoric is (as it always is in a culture of demagoguery) all over the political spectrum. But the NRA does enable mass shootings insofar as every mass shooting enabled by a weapon the NRA wants to make sure is easily available is additional evidence for how damaging the NRA is. (And the “we just need to have a more Christian nation and should enact policies” is an irrational stance and a great example of bad faith argumentation.)  But that doesn’t make the SF resolution right. We are not in a zero-sum world of politics in which “the other side” being wrong means this side is right.

We are in a world in which we should be arguing policy, not engaging in competitions about who is more loyal to the in-group or arguments about which group is better.

Gun violence in the US is a major problem, and treating this issue as though it’s a zero-sum argument between the two political parties is like the crew of the Titanic making a decision about navigation on the basis of who won the on-board shuffleboard competition.

Defenders of Trump’s China policies are avoiding rational policy argumentation, and his critics aren’t doing much better

I study train wrecks in public deliberation, and they’re all times when the people making decisions lived and breathed a world of demagoguery.  In that world, the media says, “This policy is right because there is a legitimate need, and if you disagree with this policy then you don’t acknowledge the severity of the need.”

At one point in time, my husband and I lived in a part of Kansas City we knew had issues with the water supply. We asked a water filter salesperson to come out and talk to us about their filter. The salesman went on and on about how bad the water was, but was struck dumb when we asked about how and whether his filter would solve the problem better than other filters available to us.

That the water was bad doesn’t mean his company’s product was the right solution.

And, really, that’s what people need to understand about decision making. That there is a legitimate need doesn’t mean that this policy is the solution.

In a culture of demagoguery, we argue about only two points: whether there is a need, and the moral quality of the two groups. So, there is the bizarre (and disastrous) assumption that, once you’ve identified the need, then you decide to hand the problem over to the people who seem trustworthy–in other words, appearing to be authentically in-group.

What I’ve come to believe is that, when you put together those two ways of thinking about political deliberation—we only argue need; we dismiss any criticisms of the in-group policy as “biased—you get train wrecks.

I think Trump’s stance regarding China is just such a train wreck. There is a legitimate need, but neither Trump nor his supporters have put together a good argument as to how his plan solves the problem, is feasible, and doesn’t have unintended consequences worse than the problem he’s solving (which is the major critique of his flopping around), and even his critics aren’t arguing policy.

Trump doesn’t have a coherent plan, so it’s hard to argue why it’s a good one, and it’s hard to argue against it, but his critics could point that out. Instead, most anti-Trump media seem engaged in two-minutes hate about Trump, Republicans, and conservatives.

And that is a culture of demagoguery.

But, it’s important to note that people all over the political spectrum (there aren’t two sides) agree that the need argument is strong. It’s an observable fact China engages in and allows intellectual property theft , and that’s what this trade war is about . The arguments for being tougher with China involve violations of copyright —things that have nothing to do with working class people. There are reasonable arguments that the US needs a different set of policies regarding China.

The water in our part of Kansas City really was bad. That didn’t mean this product was good.

What China is doing is bad, but that doesn’t mean Trump’s policy is right. So, what are the arguments for how what he is doing will solve the problem?

I’ve really tried to find arguments defending his policies, and they’re all need arguments—that what he’s doing is right because China is bad. That is, his policy is right because the need is real.

That’s an irrational argument, and an evasion of policy deliberation.

I’m finding a strong consensus that he’s handling foreign affairs, especially economic, badly, even among normally GOP- standard bearing sites. Here’s Foreign Affairs.  Here’s the Cato Institute. And even American Enterprise, which supports a “tough” stance, says Trump’s policy goals are unclear, and advocates other policies (click on the links). The Wall Street Journal says Trump is losing the trade war with China, partially because it’s working from a “shopping list.”

The very conservative organization Heritage says Trump’s policies are bad. What’s odd is that while many pro-Trump media are arguing Trump’s policies are correct because the need is real (an evasion of rational policy argumentation) many reactionary, free-market, and self-identified conservative sites are the ones engaged in policy argumentation, arguing that Trump’s policies are the wrong strategies–they’re engaged in policy argumentation.

And even media that defend getting “tough” on China aren’t defending his current strategies.

The only defenses I’ve found are along these lines—that his policy must be right because it’s punitive.  That’s interesting since George Lakoff long ago argued that “conservatives” (I would say “reactionaries”) always assume that the correct policy solution to every political problem is to identify and then punish the people who are behaving badly. That is a worldview operating in realm free of falsification, relevant evidence, and rational policy argumentation.

As far as I can tell, no one is engaged in rational policy argumentation defending Trump’s policies regarding China, and that’s important.

And, equally important, the anti-Trump public sphere is not engaged in policy argumentation attacking his policies. This is an exception.

I’ve prowled around various anti-Trump sites and found all sorts of arguments about how Trump’s tariffs are bad because is bad, his policies are grifting since he’s protected his daughter, and other evasions of policy argumentation.

What’s wrong with our political situation is not that GOPpers, who are evil, are in control, nor that Liberals, who are evil, are in control. Nor is our political situation bad because “both sides are just as bad.”

There is, of course, the “horse race” coverage, that reframes policy issues as a race between the two side, and engages in motivism—thereby accepting the demagogic premise that politics is a zero-sum battle between two sides.

There aren’t two sides. Our world is not one in which there is a side that says that China is just fine so we need to do nothing and another side that says China is bad so we need to support Trump’s actions.

The world of politics is a world of uncertainty, nuance, and luck that says we should engage in rational policy argumentation about our various policy options regarding China and not reduce every political issue to “liberals” v. “conservatives”—aka, “us v. them.”

As citizens in a democracy we are not faced with the issue of whether Trump is a good or bad person, whether Democrats are better or worse people than Republicans. We are faced with the issue of how to deliberate effectively about issues that aren’t usefully reduced to us v. them.

What matters about Trump’s policies is that they are policies. Let’s argue about them.

How Trump’s tariff war shows the deep irrationality of neoliberal media

G.K. Chesterton has an article about how some event (if memory serves, it was a fire) was framed differently by media depending on what was most politically useful. He says that the sad state of their political world was that something like a fire would be covered differently purely on the basis of whether the incident could be used to excuse or beat up on the other side. He was right.

Chesterton was describing a world in which every incident is used as an example of how the in-group is good or the out-group is bad. There is an incident (a building burns down), and factionalized media deduce how to frame the incident on the basis of what most helps their faction. Factionalized media can deduce that identical behavior (a building burns down) is an inescapable tragedy (if the in-group is in power) or a sign of the deep corruption/incompetence of the out-group (if the out-group is in power).

In such a world, there are no actually principled political positions, just group factionalism. But the people engaged in irrational factionalism don’t like to see themselves (ourselves) that way, and so they/we instead claim that we are passionately committed to a principle–such as neoliberalism. But, when the behavior of an in-group politician violates the principle, then people whose political positions are deduced from loyalty to faction face cognitive dissonance: we are actually only engaged in irrational rationalizing grounded in-group loyalty, but we like to think that  then we are principled people whose stances are logically consistent.

Thus, we might say we are enraged at the idea that a President would use his position as President for financial gain  because that violates a principle for us (such as arguments about Obama or Clinton’s book deals). People whose outrage about Clinton or Obama’s book deals was grounded in principle would be outraged at Trump pushing people to stay in his hotels.

If they aren’t, then the outrage about Clinton and Obama was never about a principle.

It was about their being Democrats. (And, similarly, if people who defended Clinton’s groping but were outraged about Trump’s groping, it’s all about faction and not principle.)

There are few better examples of that deductive factionalism of our world than what is happening with Trump tweeting that “American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China,” and how his base has responded.

The first point to make is that, had Obama tweeted exactly the same thing–that he hereby ordered businesses to stop doing business with China–, the people defending Trump’s tweet would have chewed off their own arms in rage.

In a way, this post could end there. Unless the people now defending Trump say that they would have praised Obama for the same tweet (and behavior), then they’re admitting that they’re irrationally committed to the in-group, they don’t have political principles, but just factional commitment, and their arguments in favor of any policy are deductive factionalism.

One of the characteristics of rational political argumentation is that you hold all groups to the same standards—regardless of faction. If a trade war with China is good when a GOP does it, then it’s good when a Dem does it. If people think that the Economic Emergency Act gave Trump the power to tell businesses what to do, then they would not have objected had Obama done the same thing. If Obama had engaged in a tariff war with China exactly like Trump’s, the people with rational positions on Trump’s tariff war would have supported it.

If people currently defending Trump would not have defended Obama equally vehemently had he done the same thing, then they’re just unprincipled claques.

The second point is that one of the major arguments for Trump and his policies is neoliberalism —the notion that “the market” is self-regulating , and that all intervention or governmental control makes things worse.

Neoliberals (a term that doesn’t mean what much of Trump’s base think it means–neoliberals vote GOP and support Trump) argue that open markets are the best way for the world to work. Thus, if the commitment to a free market were a principled commitment, and not just motivated reasoning, they would express outrage at Trump ordering businesses to do anything.

What Trump did is a complete violation of neoliberalism. Reason, The Heritage Foundation, Fox News, and all the “the market is rational” politicians and pundits should be in a rage about Trump saying that he can issue an order to tell the market how to operate. But, as far as I can tell, they aren’t. None of them is supporting him (which is interesting) but they are not writing the pieces they would have written had Obama done exactly what Trump is doing.

It’s the same problem with Trump’s promise to use government power to force companies to stay in the US (which he hasn’t actually enforced) or to keep coal mines open (which he hasn’t done)—that’s government intervention in the market, which neoliberals claim they are, in principle, completely opposed to. Neoliberal media would have been so outraged their hair would have caught on fire had Obama said he would do those things. Where is the outrage about Trump?

Neoliberals’ failure to call out Trump for his telling businesses what they should do is an admission that they don’t actually think “the market is rational and will sort things out.” Or, to be more accurate, they only think that when it’s a convenient thing to think–when it supports their political faction. They’re loyal to the faction first and to the principle much later than that.

What I’m seeing are various FB acquaintances who have chuffily announced that Trump is taking a hard stance in regard to China (the preponderance of tumescence metaphors in politics really gets on my nerves) who previously endorsed the unleashed market model.

If neoliberals are arguing, as they are, that the market is the true judge of everything, except when it isn’t, then they’re either saying that their claim about the market is just motivated reasoning; or they have to admit that “the market is rational” doesn’t end arguments, and we have to engage in argumentation about whether this exception is valid.

As it stands, the neoliberal defense of Trump is: the market is magically rational except when it isn’t, and we aren’t willing to engage in argumentation about any of that. That isn’t a rational position.

How (not) to think about politics in a democracy

I hope I’ve been clear that I believe that politics is about policy—that politics is the realm in which we deliberate about what policies we should pursue, as people in a shared world (what Hannah Arendt called a “common” world). Those policy options are not a binary, and our commitment to any policy shouldn’t derive from our loyalty to our in-group. Effective public disagreement about our policy options doesn’t require that we argue dispassionately, calmly, decorously, or with any particular feelings (such as respect) toward everyone else involved in the argument.

A model of public disagreement that says we need to be calm and respectful toward others is a model that assumes that people don’t really disagree, or don’t really care. That’s a bad model.

We should think about politics, all politics–the politics of our job, club, church, HOA, state, country—as the space in which we try to respond to the fact of legitimate disagreement.

Unhappily, perhaps the most common way of responding to that fact is to deny that disagreement is legitimate. This view says that our political problems aren’t complicated, that the correct answer to the problem is obvious to any reasonable person.

This assumption quickly leads to motivism and arguments for disenfranchisement.

It eventually leads to fascism or authoritarianism of one kind or another.

People genuinely disagree because we genuinely have conflicting interests and values. In addition, we all have limited perception, and therefore none of us can see an issue from every possible perspective. We disagree because each one of us is always at least a little bit wrong. We disagree because we reason differently. We disagree because we really disagree. And yet there is a we—a people whose lives are infinitely entangled, a we that includes people we don’t know, and might not have been born. In politics, the we of our policy decisions is not the we of our in-group.

So, the first rule of effective democratic deliberation is that it acknowledges that disagreement is inevitable and potentially productive.

This isn’t to say that all points of view are equally valid, nor that we are prohibited from being angry and judgmental about points of view with we disagree. It’s fine (even good) to be angry with people who disagree with us. Someone who is openly angry isn’t necessarily making a more irrational argument than someone who appears to be calm.

An apparently calm person isn’t necessarily making a rational argument, and a person who is angry isn’t necessarily making an irrational argument. The rationality of an argument is most effectively determined by the ways the claims fit together, are defended, and how they related to the argument(s) to which it claims to be a response.

The second rule of effective democratic deliberation is that we do not assess arguments on the basis of the affect of the people making the argument.

If we say that disagreement is legitimate, and that we aren’t going to dismiss arguments on the basis that some interlocutors (as they say in argumentation theory) are emotional, then on what grounds are we going to assess arguments?

And here I want to point to the fact that our common notion of political deliberation is poisoned by the false sense that you either believe that the truth is obvious or you are a rabid relativist. It is not obvious to you in the morning whether it will rain, but you do not therefore believe that all points of view regarding the weather are equally legitimate.

Our world, from the mundane (what will traffic be like on my way to work) to the global (what would the consequences be of this trade policy), is not a world in which we are either certain or clueless. We live in a world of probabilities when it comes to the weather. When it comes to the weather, we do not think that a person is either certain or clueless about it. Most of us manage to understand that an 80% chance of rain is not a statement that it will rain (although many people do manage to misunderstand that). We can make a judgment about what to wear even though we recognize our information about the weather is uncertain. Our judgment might be wrong.

The third rule of effective democratic deliberation is that we understand that the correct answer is not obvious–because we are in a world of uncertainty, but acknowledging uncertainty doesn’t mean being unable to judge.

Being uncertain doesn’t mean being indecisive. I can’t be certain that I’m picking the best outfit for the day, but that doesn’t mean I spend eternity naked in my closet. We spend most of our lives in uncertainty and still manage to make a decision about how to get to work (that might be wrong), apply for a job (that might be terrible), go out on a date with someone (which might be disastrous), buy a taco.

The problem is that a lot of people manage that uncertainty by denying that they are uncertain, and when they get evidence that they made a bad decision, they don’t admit the error, or don’t take responsibility for it. And then they can’t learn from their mistakes.

If I decide to wear a shirt that has to be dry cleaned on a hot day when I know I’ll sweat a lot, I not only have to admit it was a mistake, but then I should think about what went wrong with my decision-making process, especially if that same mistake happens repeatedly.

People felt certain that Christians should support slavery, segregation, criminalizing homosexuality. They were wrong.

The fourth rule of effective democratic deliberation is that feeling certain that you are right doesn’t mean you are. Certainty is more often affective than it is cognitive.

Slaves felt slavery was wrong. They were right.

Feeling that you’re right, believing that a source is true or objective because it rings true to you, feeling certain, having seen evidence with your own eyes—none of those things necessarily mean you’re right, but they might. Feelings are something about which we can argue. Defenders of slavery refused to consider the feelings of slaves, while they spent a lot of time talking about their own feelings. The problem with the argument about slavery wasn’t that it was a feelings v. reason argument, but that only some feelings were considered valid.

The whole point of the weather example is that the world in which we live is not one that is one that legitimates someone being cognitively certain. The sense of being certain is an affective choice—people feel certain. And that feeling of certainty is not necessarily the consequence of evidence.

Acknowledging that we are in a world of uncertainty doesn’t mean we’re in a world in which we have to think all points of view are equally valid. But it is a world in which “This claim must be true because I feel certain it’s true” is not actually a good argument.

This is a very fallacious appeal to authority, the false authority of personal conviction. That a person feels certain about something doesn’t mean it’s true; if they feel certain that their memory of an event is accurate, that’s a datapoint. But that evidence has to be assessed like any other piece of evidence, and one of the things we should consider is whether, on the whole, this source is reliable. Feeling certain is a feeling, and so it should be argued about just as much as we argue about other feelings. And we should argue about feelings—our policies should be grounded in our feelings about future generations, our fears, our hopes—but that someone has a strong feeling doesn’t end the argument. That someone feels certain doesn’t end the argument as to whether they’re right.

The fifth rule of effective democratic deliberation is that we are willing to argue about and with feelings, and that feelings don’t end the argument, including the feeling of certainty.

All political arguments are grounded in and usefully informed by feelings. People who wear “fuck your feelings” t-shirts feel strongly that anyone who disagrees with them is wrong. They also think that criticisms of racism, sexism, sexual assault, sexual harassment, ableism, and so on (what they call “political correctnss”) are grounded in the notion that those things are bad because it hurts someone’s feelings. That’s because they live in an informational enclave that inoculates them against what arguments about sexism and racism and so on are actually about.

So, is the “fuck your feelings” about feelings not mattering—an odd claim since the people wearing it feel strongly—or is it saying fuck your feelings? Those t-shirts say their feelings matter; yours don’t.

Either feelings matter or they don’t. When people argue that only the feelings of some groups matter (or only the experts of some group, or the policies of some group), then they arguing for abandoning democracy. Those are all arguments (or assumptions) that only one group really counts. That’s a common way to think about disagreements (and communities), and it’s a bad one.

It’s a way of denying legitimate disagreement that hurts communities in the long run, but seems to provide a kind of solidarity in the short run, and it makes people feel better about themselves (by pretending that “everyone” thinks the same things they do). A better strategy is to hold everyone to the same standards—everyone has feelings, and we can argue with and about them.

The sixth rule of effective democratic deliberation is that we argue together by holding one another to the same standards.

Holding one another to the same standards isn’t saying that we think all arguments are equally valid. Nor does saying that you might feel certain and yet be wrong mean abandoning judgment entirely.

It means that we need to think about ways of making and assessing arguments that aren’t just about whether a claim seems true to us. It also doesn’t mean that we decide an argument is true because it can be supported with evidence that’s true. “All cats should be killed because these cats did a bad thing” is an argument with evidence, and the evidence might be true, but it isn’t a reasonable argument. It isn’t a reasonable way for us to argue because none of us would apply that standard—kill all members of a group because some of them did a bad thing—to our in-group. It is not a way of arguing that any of us would consider valid if applied to us. Therefore, we shouldn’t apply it to others.

We all think that we are reasonable, and we can all find evidence to support what we believe. That’s how motivated reasoning works.

That you believe your beliefs to be reasonable, that you can find evidence to support your beliefs, that you can point to experts whom you believe to be reasonable who say you’re right—none of that actually means your beliefs are reasonable.

Instead of trying to figure out if we’re right by looking for evidence that supports our position, we need to ask ourselves if we would know if we were wrong. Are our beliefs falsifiable? In other words, what evidence would make us change our minds? Are we getting information from sources that tell us when they’ve been wrong (because all media make mistakes)? Are we getting information from media that represents all the positions, especially opposition positions, fairly? Are we getting information from media that would tell us if an in-group member behaved badly or an out-group member was right?

The seventh rule of effective democratic deliberation is that we have to work to make sure we’re getting information from various perspectives.

A common mistake that people make about sources is to think that sources are either “biased” or “objective.” There are more and less reliable sources, but the whole concept of bias is indefensible. We are all biased. We think, act, feel, and believe within a world of cognitive biases.

Being biased and being rational aren’t mutually exclusive. And that we are biased doesn’t mean we’re incapable of rational policy argumentation. A rational approach to argument means acknowledging the ways our biases might be influencing us, and that’s why we have to try to perspective-shift, to look at our claims from the perspective of others. Would we think this a good argument if made by an out-group? Would we consider this a good way of arguing if made by an out-group?

If not, then we need to stop making that argument, or admit it isn’t valid.

Notice that I’m talking about the validity of arguments being determined by standards that apply across all arguments. That’s what makes rational argumentation. Rational argumentation isn’t argument on the part of people who are rational, nor is it argument that has certain surface features. It’s about how people treat one another.

The eighth rule of effective democratic deliberation is that the fairness rule applies to how we assess the validity of arguments.

One common way that people think they’re being rational when they aren’t is when they’re engaged in a fallacious version of argument from authority. People have a tendency to reason by in/out-group membership. One of the consequences of our world is that there is always a study published in a journal that claims to be peer-reviewed and written by someone with advanced degrees that is unmitigated bullshit. Academic reviewers who are doing their job as reviewers appropriately don’t just argue for publication of arguments they think are true, but ones they think are worth arguing about. So, that something is published in a well-respected journal doesn’t mean everything it says is true.

And then there are journals that are “peer-reviewed,” sort of, in that, if you pay enough, you can get peer reviewers who will approve your article. There are also journals associated with an organization with a political agenda that will only publish articles that promote that agenda, such as the Family Research Association. That something is published in one of those journals doesn’t mean it’s true. Nor does it mean it’s false.

It means that studies should always be considered critically.

The ninth rule of effective democratic deliberation is that we have to understand that an argument being published in a journal claiming to be “peer-reviewed” doesn’t mean it’s true. It just means, at best, that it’s worth arguing about.

I’m arguing, passionately, for effective political deliberation grounded in rational policy argumentation, and I’m not saying that feelings should be excluded from political deliberation, especially not the feeling that you’re right.

We should feel we’re right. We should feel passionately that we’re right. Political activism (from voting to knocking on doors) requires believing that we’re right.

But believing that we’re right doesn’t require that we think that our position is the only one that should be considered—that anyone who disagrees with us is evil and should be shunned. What I’m saying (and it’s what a lot of scholars and thinkers about democracy say) is that democracy requires the conviction that you are right so deep that you act on it, with the mental caveat that you might be wrong such that you don’t kill, expel, or disenfranchise everyone who disagrees with you.

Authoritarian systems say that only this political stance is valid, and all others can be silenced as not legitimate political positions, and therefore argumentation is a waste of time. They might engage in trolling, propaganda, demagoguery, but the last thing they will do is engage in argumentation in which all parties are held to the same standards of argumentation.

People who support authoritarian systems don’t see themselves as subverting democracy. They see themselves as promoting true democracy. They believe that politics isn’t an issue of policy, but identity. They believe that there are people who are really the people, whose views really count, and a true democracy is a political system that entirely and only promotes the interests and policy agenda of those real people.

Since these people tend to think in binaries, they think that, if you aren’t as authoritarian as they are in favor of their group, you have no values at all.

Democracy isn’t about what group you’re in; democracy is a world of policy argumentation.

The tenth rule of effective democratic deliberation requires that we understand that there are ways of arguing that contribute to determining the life of our common world, and those ways of arguing operate across political positions.

Authoritarian politics says that there is only one group should have political authority because only that group really represents the interests of “the people.” States that practiced race-based criteria for voting were authoritarian and not democratic (with “the group” being a race); states that are gerrymandered are authoritarian and not democratic (with “the group” being one party).

Authoritarian politics says that it’s legitimate to deny voting rights to various groups because they don’t have the authority to make political decisions.

A person, or group, arguing that there are only two sides to our political world, and that “the other side” is entirely bad is engaged in a damaging kind of discourse, one that’s bad for our community, and bad for our common world getting to good solutions. I’m not saying they are bad, that they should be denied a voice or vote, that our world should be cleansed of them; I’m saying their way of arguing is bad.

I often find myself getting into confusing arguments on this point, partially because some people can only think in terms of identity, and so they can’t distinguish between being the two very different claims: you are a bad person; you are making a bad argument. Good people make bad arguments, and bad people make good arguments.

There are people we believe are bad, who are making what we consider terrible arguments. It’s fine for us to think some people are bad, and it’s fine for us to think (and even say) that some arguments are dishonest, ignorant, incoherent, stupid, evil, and so on. But, if we think that all arguments other than ours are dishonest, ignorant, and so on, then we’re in the realm of demagoguery. It’s damaging when we think the political realm has only one legitimate position in it (ours) and that every other position should be silenced.

I’m saying that effective democratic deliberation has people who disagree deeply, profoundly, disrespectfully, sincerely, and yet can find ways to argue together.

The eleventh rule is that we understand that we are arguing together with people with whom we passionately disagree and might even think are total jerks.

We might think the other people are jerks because they are jerks, because we disagree with them deeply, or because our sources of information have inoculated against even listening to them, and we’re projecting jerk arguments onto people who might have a point of view that would benefit us to hear.

We are not actually in a world polarized between the left and the right; we aren’t even in a world that is on a continuum between the left and right. We are in a world in which our media—ranging from some rando person’s youtube channel to MSNBC—has learned that you don’t get viewers by promising a nuanced explanation of the complicated range of options we have available to us in our vexed situation. You get viewers by simplifying issues, engaging in demagoguery, and making media a prolonged two minutes hate.

The twelfth rule is that we are not in a world of only two options on every issue, and the political realm is not a zero-sum battle between two sides.

I mentioned earlier that we are all prone to cognitive biases, but we aren’t hopelessly trapped by them. Two particularly important biases for thinking about effective democratic deliberation are in-group favoritism and confirmation bias. Our first impulse is to hold our in-group to lower standards than any out-group because, oddly enough, we believe our group is better. So, if an in-group President issues a lot of executive orders, he’s decisive; an out-group President who does exactly the same thing is a fascist authoritarian.

Another really interesting way that in-group favoritism comes up is in whataboutism, the moment that says that it’s okay for an in-group political figure to do this because an out-group political figure did it.

That can look like a fairness argument, but it isn’t. Fairness is about holding all groups to the same standard. Whataboutism comes from the weird accounting in zero-sum binary politics.

Whataboutism says that any bad in-group behavior is erased by finding any similar out-group behavior. Fairness is asking that all groups be held to the same behavior; whataboutism is about vengeance. It’s the way you argued when you were ten: you were justified in borrowing your brother’s bike without asking because he took your basketball without asking six months ago; he says he was justified in that because you took his mitt without asking a year before that; you were justified in borrowing his mitt because three months before that he borrowed….

In a culture of demagoguery, every argument is about how the in-group is better than the out-group.

In the world of effective democratic deliberation, fairness means that your in-group bad behavior isn’t justified because an out-group member did it too. It means you condemn that behavior regardless of group membership.

The thirteenth rule of effective democratic deliberation is that we value fairness across groups over in-group favoritism and confirmation bias.

These rules don’t guarantee good decisions, or even good processes, but they are ways that tend toward better processes.

The Chosen One

I used to have a colleague who got all of his information from Fox News. Whenever we got into a political disagreement (which wasn’t frequent), he would make some claim to me, and I would show it was wrong. It never changed his reliance on Fox. This isn’t just an issue with Fox—I have the same exchange with people who repeat things from Raw Story, various youtube channels, Mother Jones, all sorts of dodgy sites about nutrition, their fanatical Facebook group, and so many others.

What’s striking about all these cases is that, even in cases when they get shown that their source of information has lied to them, they don’t abandon the source.

They don’t abandon the source because they are engaged in motivated reasoning, in which they begin with beliefs, and then look for data that supports those beliefs. Motivated reasoning is our fallback way of reasoning; it’s deeply embedded even in how we perceive. And so the issue is what is our motivation: we might be motivated to believe that our in-group is good and the out-group is bad, and then we only notice and value data that supports those two beliefs (and engage in motivism when necessary).

That’s what’s happening with Trump’s saying that “he is the chosen one.”

He’s talking about the trade war with China, and, at a certain point, he looks up at the sky and says, “I am the chosen one.”

What did he mean?

He might have meant that he thinks he is the Second Coming of Jesus, the King of Israel, and actually God. While there are people who say Trump is chosen by God to be President, the people who argue that’s what he was claiming (especially in light of his retweeting someone making that claim) are on very shaky ground. I think that’s the least reasonable reading of what he was doing.

Others argue that he is just a troll, and they mean that as a compliment. He’s engaged in a trade war, they argue, that has merit (especially given China’s long violation of basic principles regarding intellectual property, which he mentions). Trump’s saying he’s the chosen one, and looking to the sky is just good TV, as he knows it will make “the libs” foam at the mouth. I suspect that’s true.

Let’s assume that’s the right reading—that Trump was just engaged in good TV, and doesn’t think he’s God–that still doesn’t make what he did okay. What he said is that all the other Presidents have screwed it up, and he sees himself as the only President since Nixon to have the right relationship to China. I don’t think he really thinks he’s the Second Coming, but I do think he believes (as do many of his followers) that he is the only one to get it right. That’s call the fallacy of “universal genius.” It’s arrogant. Either he believes that–that he is the only person to get it right since Nixon opened relations with China–or he’s lying.

Great TV happens when you make extreme claims. So, perhaps, Trump was lying, and he doesn’t think he’s getting a better deal. That should trouble his supporters, since it means he isn’t really engaged in arguing with anyone who disagrees with him.

I think he meant it. I think everything about Trump says he sees himself as a universal genius who is the only one who knows the right answer, and who gets great deals through brinksmanship. He meant what he said when he presented himself as the only President who could get a good deal with China. Better than Reagan, better than Bush. He thinks he can reject what everyone else recommends as a good strategy in favor of his gut instinct. That strikes me as arrogant.

I mentioned a colleague who only got his information from Fox, Limbaugh, and various other right-wing sources, and I mentioned that his information was always wrong. One of our disagreements involved whether Obama had claimed to have ended global warming. My colleague said he had, and I sent my colleague the clip in question, and even he had to admit Obama had said no such thing. “But,” this colleague said, “he was arrogant.”

There are two ways to think about that response. One is that my colleague cares about the arrogance of political figures and would be offended by any arrogant political figure. The second is that he was engaged in motivated reasoning, and just needed to find some reason to continue to think what Obama said was bad; he only objects to arrogance if it’s out-group.

He supports Trump.

So, he doesn’t care about arrogance. He never cared about arrogance. He was just looking for reasons to support his hate of Obama.

Our political world is really just that bitch eating crackers like she owns the place.

Personally, I think Trump even making a joke that he is the Chosen One is blasphemy, especially considering the earlier tweets, but I don’t think he actually believes he’s God. It’s still blasphemy, though. I think interpreting him as saying he thinks he’s God is just that bitch eating crackers; so was my colleague’s perpetual outrage about everything Obama did (including arguing that Michelle Obama dishonored the position of First Lady by wearing a sleeveless dress, but he had no issues with Melania).

There are two ways we get ourselves out of the bitch eating crackers world of politics: when we hear the call of the pleasures of outrage about some out-group political figure, we can ask ourselves whether we would be equally outraged were it an in-group political figure.

If not, if we would find explanations, rationalizations, exceptions for an in-group member who did the same thing, then we are not outraged on principle about the behavior. We’re just hating on the out-group. We’re just settling deep in the pleasures of outrage.

Second, we can ask whether we are getting information from sources that would tell us if the out-group behavior wasn’t that bad or that there are plenty of in-group members engaged in the same behavior. If we only get information from sources that tell us how awful the out-group is, or inoculates us against their arguments, then we’re still not actually engaged in reasonable assessment of our political options, but just rolling around in our outrage about Them.

We can work ourselves into a foaming sweat as to whether Trump sees himself as God, or whether libs are idiots for thinking he did.

Or, perhaps, could we argue about Trump’s trade war with China?

Does Trump have a coherent policy agenda? Or is it really just a very long two-minutes hate?

One argument is that Trump doesn’t have a coherent policy agenda—he never intended to be President, and he was always out for himself, and he is now just engaged in doing whatever the people who fawn on him say is the right policy, as well as whatever benefits him or his family.

The second argument is that Trump represents a new kind of conservatism. According to John Burtka, this national conservatism has these policy goals:

In economics, it would aim to strengthen the middle class, reduce income inequality and develop an industrial policy to ensure economic independence from China for essential military supplies.

Policy proposals could include incentivizing investment in capital equipment and research and development; ending tax advantages for shareholder buybacks; federal spending on infrastructure; promoting skilled trades and vocational programs; busting up inefficient monopolies through antitrust enforcement; slowing immigration rates to tighten labor markets and raise wages for the working class; holding universities liable for student loan debt in cases of bankruptcy; and raising tariffs across the board while slashing taxes on the middle class.

As relates to culture, national conservatives would aim to support families by being pro-life for the whole life. Policy ideas might include paid family leave, increasing the child tax credit, federally funded prenatal and maternal care, reducing or eliminating income tax on families with three or more children, and working toward a society in which a mother or father can support a family on a single income. America’s Judeo-Christian roots would be celebrated, and churches and charitable organizations would be given preference in caring for the poor.

In foreign affairs, national conservatives’ goal is to protect the safety, sovereignty and independence of the American people. America’s regime-change wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen would be recognized as imperial hubris, and anyone involved in their promotion exiled from future positions in Republican administrations. Presidents who ignore congressional authorization for war would be impeached, and members of Congress who eschew their constitutional duties would be stripped of committee assignments and “primaried” in the next election. We would command the seas and space, bring the remaining troops home, secure our own borders and rebuild America.

The third argument is that the pro-Trump media is scrambling to defend the deeply incoherent GOP policy agenda, one that can’t be defended rationally because it isn’t rational, and so they’re deliberately deflecting from affirmative policy arguments to “virtue signaling” and fear-mongering about the Other.

The fourth argument is that ideology doesn’t matter, just outcome. It doesn’t matter if Trump is personally racist, corrupt, senile, as long as he is getting a good outcome for the US. I’m going to leave this one aside, since it’s an actively dangerous argument—it is how democracies die. (Also businesses, but that’s a different post.)

Let’s focus on the second, since it’s the only one that claims that Trump’s actions aren’t either coming from his personal sense of perpetual injury/need for reassurance/greed or from his having done whatever the last person who flattered him said he should do.

And I think it’s helpful to spend a moment to notice that even his defenders rarely try to defend his actions as rationally grounded in a coherent policy agenda that is logically connected to defensible goals. Most pro-Trump rhetoric is that what he is doing is good because it hurts libs, the economy is good, and his demagoguery is great because he’s stigginit to the libs by not being politically correct. In other words, most pro-Trump rhetoric is openly irrational and “HAHAHA WE’RE WINNING.”

That’s interesting.

That’s interesting because the argument of many scholars of rhetoric and political science is that support for Trump is not a rational commitment to an affirmative set of political goals connected to set of policies that can be rationally defended as achieving those goals as much as an affective and tribal framing of politics as whether “we” are better than “them.”

Thus, Trump defenders responding to this criticism by saying, “Democrats do it too” supports that interpretation of Trump supporters: that they can’t defend their policy case(s) affirmatively, but think entirely in terms of a zero-sum between their reductive notion of our political options.

That’s why the second argument matters so much: this is claiming to be a coherent statement of principle on the part of Trump conservatism.

So, let’s take it seriously.

How many of those things has Trump actually done?

In other words, the strongest argument for Trump having a coherent political ideology fails on its face.

That’s interesting.

Our crisis of reasoning

We don’t have a constitutional crisis, or a crisis of civility. We have a crisis of motivated reasoning.

I am a scholar of train wrecks in public deliberation—times when communities decided, after much deliberation, and with many policy opportunities, to pursue a course of action they had plenty of evidence was a bad one. And then, usually, when they got evidence that it was a bad course of action, they recommitted to the clearly bad policy, but with more will—such as the Athenians’ decisions about whether and how to invade Sicily, the US commitment to slavery and then segregation, Hitler’s decisions regarding Stalingrad (and lots of others).

These aren’t just decisions I think are bad, but ones that the communities themselves regretted (sometimes, as with the commitment to slavery, by pretending they never made that decision).

It’s conventional for academics to say, “It’s more complicated than that,” but in this case it really isn’t complicated at all, and the ways people reason badly are well known.

Communities talk themselves into disastrous decisions, while ignoring all the reasonable criticisms of their position, when one position gets associated with loyalty to “us” (the in-group). When we are presented with complicated situations, and especially uncertainty (and, let’s be clear, every important political decision has a lot of uncertainty) we all have a tendency to manage our anxiety about the uncertainty by relying more on reasoning from in-group, and to be more defensive about our in-group. We are motivated to reason in a way that confirms our in-group is good, and all of our problems are caused by the out-group.

Imagine that you are watching your favorite team play, and there is an ambiguous situation, and the ref calls against your team, you will feel outrage on behalf of your team. The rational response (that is, one grounded in a sense that the data about the decision should be the same regardless of in- or out-group) would be to think, “Well, maybe that’s right.” But, if you are motivated to reason about the evidence on the basis of your in-group loyalties, then you’ll be outraged.

And, and this is important, your expressing outrage is also a way of performing in-group loyalty. Having a rational response (that is, one that assesses the call regardless of in- or out-group affiliation) would, especially in the case of a disputed call, show you to be not loyal to the in-group.

We are in a world of evading policy argumentation in favor of framing all policy issues as opportunities of performing in-group loyalty, which means that any argument or policy that makes Them mad is good for us. Political theorists talk about the fallacy of the “fixed pie” model—it’s the sense that the “goods” of our political world (police protection, health care, educational opportunities, infrastructure ranging from clean water to reliable bridges, being able to get political figures to take our concerns seriously) are a fixed amount, so anyone not like you getting a good must hurt you somehow. And, if you can’t get the good, then keeping them from getting a good is a kind of win.

The fixed pie model is part of making every issue an issue of in- or out-group identity. Democrats are framed as pro-immigrant and pro-government, and Republicans as anti-immigrant and anti-government, so, oddly enough, many people will vote Republican because they’re mad about a policy that Republicans enacted.

And that way of thinking about politics hurts everyone. Take, for instance, the issue of immigrants taking the jobs of “Americans” because they’re willing to work for less. The mainstream media (by which I mean Fox, which is the major source of information for a plurality of Americans) is used as an argument for being restrictive at our borders, in a way that means most of us could never have come to the US (and, no, not all the people who show up at our borders are illegal).

If the problem is that employers hire “illegal immigrants” rather than Americans, then a stricter policy at the border is not the sensible solution. If the problem is that Americans can’t get decent wages because “illegals” take the jobs, then the most obvious solution is to have high penalties for employers who hire “illegals.”

But, Trump, who hires a lot of “illegals,” isn’t arguing this point. He isn’t advocating a policy that would solve the problem he claims to care about (he never does). That’s because we aren’t in the realm of rational policy argumentation. We’re in the realm of politics as really about whether good or bad people will get their way, and simply making Them unhappy is as good as getting our way.

Middle income people caring that open borders will hurt their ability to earn a living wage is a legitimate concern. That concern is not solved by separating children at the borders. It’s better solved through various policies, including making it unprofitable for employers to exploit undocumented workers. Why aren’t we arguing about that?

Privilege and the rhetoric police

[Image from George Walling’s 1887 Recollections of a New York Chief of Police]

A lot of people assume that the only function of rhetoric is to persuade all readers to adopt your point of view. That’s wrong in a bunch of ways. A lot of times people have a composite audience, and might have different intentions for different audiences (such as a text with dog whistles, intended to calm some audience members down about whether the rhetor is a war-mongerer while having enough dog whistles that other members of the audience are cheered by the racist and war-mongering of the text—Hitler’s March 23, 1933 speech).

But, in addition, sometimes people have an intended audience, and have no intention of trying to persuade every person who comes in contact with the text.

Imagine that you and a friend are chatting quietly in a fairly empty Tacodeli, and you’re talking about how much you hate squirrels and how awful squirrels are. Although uninvited, I come in and sit at your table, and then say, “You shouldn’t be saying this or talking this way. I like squirrels, and you are doing nothing to persuade me that you’re right. In fact, you’re making me think that your kind of people are irrationally anti-squirrel.” You’d be thoroughly justified in saying, “We weren’t talking to you.” This is rhetoric policing.

Imagine that you and a friend are ranting about squirrels in a Tacodeli, and everyone there is forced to listen to your rant—it would be fair for someone to tell you to tone it down.

The internet makes that analogy weird, in that you can wander into all sorts of conversations in which you’re not part of the intended audience. Imagine a site oriented toward talking about college football. A person who thinks college football is boring might wander on and say, “This site is stupid, and I’m not interested in anything you’re saying, so you all suck. You need to make this site more interesting to people who hate college football.”

Perhaps it’s someone who loves Twilight, and the site has a lot of snark about Twilight, and so that officer of the rhetoric police says, “I have no interest in college football, and I love Twilight, and so your site is doing nothing to persuade me to like football. You should be more welcoming to Twilight fans who hate college football.” It would be perfectly fair for the regular members of the community to say, “I am so sorry that there is something so wrong with your internet connection that you have no possible way of engaging with the vast array of possible communities, and only have access to this site.” Or, perhaps, “I am so sorry that someone is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to read this site. Try dialing 911.” Or just, “Go away.”

I once wrote a talk I rather liked, oriented toward academics, about the ways that Milton’s Samson Agonistes exemplifies misogynistic discourse about women. I had a misogynist (let’s call him Bunny) not at the conference,but who ran across the talk somewhere, tell me that it wasn’t a good talk because it didn’t persuade him. He was rhetoric policing, and he wasn’t part of my audience.

But, he said, if feminists really want to change things, we will have to persuade men like him that there is some validity to our arguments. Therefore, I should have imagined someone like him when I wrote that talk. I pointed out to him that he didn’t try to think about how feminists might respond to anything he wrote, including what he was writing to me at that moment. He never understood that point. He was pretty clear that changing things about feminism would require that anything that any feminist wrote at any time and for any audience had to be oriented toward him, but he honestly was confuzzled at my notion that he would try to be aware of my rhetorical needs in something written to me.

All discourse had to accommodate him and his beliefs, but he didn’t have to accommodate others’ beliefs. His rhetoric policing was an absolutely perfect gem of privilege.

One of the powers of privilege is the power to interrupt conversations of which you are not a part and insist, not just that you be made a part, but that the whole conversation be oriented toward you, accommodating your beliefs, answering your concerns, being careful about your feelings.

Imagine a problem-solving discussion between two highly-ranked tech people about a very specialized issue. It would be seen as weird (or worse) if an intern in advertising interrupted their conversation and insisted they have the discussion in a way he could understand. But their boss, even if zir background wasn’t tech, could interrupt and rhetoric police. The boss has that privilege.

And lots of people have that privilege. Parents have the privilege to ask what their children were talking about (and most children will lie), K-12 teachers have the privilege of asking students what they were talking about (college teachers have the privilege of saying “STFU and listen to what I’m saying”).

If you are from a privileged background (as I am—very privileged), you have a tendency to assume that everyone must accommodate your beliefs, preconceptions, prior knowledge. Bunny unintentionally gave away the playbook for misogynists—what he was saying was that he knew people like him were in power, and that they would only go along with change if their concerns were pandered to.

There is a website that is, as it says everywhere on their site, “Black News, Opinions, Politics and Culture.” And a white guy wrote in and said that, while he was trying to be anti-racist, he found the site didn’t really accommodate his beliefs.  And so, Michael Harriot wrote back:

“The Root is a site for black people, by black people, about black shit. We are not in the business of transforming racists into social justice warriors or changing hearts and minds in hopes of reversing white supremacy. Words cannot do that. If they could, I would have slit my throat with the sharpest, shiniest razor I could find years ago. I would consider my life a failure.
We don’t mind if white people read our content. In fact, we like it when you do. But don’t think for a minute that we are selecting words while considering the sentiment of Caucasian acceptance.
I know that you are accustomed to existing in a universe where everything bends toward whiteness, but do not let that factoid delude you into believing that you are the sky. You are eavesdropping on a conversation among black people. We don’t care if you listen. In fact, we are happy that you are listening, but don’t be bamboozled into thinking we are talking to you.”

Rhetoric policing can be helpful, when it’s from someone we’re trying to reach, and they’re helping us be more effective. As soon as it’s about how you can persuade me, and you should do so because I count more than the audience you’re explicitly trying to reach, it’s all about privilege.

Rhetoric and Racism: How to argue about whether something is racist (revised)

[Image from here]

This class is about how to argue whether a text or action of some kind is racist; this is not about going through the semester stamping things RACIST or NOT RACIST. That’s a waste of time, largely because it isn’t a neat binary between racist and non-racist things (there are degrees and kinds of racism). But it’s also a waste of time because it doesn’t get at why disagreements about racism get so ugly so fast. This class is about more useful ways to talk and think about race that should enable you to have better disagreements about racism.

One point that we’ll come back to again is that almost no one thinks they’re racist (I’ve never met a racist who said s/he was racist)—many people believe that as long as you don’t mention race, use a known racist term, feel and express active hostility to every member of any other race, then what you said/did can’t be racist. There are also people who say, “I can’t be racist, I’m married to a POC” or “I can’t be racist because I’m a member of [an ethnicity against which there has also been discrimination].”

Since they didn’t say the word race, let alone mention any specific race, and are not demonstrably racist against all non-white races, the person who called them racist is the one who “made this an issue about race,” and that makes the accuser the Real Racist Here. There are other assumptions that people make about what it means to be racist that, paradoxically, contribute to racism—such as thinking that racists know they’re racist, and intend to be racist; that racism is conscious hostility to every member of that race (so your black friend is a card you can pull out to show you aren’t racist); that there is only one kind of racism (what scholars call biological racism). There’s also the muddled notion that, since racism is bad, only bad people say or do racist things, if someone is accused of having done a racist thing, they can be exonerated by someone testifying that they are good people—they feed the homeless, they are nice to people, they have a POC as a friend.

That last point is important–that people falsely believe that the claim that someone has done something racist can be deflected by pointing out something good they’ve done–, and it’s where I want to start: what happens quickly in a discussion about racism is that, if you point out that you think I did something racist, I now see the issue (what we’ll call the stasis) of the argument as my identity as a good or bad person (a racist or non-racist), and so I start defending myself as a good person. Whether I am a good person has nothing to do with whether I’m racist—as you’ll see in this class, there have always been good people, many of whom were engaged in important anti-racist activity, who did racist things.

On the whole, I think Jay Smooth’s advice is really good—don’t argue about whether a person is racist, but whether that thing they did was racist. (Also, I love the term “rhetorical Bermuda triangle.”) After a while, if a person does a lot of racist things, I think it’s fair to conclude that they see everything in racist ways, and you can conclude they’re racist—but that’s probably also the moment you aren’t engaging with them anymore. (Or you’re engaging just long enough to ask them to pass the mashed potatoes.) People who are deeply embedded in persistently racist rhetoric are, in my experience, so deeply embedded in identity politics—the notion that the political and social worlds are both zero-sum battles between their “us” and all other groups (“them”) that they’re beyond rational argumentation. This class might help you understand them better, but it won’t help you persuade them because I think they’re beyond persuasion. With people like that, just change the subject or walk away. You can try to argue with them, but don’t keep your hopes high.

But that leaves a lot of people, including you and me, who inevitably do or say racist things, or, at least, things that someone thinks are racist, and who are in situations where we think someone else has done something racist and they probably don’t think they have, but are open to talking about it. This class is not about how we persuade overtly racist people to stop being racist, nor about how we prove we aren’t racist, but about how we talk about the muddled and gerfucked world in which actions, policies, texts, sayings, comments, and conversations might be usefully described as some degree of racist. This class is not about learning to put a stamp of racist or not racist on actions, texts, or people. It’s about trying to talk better about racism. It’s about the assumptions that keep us from having better discussions about racism.

Racism is one of those topics (like grammar, oddly enough—more on that in the class) on which everyone considers themselves an expert. Recently, I found myself in an argument with someone who, when I pointed out that his definition of “racism” didn’t fit with what scholars said about it, said, “Who are these ‘scholars’ of racism? Where are they?” I wanted to post that gif of someone clicking on google, but it would be google scholar. In any case, what matters is that he could have answered that question himself had he queried the topic via google scholar, but he didn’t. He didn’t because he thought racism was an issue about which every person is an expert (or, at least, everyone who agreed with him).

But there are scholars of racism (who agree that there are different kinds and degrees of racism) and the history of concepts of race (who agree that those concepts have changed over time, and they vary across cultures). We’ll read some of them. What scholarship about rhetoric brings to their work is an understanding of how people argue, and especially how people argue productively about definitions.

Different definitions of racism: the rhetorical triangle
The first thing to understand about disagreements is that people in any disagreement engage in what’s called “motivated reasoning”: “motivated cognition refers to the unconscious tendency of individuals to fit their processing of information to conclusions that suit some end or goal.”  One way to think about different definitions of racism is in terms of the rhetorical triangle—people will appeal to different points on the triangle as what constitutes racism.

The notion of the triangle is that a text is created by an author who has a conscious intent as to what impact that text should do to the audience, and it happens within a context. Thus, I am writing this text to try to explain racism to students in the class I’ll be teaching this fall. I’m writing this within the context of the course requirements and readings, and also the context of a President being accused of racism and our world one of increasing  racially-motivated violence.

The rhetorical triangle is really simplistic. The situation is actually much more complicated than that—for instance, I make certain assumptions about students (what references you’ll get, what I’ll need to explain). You look at the assumptions I make and infer what kind of reader I think I have. That is the implied audience. Those assumptions might be wrong; they’ll inevitably be at least slightly wrong. A group of students is a “composite audience” (some of you know more than others, some won’t understand references, and some will find my explanations unnecessary). The actual readers of the text won’t match the implied audience. Similarly, there is a difference between who I really am and how I present myself in this text—the difference between actual and implied author.

This triangle doesn’t really do a good of modelling how texts are actually created, or how people are actually persuaded, but it is a good model of how people think communication works (what might be called “folk rhetorical theory”). And, so, people tend to use it (without even thinking) when trying to assess if someone said or did something racist. So, for instance, if we disagree as to whether Chester said something racist, here’s how that argument might wander around the points on the rhetorical triangle:

• Author: intent
This is the most common stasis for an argument about racism, and it’s often not actually relevant and very rarely useful. People often argue about whether an author consciously intended to say something s/he knew to be racist because the most popular understanding “racism” is that it is the conscious intent to hurt people of another race. I think there are two times that it’s useful to talk about intent, and one is figuring out what we do about it. People often use a term they don’t know is racist, cite a source they don’t realize it’s racist, engage in cultural appropriation when they think they’re honoring a culture, or otherwise do racist things that they wouldn’t have done if they had understood beforehand. But, in all those cases, the lack of intent doesn’t mean the racism disappears. It means the person apologizes and doesn’t do it again. The second way that the discussion of intent can be useful is if Chester sincerely believes he has been misunderstood—he was being sarcastic, for instance. (Dave Chappelle has said some really interesting things about his comedy routine in this light, and Oluo talks about this issue really nicely in her book.)

There are a lot of problems with making “intent” the stasis for arguing about racism. First, it means we aren’t talking about the most important and most damaging kinds of racism (structural, cultural, implicit bias). Second, we quickly get into the issue of motivism—of trying to guess someone’s motives. We’ll talk about both of those much more in the class.

• Author: actual
This stasis also seems sensible within the frame of racism as coming from deliberate intent, and it’s inevitable if we always decide that racists and not racism matter—that is, if we think that there is a binary of racist or not, and we’re trying to figure out whether the person is racist (as though that settles the question of whether the act/text was racist—it doesn’t). If racism is bad because racism is something only bad people do, then if we can figure out if a person is bad or not, we’ve settled the issue of whether they’re racist or not.

That’s like assuming that only bad people are bad drivers, so if you say I’ve driven badly, I could respond with evidence about other ways I’m a good person. Good people can be bad drivers. People can be good in many ways and still engage in, support, or enable racist practices.

• Author: implied
This stasis is pretty uncommon—I’ve only seen it when people are trying to figure out the intent of someone they don’t know, or whom they can’t really identify, or where there isn’t enough information (such as the question as to whether Edgar Allan Poe supported slavery), and so you have to rely on a single text or a few texts. It’s still about whether the person is racist.

• Text: word choice
My sense is that this stasis is in a tie with “actual author” for second most common. This stasis is on the issue of whether the text has the word “race” in it, or a racist epithet. If it doesn’t, then it can’t be racist.

This stasis is attractive to people who believe that things don’t exist till they’re said. These are the same people who, if Uncle Hubert says something racist, and cousin Chester says, “Hey, that’s racist,” that is when the conflict started—everything was fine till then. These people think that they can keep a child from being gay if they don’t let the child come out. There isn’t conflict till the conflict is named because nothing exists till it’s named. (MLK Jr. talks a lot about this, especially in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and “Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience.)

One version of this is almost hilariously casuitical (that is, hair-splitting): that if a rhetor doesn’t mention race, but “culture,” then it isn’t racist. Until the rise of biological racism, “race” was always country of origin. Even after the rise of biological racism, there was a lot of “science” that showed that people from various countries (or continents) were inferior—the Irish, the Poles, the Italians–, biological racism never had a coherent biological definition of race. Some scholars use the term cultural racism, but I’m not wild about that term, since all racism is and always has been about country of origin (sometimes going back pretty far, as with Latinx whose families have been in the US far longer than Trump’s, or Native Americans who are oddly framed as not native to the US). The Jews are not a race.

Here are some questions to ask yourself: are people from Spain white? If two people from Spain move to Mexico and have a child (so that child is a Mexican citizen), is that child white? Are Germans white? If two Germans move to Mexico and have a child, is that child white?

Racism never is and never was actually about biological categories—it’s always about socially constructed categories we have that are entirely political, historical, and thoroughly cultural. Nazis claimed their categories were scientific, but “Jewish” is not a race. Harry Laughlin, the expert who advocated forced sterilization, and extremely restrictive immigration quotas for Poles, Croats, and, well, Eastern Europeans generally, argued that they were different races from the Irish and Italians (or something—his argument is more than a little hard to follow). Madison Grant, still influential among racists, insisted that there were three white races, and intermarriage among them was disastrous. His categories weren’t biological, but cultural, religious, linguistic, and whatever helped his argument (that is, motivated reasoning). In other words, as we’ll talk about in the class, making a “cultural” argument often, but not always, is a racist argument (it depends on whether the “cultural” qualities are naturalized).

Another way that the word choice stasis comes up (with overlaps with context and audience) is whether an author is using dog whistles. That issue is sometimes straightforward (“welfare queen”) but sometimes more complicated, as when there is a possibility of someone not knowing that something is a dog whistle (there was a funny letter to an advice column about an older colleague who was, apparently completely innocently, usimg the Pepe the Frog emoji in emails.).

• Text: argument
This stasis is on the question of whether an argument endorses policies or positions or beliefs that are, in consequence, racist. If you are advocating that some races are more intelligent than others, it doesn’t matter if you avoid “racist” terms—that’s a racist argument. David Duke, for instance, spends an entire book insisting he isn’t racist, while arguing that some races (his) are better than others in every way that matters. It doesn’t matter if he avoids the ‘n’ word. He’s racist. The text: argument is a really productive stasis, but it’s hard for a lot of people to grasp. A culture really concerned about racism would spend a lot of time on this stasis. We don’t.

• Text: tone
Another way that people defend racist arguments or policies as not racist is that they pay attention to tone. Too many people (falsely) assume that the problem with racism is that it is a feeling of hostility toward all members of another race (or toward all other races). They see racism as an expression of hate, and they assume you can’t hate someone without knowing it. It isn’t especially helpful to frame racism as a kind of hate; while there might often be some kind of aversion, racism is quite frequently grounded in condescension, in-group favoritism, erasure, nostalgia, fallacious universalizing, and other ways of thinking that don’t require active hate on the part of individuals. But, if people assume that racism is hate (something we get from movies, where racists are mustache-twirling hateful bigots who know they are bigots and know they hate others), then they assume it can only be expressed with a hateful tone. What you’ll see in this class is that a lot of people have advocated (and enacted) extraordinarily racist policies—including forced sterilization, race-based imprisonment, even genocide—with a calm, “scientific,” sometimes apparently compassionate tone.

• Text: source, format
This stasis doesn’t show up very often, and it can be productive—it can rarely settle the issue, but it can be relevant that an author has a long history of writing racist (or anti-racist) pieces, it’s from a press or journal with a long history of racist (or anti-racist) arguments. That information can help determine if something is satire. It’s also useful to look at sources—if an author is citing racist sources as though they are reliable (and not in order to make a point about their being racist)—then it’s probable that the argument is racist (so this is useful in conjunction with the argument stasis).

• Audience: implied
The implied audience (which some people call “intended” audience—it’s the kind of person the author appears to intend to reach—and others call the textual audience) is the kind of person implied by the various assumptions the author makes. You’ll do much better if you don’t identify the audience by social groups (e.g., students, teachers, white people) since you inevitably end up making generalizations about groups, many of which are false (so, for instance, Malcolm X wasn’t trying to appeal to “black people” with “The Ballot or the Bullet” since it’s an exclusively American argument, and not even all African Americans would agree with his premises). Try to identify an audience in terms of beliefs and assumptions, not identity.

Looking carefully at implied audience can help with disagreements about the argument. For instance, when we’re trying to figure out if an argument is racist we might need to decide if something is satirical, if an author is calling for violence or just engaged in hyperbole, if an author is serious or joking, if an author is repeating a racist claim because s/he endorses it or thinks it’s racist on its face. And trying to figure out that implied audience can help us do those things.

• Audience: actual
In this class, we’ll talk a lot about racism being a question of consequences, and so it’s useful to see how the audience responds (such as that Malcolm X’s audience laughs a lot, or commenters on a post don’t get it). If a text rouses an audience to racist violence, it’s reasonable to argue that it’s racist. Oddly enough, it doesn’t always work the other way—a text might be racist in argument and yet not in consequence because the audience has shifted, its rhetoric is incompetent, or various other reasons.

• Context
When people are arguing about racism, we often end up on the question of context—was that text racist in context (such as Ronald Reagan talking about “states’ rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi; whether we should consider something racist if it was using language and arguments considered “normal” in the era; if the argument was progressive for its era or context). It’s perfectly possible for something to be not racist in one context and racist in another.

As is clear from the above, I think some stases are more productive than others, but I don’t want to sound as though there is only one right stasis. This list is mainly useful for you to understand why people are disagreeing—often you have one person arguing from the stasis of actual author (“I know Chester, and he is a good dog”) and someone else arguing from actual audience (“after that speech, his audience rioted, and attacked squirrels everywhere”). Being able to identify that they are arguing from different stases can mean that the discussion might move to a better place—you might argue, “I’m not saying that Chester is a bad dog, but I’m saying that speech reinforced the racism of the audience, and so he shouldn’t have made it.”

Also, it’s sometimes useful to argue that a text or action is racist from several different perspectives, or to note that someone is fully on the issue of actual author and the issue really is systemic racism. (We’ll talk about that more in class.)

The other point I want to make here is that we often want to make every bad action racism, and that isn’t always helpful (or accurate) for various reasons. Sometimes it is productive to stay off of the racism argument entirely, and just argue that the person is a jerk or the action was terrible.

Different kinds of racism

You’ll read a lot of things this semester that argue for different ways of dividing up kinds of racism. So, when you argue that people disagree about whether This Text is racist (paper #3), and you want to say that one person is assuming that all racism is biological and the other side is cultural, you’ll want to cite specific sources for your definition (such as the Encyclopedia of Race and Racism).

Racism is an instance of in-group favoritism—the tendency to think that members of your in-group are entitled to more than members of out-groups; that in-group members have good motives, and out-group members have bad motives; that the world (or your nation, culture, community) would be better were it only in-group members; that most of our problems are caused by the out-group; that the in- and out-groups shouldn’t be held to the same standards.

So, for instance, I live in an area that has a lot of cyclists come to time themselves for races. Many of them run stop signs, yell at pedestrians, and are generally jerks. I am not a cyclist. For me, cyclists are an out-group. At a certain point, I found myself thinking that cyclists are all jerks. But, once I thought about it, I had to admit that every day I see one or two cyclists behave like jerks, and I see twenty or more cyclists who don’t. Every day, I see a much higher percentage of drivers behave like jerks, but I never came to the conclusion that drivers are jerks. That’s because I’m a driver. They’re in-group. That’s how in-group/out-group thinking works—your mental math is different about in- and out-group members, so you always think that your judgment of the out-group is grounded in empirical data—those two jerk cyclists—but it isn’t, because that data wouldn’t cause you to condemn your in-group (drivers). That’s in-group favoritism.

You take bad behavior on the part of an out-group member as proof that they are basically bad people.

Racism takes in-group favoritism and “naturalizes” it by associating that bad behavior with culture, “race,” ethnicity, or some inherent and inescapable character of a group. My irrational assessment of cyclists wasn’t racism not just because I never said or thought the word race, but because “cyclist” isn’t a category associated with an ethnicity, race, country of origin. Once that cyclist wasn’t on a bike, I wouldn’t assess them as out-group. Racism has two parts: it is in-group/out-group thinking that makes out-group an inescapable identity; also, it is the world in which privileges are (generally unconsciously) given to the inescapable identity of in-group.

Here I’ll review some of the more recurrent categories that scholars use for talking about kinds of racism:

• Cultural racism.  It’s important to keep in mind that the word “race” was used interchangeably with “people” until the early twentieth century (and many people used it that way even longer). Thus, people might talk about “the French race” or “the Irish race” or try to pretend that Jews are a “race.” They were naturalizing the borders and social groups present at that moment in time, by pretending that there were necessary consequences of being a member of a particular language group, within certain borders, or some other odd quality. It was common for people to talk about “race” when they meant religion (as in the case of talking about the Irish race, which meant Catholic). Cultural racism never came up with a coherent definition of “race,” nor used it consistently. Many scholars believe cultural racism is a new phenomenon, with the discrediting of biological racism (the only good thing the Nazis did), but really it’s just a return.
• Biological racism. In the eighteenth century (or perhaps earlier) there was a need to defend a new kind of slavery. Slavery is a long tradition, but, with the exception of the Spartans’ enslavement of the Helots, it wasn’t perpetual—meaning that you might be enslaved because you lost a battle or got indebted, but you could get out of it, and your children weren’t necessarily slaves. The consensus among scholars is that, as the economic practice of “perpetual slavery” (you could be born into slavery, there might be no way out) came to dominate in some areas, there was a need to naturalize it—that is, make it not just an economic or cultural practice, but something grounded in nature. This was particularly important, since the New Testament lists slavers among people who are sinning, and the Hebrew Bible has passages about how to handle slaves violated by the practices dominant in many “Christian” communities.

Thus, through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, experts were trying to find ways to argue that some races (a term they never managed to define) deserved to be enslaved. This is an example of the just world model, or the just world hypothesis (that is, the tendency to assume that the world as it is is just, and so everyone is getting what they deserve—if you’re a slave, you did something or are someone who deserves slavery). This was the era of categorizing (and putting into hierarchies) all the flora and fauna, and so it was an era of saying that differences among human groups were biologically determined.

And there was a tendency to make all taxonomies (ways of categorizing) hierarchical. This was an old notion—that the entire world of God’s creation could be put into a Great Chain of Being. Thus, just as we could say that an ant is lower than a human, we could say that an Italian is lower than a Greek (note, still, there is no coherent definition of race). This all predated Darwin. And, in fact, Darwin didn’t endorse the notion that an ant was “lower” than a human, and he was anti-slavery. Darwin didn’t endorse the notion that evolution heads toward perfection, that some beings are better than others because they are more evolved (the teleological explanation of evolution). But many people used his notion of competition among species to justify how some groups (which they called “races”) had come to dominate others. So, again, the just world model.

• Institutional racism (sometimes used interchangeably with systemic racism)
I think the best way to explain this is for you to think about Parlin (the building). When the building was built in 1953, it didn’t have ramps, only stairs, so it was (and still is, I think) pretty much inaccessible for anyone with even mild problems with stairs. The people who designed the building didn’t get up in the morning and think, “Oh, boy, how can we design the building so it discriminates against disabled people?!” They just didn’t think about disabled people at all. (Which is kind of weird, since lots of students, faculty, or staff end up on crutches at some point.) Institutional racism often comes about people just don’t think about someone having experiences different from theirs—teachers who only include authors of their ethnicity in coursework, or putting a lot of emphasis on standardized test scores in fields or programs where those scores have little predictive value. But it also comes from the ways that unconscious racism can influence decisions, such as a tendency for teachers to come down harder on AAVE than other dialects (because they don’t even realize that they think AAVE is somehow “worse” than other dialects), or operating on the default assumption that all Latinx students are ELL. This really interesting study of how lawyers assess resumes shows that they found more typos (and generally assessed resumes more harshly) if they believed the applicant to be African American. Lawyers use preemptory challenges in ways that hurt non-white defendants disproportionately, and jury deliberations are notoriously influenced by unconscious racism (and sexism, and various other biases) in many ways, ranging from mistrusting testimony by POC to giving POC defendants harsher sentences.

Why is it so hard for us to have good disagreements about race?

We have trouble arguing productively about race as a nation because we have trouble disagreeing about anything. A lot of people believe that the truth is obvious to people of intelligence and goodwill, and that, if two people disagree, one of them is wrong—the people who disagree with us know they’re wrong, and are arguing for perverse reasons; they are idiots corrupted by their political agenda; they are greedy and just looking out for themselves. We are not good at acknowledging that disagreement might be legitimate, or that we might be wrong.

The dominant model for how we know things (an epistemology) is “naïve realism,” which says that you just have to look at the world in an unprejudiced way, and you can see the truth. In fact, we reason by confirmation bias, so that, if you believe that Lithuanians are rude and interrupt everyone, then if someone is rude and interrupts everyone, you’ll be likely to decide that person is Lithuanian, with little or no evidence to that effect. Oddly enough that experience will enable you to think that your racism about Lithuanians is rationally grounded. It isn’t. You don’t know if they are Lithuanian.

If you believe that Lithuanians are rude and interrupt everyone, and you know that someone is Lithuanian, then you’ll notice every time they interrupt anyone and interpret behavior as rude that you wouldn’t consider rude if you did it. (The cyclist example from above.)

Naïve realism gets entangled in supporting racism in three ways: first, naive realists believe that they can know if they’re racist by asking themselves if they are consciously operating from racism; second, they believe that they can know whether someone else is racist by asking themselves whether that person seems racist; third, it enables racism by making people think that races are real—they can look and see different races, and they can see that That Race is bad (again, the cyclist example).

More important, naïve realism—the notion that you can know if something is true by asking yourself whether you really think it’s true—means that people, when presented with disconfirming evidence, just recommit to their beliefs. Naïve realism is confirmation bias; it’s in-group favoritism.

So, one reason people engage in racist actions is that they think they would know if they were doing something racist (a combination of the notion that racism is always conscious and naïve realism), but another is that our entire complicated, nuanced, rich world of policy options is reduced by political parties, the media, and our choices regarding media consumption to the false binary of liberal v. conservative. If you’re in an informational enclave, and you or an in-group political figure is criticized for doing something racist, you’re unlikely to hear the evidence that might support that claim (but you’ll hear about all the evidence for out-group political groups or figures).

We all inhabit worlds of information, and some of those worlds are explicitly in-group (Fox, MSNBC, Infowars, Rush Limbaugh, Mother Jones, Reason). And what those rabidly factional groups do is spend most of their time persuading you that the opposition arguments are terrible, so you shouldn’t even listen to them. This is called inoculation. It isn’t new. Media, pundits, and political figures making racist arguments have always generated support among their base by arguing that, “We are good because those people are awful” and then reducing all the various complicated ways that people disagreed into “Them” (a dumbass parody that no one actually advocated). In the US, in the antebellum era, you either supported the most extreme proslavery positions or you wanted slaves and white women to have sex, you wanted race riots; in the era of segregation, you either supported the most extreme segregationist policies or else you supported black men and white women having sex (I’m not kidding—this was a big deal), a “coffee-colored” world, and the decline of our civilization.

Those arguments (and ideologies) were illogical and entirely false, but they appeared to have a lot of data. Most important, they seemed reasonable to people who thought that the desire to end slavery and segregation was motivated by the desire for black men to have sex with white women. It wasn’t, but the pro-slavery and pro-segregation media presented that as the only real argument that critics of slavery and segregation had. When you watch or read the King/Kilpatrick “debate,” notice that Kilpatrick never really responds to what King actually says, but is obsessed with sex; you’ll see Theodore Bilbo do the same with black scholars—Kilpatrick and Bilbo have been inoculated against counter-arguments, so they don’t even listen.

As I’m emphasizing throughout this class, we should talk about racist actions, but  our culture tends to talk about whether a person is racist. That’s another reason our arguments about racism are so bad. Many people believe that racist actions are the consequence of deliberate decisions to be racist on the part of people who consciously decide to engage in an action that they themselves believe to be racist because they are racists. In this (false) world, there are some people who are racist, and everything they do is deliberately racist.

Also, too many people think there is a binary between racist (really bad) or not racist (good). Some people describe it as a continuum, and that’s a better model, but I think that’s just part of it, because you can have (as you’ll see in the readings) something that argues against biological racism but rests on the premises of cultural racism, or that uses somewhat racist arguments to end a very racist policy.

Our culture also tends to assume that there is a binary of shame v. pride in how we think of ourselves, our nation, our culture—there is the assumption that you are either proud of yourself (meaning you have only done good things), or you think you’ve done something bad (in which case you’re ashamed of yourself). This applies to your sense of your group—you can either take pride in your group (meaning you believe it’s perfect), or you can think your group has behaved badly (in which case you should be ashamed of your group). That’s an actively dumb way to think about ourselves, our culture, our in-groups.

Imagine that someone says to you, “Hey, I think what you just did there was kinda racist,” or “America has a racist past,” or “The Confederacy was racist.” If you believe the three false assumptions above—racism is necessarily an identity argument, something is racist or not, and you can either be proud or ashamed–, then here’s what you hear: “Hey, you are a bad person who should wallow in shame because you decide to be racist every day and every way.” Or, “As an American, you should wallow in shame about the US and spend your whole life apologizing because America and Americans are entirely evil for their deliberate racism.” Or, “If you live in a CSA state or are descended from anyone who fought for the CSA, you should do nothing but wallow in shame and hate your ancestors because they were completely evil.”

You can think your ancestors were completely evil and yet not feel that you have to wallow in shame, you can think they were evil for their racism, but good for some other reason, you can be proud of the good things they did and remorseful for what they did wrong. You can try not to take personally criticisms of your in-groups and acknowledge flaws. There isn’t a binary of shame v. pride—to take pride in something, it doesn’t have to be perfect. And shame is not a particularly useful response to criticism (in fact, it shifts the stasis from what you did to who you are—which is sidetracking).

Think about it this way. You’re driving along, and someone (call him Chester) changes lanes into you and causes y’all to crash. Your car is really damaged. And Chester gets out of his car and you have this conversation:

You: You just changed lanes into me.
Chester: No, I couldn’t have done that because that would make me a bad driver and how dare you call me a bad driver! I am a good person. I foster blind owls, and teach a literacy class at the local public library, and pick up trash on the road.
You: Um, that’s all great, but you did change lanes into me.
Chester: I couldn’t have done that because I’m a good driver. I have never been given a ticket (because I treat police officers with respect, unlike some people), I think terrible things about very unsafe drivers, and I always check my blindspots. And I think the real issue here is that you’ve accused me of being a bad driver.

You wouldn’t say, “Oh, wow, well, yeah, that’s all evidence that you are a good driver, so you can’t possibly have just changed lanes into me.” That would be an absurd conclusion. You would say, “I don’t really care if you’re normally a good driver. I don’t care who you are–I care about what you just did.”

Yet, when someone does something racist, and someone else points it out, we have the “I can’t have changed lanes into you because I’m a good driver” argument. We need to stop having that argument.

There isn’t some binary of being racist (bad, shameful) and not racist (good, pride). Racism isn’t about who we are; it’s, to some extent, about what we do, but even more, it’s about how unconscious biases on the part of many people have a particular outcome. The solution to racism isn’t that some group should feel shame, or stop feeling pride; the solutions are complicated, but we won’t get to those solutions unless we argue better about race.

Hence this class.