Author: Trish

Another way that American coverage of political issues sucks

A bunch of people are posting a USAToday article that makes it seem McCaskill dissed on Ocasio-Cortez, and they’re expressing an appropriate amount of outrage about McCaskill doing that. The thing is, I’m not sure she did.

I don’t have a dog in this fight. I don’t know either politician at all. But I do know outrage bait, and both the USAToday and CNN articles reek of it. First, they smell like cropped quotes. For instance, the CNN article says,

“I don’t know her,” McCaskill said when asked if she’d consider Ocasio-Cortez a “crazy Democrat” like the ones she decried on the campaign trail. “I’m a little confused why she’s the thing. But it’s a good example of what I’m talking about, a bright shiny new object, came out of nowhere and surprised people when she beat a very experienced congressman.”

Had CNN presented the whole interview, there would have been an exchange like, “Do you consider OC a crazy Democrat like the ones you decried on the campaign trail?” And McCaskill would have answered, “I don’t know her.”

In other words, no, she was not talking about Ocasio-Cortez.

The next part of her quote might have been praise, and might have been criticism. We can’t tell because CNN didn’t give us the context. But we do know this—that this is the photo CNN chose of Ocasio-Cortez.


Meanwhile, this is the photo they chose for Kamala Harris.

So, and that’s my second point, who knows what McCaskill actually said—CNN didn’t give us the interview, but an abridged version that skews against Ocasio-Cortez. Harris has nothing to do with this interview.

[Edited to add: why is Harris here? My crank theory is that CNN wants to play Harris against AOC. In other words: clickbaity CATFIGHT!]

The USAToday version is the classic CATFIGHT version that always gets clicks—women fighting is such fun. It’s the depoliticized, hyperpersonalized coverage of political events that has made me loathe USAToday since it was started.

There might be reasons to criticize Ocasio-Cortez’s policies; McCaskill might have made them. But neither CNN nor USAToday went in that direction because policy argumentation doesn’t get clicks.

So, did McCaskill diss Ocasio-Cortez? Maybe. Maybe not. That isn’t my point. My point is that we don’t know from either the USAToday or the CNN article because neither of them is oriented toward giving voters useful information about anyone involved. CNN is part of the outrage machine, and USAToday is the founder of clickbait journalism. I think lefties sometimes forget that CNN is more interested in getting committed viewers than it is in furthering democratic deliberation, and USAToday is an insult to parrots who might find it in their cages.

Trump and the long con

One of the paradoxes of con artists is that cons always depend on appealing to the mark’s desire for a quick and easy solution but the most profitable cons last a long time. How do you keep people engaged in the scam if you’re siphoning off their money?  

There are several ways, but one of the most common is to ensure that they’re getting a quick outcome that they like. They’ll often wine and dine their marks, thereby coming across as too successful to need the mark’s money, and also increasing the mark’s confidence (and attachment). They might be supporting that high living through bad checks, but more often with credit cards and money from previous marks, or by getting the mark to pay for the high living without knowing. One serial confidence artist who specialized in picking up divorced middle-aged women on the Internet was particularly adept at stealing a rarely-used credit card from the women while they were showering. He then simply hid the bills when they arrived.

Because he seemed to have so much money, the women assumed he wouldn’t be scamming them, and would then hand over their life’s savings for him to invest.

They do this despite there being all sorts of good signs that the guy is a con artist–his life story seems a little odd, he doesn’t seem to have a lot of friends who’ve known him very long, there’s always some reason he can’t write checks (or own a home or sign a loan). There are three reasons that the con works, and that people ignore the counter-evidence.

First, cons flatter their marks, arguing that the marks deserve so much more than they’re getting, and persuade the marks to have confidence in them. They will tell the marks that those people (the ones who are pointing to the disconfirming data) look down on them, think they’re stupid, and think they know better. The con thereby gets the mark’s ego associated with his being a good person and not a con artist—admitting that he is a con means the mark will have to admit that those people were right.[1] The con artist will spin the evidence in ways that show he’s willing to admit to some minor flaws, ones that make the mark feel that she can really see through him. She knows him.[2]

Second, the con works because we don’t like ambiguity, and we tend to privilege direct experience and our own perception. The reasons to wonder about whether a man really is that wealthy are ambiguous, and it’s second order thinking (thinking about what isn’t there, about the absence of friends, family, connections, bank statements). That ambiguous data will seem less vivid, less salient, less compelling than the direct experience we have of his buying us expensive gifts. The family thing is vague and complicated; the jewelry is something we can touch.

Third, people who dislike complexity, who believe that most things have simple solutions, and that they are good at seeing those simple solutions are easy marks because those are precisely the beliefs to which cons appeal. Admitting that the guy is a con artist means admitting that the mark’s whole view of life—that the world has simple solutions, that people are what they seem to be, that you can trust your gut about whether someone is good or bad, that things you can touch (like jewelry) matter.

And it works because the marks don’t realize that they are the ones who’ve actually paid for that jewelry.

There are all the signs of his being a con artist—all the lawsuits, all the lies, the lack of transparency about his actual wealth, the reports that show a long history of dodgy (if not actively criminal) tax practices, the evidence that shows his wealth was inherited and not earned—but those are complicated to think about. Trump tells people that he cares about them; he (and his supportive media) tell their marks that all the substantive criticism is made by libruls who look down on them, who think they know better. The media admits to a few flaws, and spins them as minor.

Trump is a con artist, and his election was part of a con game about improving his brand. But, once he won the election, he had to shift to a different con game, one that involved getting as much money for him and his corporations as possible, reducing accountability for con artists, holding off investigations into his financial and campaign dealings, and skimming.

 And Trump gives his marks jewelry. If you have Trump supporters in your informational world, then you know that they respond to any criticism of Trump with, “I don’t care about collusion; I care about my lower taxes.” (Or “I care about the economy” or “I care that someone is finally doing something about illegal immigrants.”) They have been primed to frame concerns about Trump as complicated, ambiguous, and more or less personal opinion, but the benefit of Trump (to them) as clear, unambiguous, and tangible.

 They can touch the jewelry.

And they don’t realize that he isn’t paying for it; he never paid for it, and he never will. They’re paying for it. They bought themselves that jewelry.

There are, loosely, three ways to try to get people to see the con. First, I think it’s useful not to come across as saying that people are stupid for falling for Trump’s cons (although it can be useful to point out that current defenses of Trump are that he’s too stupid to have violated the law). It can be helpful to say that you understand why he and his policies would seem so attractive, but point out that he’s greatly increased the deficit (that his kind of tax cuts always increase the deficit). It’s helpful to have on hand the data about how much “entitlement”programs cost. Point out that they will be paying for his tax cuts for a long, long time.

Another strategy is to refuse to engage and just keep piling on the evidence. People get persuaded that they’ve been taken in by a con artist incident by incident. It isn’t any particular one, but that there are so many, and they reject each one as it comes along. So, I think that sharing story after story about how corrupt Trump is, how bad his policies are,and what damage he is doing—even if (especially if) people complain about your doing so—is effective in the long run.

Third, when people object or defend Trump, ask them if they’re getting their information from sources that would tell them if Trump were a con artist. They’ll respond with, “Oh, so I should watch MSNBC” (or something along those lines) and the answer is: “Yes, you should watch that too.” Or, “No, you shouldn’t get your news from TV.” Or a variety of other answers, but the point is that you aren’t telling them to switch to “librul” sources as much as getting more varied information. 

Con artists create a bond with their marks—their stock in trade is creating confidence. They lose power when their marks lose confidence, and that happens bit by bit. And sometimes it happens when people notice the jewelry is pretty shitty, actually.

[1]This is why it’s so common for marks to start covering for the con when the con gets exposed. They fear the “I told you so” more than the consequences of getting conned.

[2] In other words, con artists try to separate people from the sources of information that would undermine the confidence the mark has in the con.

For Stephanie

If memory serves, Stephanie Odom came to UT as a literature student, and she was a gifted reader and teacher of literature. But, as often happens, her experience teaching first year writing caused her to change course to rhetoric. She loved it. She loved what happens to students as they become better writers—more confident, more intellectually curious, better at research.

And she really enjoyed reading scholarship in rhetoric, as it was a “conversation” she wanted to join, asking questions that intrigued her,and to which she wanted answers.

But her love of literature, and her wide reading in it, meant that she was puzzled and sometimes irritated by what she saw as an unnecessary antagonism between literature and rhetoric. While it was long past the culture wars of the 80s and 90s that had led to the banning of literature from composition classes, literature was still banned. And, certainly, she saw the reasons for keeping first and second year writing courses from being intro to lit crit or literature appreciation classes—not that she saw such approaches to literature as bad, but simply as out of place–but she didn’t see why banning literary texts (still a common practice) was the necessary outcome of ways of teaching literature being not particularly useful to the goals of introductory writing classes.

Behind these arguments about literature, she thought, there was an argument about the purpose of humanistic studies. Initially, she imagined that she would write a dissertation that would focus on the term“humanism,” and its post-Matthew Arnold permutations. And she was well-trained and well-equipped for exactly that dissertation—one that would require close textual analysis, capacious reading, and precisely her kind of intellectual generosity. She could have written that dissertation about as easily as anyone writes a dissertation. She, however, did something that required more courage.

The problem for her, and this is typical of Stephanie, was that she wasn’t just interested in the theoretical disagreements or intellectual genealogy of the place of literature in writing classes: she wanted to do scholarship that would help teachers teach better. She wanted to know if bringing in literature did actually inhibit writing instruction. And that meant a whole set of other questions—how many people are bringing in literature? What are they doing with it? How do we assess the effectiveness of any teaching practice?

So, partway into her dissertation, she developed a set of questions that required that she learn entirely new methods—survey writing, qualitative analysis of data. She was brilliant, and so certainly smart enough to learn new material, new skills, and even new ways of conducting research. But it took more than intelligence to make that cognitive shift. It took a kind of bravery, and she did it. She was intellectually fierce.

She was also kind and funny, who inspired love, admiration, and respect everywhere she went. She was an Assistant Director in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing, meaning that she helped prepare others to teach writing, who was always kind and helpful to fellow graduate students as they were trying to learn the thing at which she was so skilled.

She was active in a graduate writing group for years, a kind, clear, generous, and usefully critical reader of fellow graduate students’ work. Perhaps more important, at times when other members were slacking off—or even thinking about slacking off—she was cheerfully fierce at holding everyone accountable, partially through her breathtakingly practical approach to solving whatever problems people were presenting as obstacles.

She worked in what was then the Undergraduate Writing Center, and was a respected and talented writing consultant, with whom everyone loved to work. When the Writing Center shifted to the University Writing Center, and moved to a new space, there were two major new opportunities. One was the opportunity to work with graduate students, something that would require establishing a cultural practice of accountable writing groups. The other was to have rooms which would be quieter and less distracting than the hectic and often noisy common space—rooms crucial for being able to resolve the problems faced by students whose hearing, cognitive processes, writing project,or previous experiences meant being in the midst of a crowded and very public consulting space wasn’t practical. 

Thus, when there was the possibility of naming one of those rooms, it was obvious that it should be named for Stephanie. Her commitment to writing—at both the graduate and undergraduate level—and her skill as a teacher and facilitator of writing meant that she was a model of what the UWC was trying to be. That the rooms were also a practical solution to a vexing problem of exclusion made it perfect.

When Stephanie was diagnosed with cancer, all those qualities—her brilliance, ferocity, pragmatism, and ability to inspire love—were tested. And still, she persisted.

And she got a really good job—Assistant Professor at UT-Tyler—where she branched into yet another area of research, working with a criminal justice professor on pragmatic ways of improving student writing. The smart and beautifully-written co-authored article ended up published in a journal on criminal justice education, another intellectually brave venture.

At UT-Tyler, she met a smart, kind, funny, and loving man, and it was wonderful to see her so happy. She also got an adorable dog, whom she loved even after the dog broke a sliding glass door multiple times (because squirrels).

Stephanie died yesterday. She was loved, admired, respected, and needed. I will miss her so very much. She was fierce.

From Trump’s interview with Wall Street Journal

[The short version is that he’s rambling, incoherent, and counter-factual. You should read the whole thing, but you have to have access.]

President Trump: We have money that is pouring into our treasury right now, and on January 1 it’ll become much more so. And here’s the story: If we don’t make a deal, then I’m going to put the $200 — and it’s really $67 — billion additional on at an interest rate between 10 and 25 depending.

Mr. Davis: Including even iPhones and laptops and things that people would know?

President Trump: Maybe. Maybe. Depends on what the rate is. I mean, I can make it 10 percent and people could stand that very easily. But if you read that recent poll that came out, we’re only being – most of this is being – the brunt of it is being paid by China. You saw that.

Mr. Davis: Right. Right. I mean, well, you know –

President Trump: On the tariffs.

Mr. Davis: It depends, like, who –

President Trump: Look, I happen to be a tariff person.

Mr. Davis: Yeah.

President Trump: I happen to be a tariff person because I’m a smart person, OK? We have been ripped off so badly by people coming in and stealing our wealth. The steel industry has been rebuilt in a period of a year because of what I’ve done. We have a vibrant steel industry again, and soon it’ll be very vibrant. You know, they’re building plants all over the country because I put steel – because I put tariffs, 25 percent tariffs, on dumping steel.

How reading Hitler’s deliberations with his generals might make you lose it with sociopathic scammers

When we moved into this neighborhood, an older man stopped by to welcome us, and we thought that was sweet. But, pretty quickly, it became clear that his agenda was warning us against the lesbian couple who lived across from him. He told us that “some people around here” were doing things “forbidden by the Bible.” I became very animated about my need to unpack this box in exactly the right way and said something about being really busy. But he went on spouting fundagelical (and false) talking points about homosexuality and Christianity, and put the cherry on the top by telling me, condescendingly, that he was an expert on the Bible, and willing to help me with it. That happened to be a point in my life when my ancient Greek was crappy, but manageable for the work I was doing (I couldn’t sit down and read Scripture in Greek because both my vocabulary and grammar sucked, but I could follow the arguments about translation in interesting ways), but I was furious. I said something along the lines of, “Oh, really, do you read Hebrew and Greek?” And he said, “No.” And I said something like, “Oh, well, I read Greek, but I’m always looking for someone who reads Hebrew.” He left. Chagrined.

I considered it a win.

As it happens, our son became really good friends with the son of the couple he hated, and so we learned that that bigot harassed that couple a lot.

He shares one of our last names, and lately we’ve been getting a lot of calls for him. We checked, and they’re scams. We don’t really know where he is (he might have moved, since the house seems to have had some remodelling), and we don’t really care. We had three choices: ignore the calls (it’s landline, so we can’t block), tell them they have the wrong people, or, what I did, since I spent much of today reading Hitler’s deliberations with his generals. I spent a day reading about how a guy who believed that what he wanted for himself and people like him merited the killing of 355 million people, so I was pretty much done with sociopaths who think they can make a buck this way.

I lost it, and called back one of the numbers and told the guy who answered the phone that I hope he spends every day of his life dealing with people like him, and that, when he’s old and vulnerable, he is the prey of people like him.

I was so enraged that I was completely incoherent and almost certainly ineffectual, and it was all in service of a bigot, but I’m still proud about it.

And, fyi, the numbers all seem to be 844 area code.

Racism, slavery, and nativity scenes

You might have noticed that nativity scenes have three wise men. Scripture doesn’t say there were three, nor does it specify that one is African. But, that’s what they always have (and the Holy Family is always white, often blond).

So, where did those details come from? From the need to shift slavery into a race-based and perpetual condition. In general, except for a few striking exceptions like the Spartans’ enslavement of the Helots, slavery was generally a temporary condition, the consequence of something like indebtedness or capture in war, and wasn’t connected to any notion of race (which itself wasn’t really a concept until the 15th or 16th centuries).  Enslaved people often had ways of working their way out of slavery, slavery didn’t necessarily extend to their children, and it certainly didn’t apply to everyone like them.

But, for various reasons, at a certain point, people needed to justify slavery as a necessary consequence of having a particular heritable identity. At that point, Christians adopted the Muslim reading of Scripture, and began to read Genesis IX as God’s creation of races. Genesis IX involves Noah’s three sons, and racists read that passage as God’s creation of Africans, whites, and Asians. That reading was especially useful for, and promoted among, pro-slavery rhetors in the US because it appeared to legitimate southern practices (actually very extreme) by grounding them in Scripture. So, as Stephen Haynes shows, reading and portraying the wise men as three–a white, African, and Asian–was part of back-reading Scripture to legitimate the notion of three races, and the notion that one was condemned to servitude.

It’s interesting to look at representations of the nativity, and notice the moment that you get the three races, and where those paintings are from.

I think of myself as a good listener, and a critical interpreter, but, when a pastor said, “Listen carefully to this passage,” and then read it, and then said, “How many wise men did the passage say there were,” I was certain I’d heard him say three. We always read by what we think we know.

Things like this Nativity scene are perfect examples of how racism actually works. Too many people think that racism involves self-conscious intent, a specific desire to oppress or slur a race, but nobody got up in the morning and, to meet their daily quota of racist acts, decided to put together this Nativity scene. They might have even thought (as I once mistakenly did) that such scenes are anti-racist because they show the diversity of people worshipping Jesus. And it wouldn’t be much better if they made all the participants white. The problem with racism and representations of traditional scenes is that those representations almost inevitably rely on conventional understandings of what happened (I thought there were three wise men). Given how deeply interwoven racism is in our traditions and conventions, a representation that is simultaneously comfortably traditional and not comfortably racist is often impossible. And that is how racism works.

The photo at the top of this article is from the paper copy of the catalog for Frontgate. You can get the whole set for about $2k, or maybe not. It appears to have disappeared from their online ordering.

Democracy and the Rhetoric of Demagoguery (ODU talk, hosted by RSA)

Thank-you so much for having me; I’ve been obsessed with the issue of a culture of demagoguery for at least fifteen years, and I’m always glad to talk about it with people who care.

My basic argument is that demagoguery is a way of shifting disagreements from policy argumentation to questions of group identity and loyalty.

People go along with that shift because policy argumentation is complicated, uncertain, and risky, and demagoguery promises to reduce its complexity, uncertainty, and risk.

As Hannah Arendt so elegantly argues in The Human Condition, participation in politics requires a certain amount of faith in our own agency, while it simultaneously so very clearly demonstrates the limits of human agency. Argumentation about politics requires that we make claims about the consequences of policies, all the while knowing that many—and perhaps all—of those claims will be wrong. Political decision-making is riddled with uncertainty. We might feel certain about a decision, but we can’t be certain about all of its consequences. Advocating a political argument is and should be a transcendental leap into the unknown. All the while, with data and reason to support that leap. And the profound uncertainty, and the deep argumentative support, are both part of that leap, when people are engaged in responsible argumentation.

Demagoguery is about dodging the responsibility, the argumentation, and the uncertainty by focusing instead on how much we all hate an out-group.

That simple fact about the uncertainty of decision making is a reminder the world is not fully constituted by how it looks to us—our viewpoint is not all there is.

What’s even more concerning is that it is possible to consider a policy with due diligence, to do one’s best to investigate it from various angles, and with all the best data available, to enact it, and then for our policy to cause tremendous harm. It’s probably impossible to find a policy that doesn’t hurt some innocent being, and some well-intentioned policies hurt a lot. A thorough process doesn’t guarantee a good outcome, even if the people involved have good intentions. Meaning well doesn’t guarantee that we will do the right thing.

All of these characteristics inherent, as Arendt would say, to the human condition mean that it is difficult for us to be honest with ourselves about our limitations and yet think of ourselves as good people with good judgment.

We want to think of ourselves as good people with good judgment and good intentions, and we want policy decisions that benefit us, but, if we support policy decisions that benefit us at the expense of others that is dissonant with our desires to think well of ourselves.

What I’m saying that participation in policy disagreements creates cognitive dissonance between who we want to think we are, what we think we’re capable of, how much control we like to think we have, and what we can see happen time after time—votes don’t turn out the way we want, they do and we still don’t get what we want, despite tremendous work problems still remain.

Because the stakes are so high in politics, we want certainty—we want there to be guarantees, necessary consequences, and promises that if you do this or believe that, things will get better. We all want a pony. But we want more than just certain policy outcomes—we want more than a pony—we want to feel that what we’re doing is good and right.

Demagoguery helps silence the cognitive dissonance by saying that there are certainties, and the main certainty is that the in-group is good and just and smart. Demagoguery says, “Politics is very simple, and the answers are obvious to people of intelligence and goodwill.” If policies promised by in-group politicians and pundits don’t play out the way they were supposed to, it’s the fault of an out-group. Were it not for that out-group, the policies that seem obviously right to us would be enacted and would make everything better.

Demagoguery says everything can be divided into binaries, with us v. them being the Ur binary. It isn’t always emotional; it isn’t always populist; but it does always make some version of the move of taking a very complicated situation and breaking it into two sides. Once that move is made, once we’re talking about “both sides” or “two sides,” we’re strengthening one of the foundational pillars of demagoguery.

So, the apparently “fair” claim that “both sides are just as bad” is actually demagogic. That isn’t to say that “both sides” aren’t just as bad—it’s saying that the second you move to “two sides” regarding political deliberation you’re in a realm of imagined identities and not policy argumentation. Not only is it reinforcing the fallacy of the false dilemma but it’s strengthening yet another foundational pillar of demagoguery—that all political questions should be cast in terms of group identity, that to raise a question about political deliberation is always really a question about which group is better.

A persistent hope of humans is that if you free your mind, your ass will follow—that, if you get your theory right, or your intentions right, then your actions will be right.

And that’s a third foundational pillar of demagoguery—that bad things in human history are the consequence of groups with bad motives. That’s a non-falsifiable claim, since no group has entirely good people, and no human has entirely good motives. We’d like to believe that people engaged in genocide know that what they’re doing is murder, but they actually believe that what they’re doing is right. They thought they were on the side of right, and they thought they had good motives.

Right now, you’re probably feeling kind of discouraged—because I’m saying there is no perfect policy solution, that you shouldn’t be certain that your political agenda is right, and that, regardless of your motives, you’re going to make decisions that hurt people.

And demagoguery responds to that feeling of being discouraged by saying, “Don’t listen to her. It might seem complicated and imperfect, but with this one simple trick…” (Which is intriguing—demagoguery often relies on the same moves as self-help rhetoric. That isn’t to say that all self-help rhetoric is demagogic, although some is [such as PUA, get rich quick, and some MLM]) In this case, the simple trick is to stop thinking and settle for believing. It doesn’t frame the choice quite that way—it says, everything you believe is right, the answers to apparently complicated problems are actually simple and obvious to people like you, so you should invest all the power in people who think like you. Because the answers are simple and clear, anyone who says they aren’t, or who has answers different from you is evil, stupid, and/or biased. Any source that provides information different from what we tell you is “biased.”

In other words, demagoguery isn’t just a way of arguing; it’s a way of thinking about public discourse. Demagoguery is epistemic.

Demagoguery invites people into a world but it doesn’t reduce agency or responsibility of the people who accept that invitation. Increasingly, I’m coming to think that demagoguery works primarily by making people feel better about a choice they would already have made, and once they’ve made the initial choice to join a world of demagoguery, it’s easier to get them to commit more—it’s the Spanish Prisoner con of discourse. So, the media isn’t responsible for demagoguery; consumers of demagoguery are responsible for making it profitable.

Demagoguery doesn’t reduce agency or responsibility, but, when it’s a world of demagoguery, it can make people feel as though have more agency and less responsibility. It gives people agency by proxy (when members of their in-group triumph over an out-group, they feel powerful, and as though that was their agency) while always providing plausible deniability for responsibility. There are lots of ways that they have plausible deniability—the fallacy of false equivalence, claims of pre-emptive self-defense, projection of violent intention onto the out-group(s), holding the out-group responsible for their own reaction (what’s called complementary projection—if I feel angry toward you, you must be hostile)—but the one I want to pursue here is just not thinking about it.

If all of your policies would have worked if not for the mendacious and corrupt out-group, then you don’t really have to think about whether they failed for good reason. If every good person agrees with you, then you don’t have to think about the problems others point out with your beliefs, politicians, or policies. That doesn’t make you a mindless person, nor does it make you a person who can’t support their beliefs.

Here, again, I’m following Arendt. Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem has been persistently misread in two important ways. First, an argument that the prosecutor made and that she reported (that Jewish Councils helped the Nazis) was attributed to her; second, her subtle argument about Eichmann was turned into a simplistic one, and then she was criticized for making a simplistic argument. She never claimed he was mindless, or an automaton, nor that he had no antisemitism. She argued inductively, and seems to have expected that people would understand her conclusion (an interesting pragmatic contradiction, as Deborah Lipstadt notes). In her last book, Life of the Mind, she explains how the Eichmann trial got her thinking about thinking. Since what Eichmann had done was so deeply evil, she (and many others) expected a Satanic figure who would glory in what he did—Milton’s Satan or Shakespeare’s Iago. So, she went to the trial expecting someone like that, someone like Goring, perhaps.

However, what I was confronted with was utterly different and still undeniably factual. I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer—at least the very effective one now on trial—was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic one could detect in his past behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial and throughout the pre-trial police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity, but thoughtlessness. (4)

Arendt doesn’t mean he was mindless; she meant he didn’t think. That understudied and underappreciated book is about arguing for her version of what thinking should be, and she doesn’t mean some reductive positivism. She never accepts the emotion/reason dichotomy, and she is interested in the role of language, of what we would now call talking points.

She was fascinated with how animated Eichmann became when he repeated various Nazi talking points, “but, when confronted with situations for which such [Nazi] routine procedures did not exist, he was helpless” (4). He had beliefs, about Jews, about Nazis, and, most of all, about his career, and he had been given a language that made him feel comfortable about those beliefs. But, when confronted with people who didn’t agree, he didn’t know what to say, and often said bizarre things (such as whingeing to his Jewish guards that he hadn’t advanced as much in the Nazi regime as he wanted).

And, like Orwell, Arendt noted the relationship of “winged words” (again, talking points) and Eichmann’s ability to not think about what he was doing.

Cliches, stock phrases, adherence to conventional standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence. (4)

Arendt goes on to say, in one of those moments that explain why I admire her so much, “If we were responsive to this claim all the time, we would soon be exhausted; Eichmann differed from the rest of us only in that he clearly knew of no such claim at all” (4).

Eichmann was rabidly antisemitic, but, when he was faced with the reality of what he was doing, he threw up. (Supposedly, so did Himmler.) He could follow a policy as long as he didn’t think about what the policy really meant. After throwing up, he went back to his office and kept doing the thing that resulted in a situation that made him throw up because, as he said to anyone who would listen, he wasn’t killing anyone; he was just making sure they got on trains. The rhetoric of the danger of Jews, the rhetoric about a Jewish conspiracy, the rhetoric about being loyal to Germany—the rhetoric didn’t persuade him to do what he was doing (careerism did that), but it made him feel better about what he wanted to do (that is, get advancement and kill a lot of Jews).

When he was confronted with what his desires really meant, he was appalled, so he tried not to think about it. And he succeeded, because the whole function of Nazi propaganda was why you shouldn’t think about what it might be like to be a Jew. And that is Arendt’s whole point: what she means by “thinking” isn’t some positivist exclusion of feeling; it’s about stepping above your position to consider the situation from various positions. For Arendt, thinking is imagining.

It’s imagining being someone else.

Imagining being someone else and having compassion for them are two very different things. I spend a lot of time trying to understand the worldviews of people I think are engaged in inexcusably harmful actions. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, I don’t have to like them, even if my religion says I should love them. I’m not sure how the conversion of white supremacists works, since all the data is anecdotal, and I think, from that kind of research, that sometimes compassion works, and sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes shaming does, and sometimes just ignoring them works. But I think worrying about white supremacists might be the wrong concern.

I think there are two different ways that demagoguery can be hopelessly damaging. One is when a culture is dominated by demagoguery as the only form of public reasoning. In that case, a demagogic post on a cooking blog is harmful, insofar as it confirms that this is how we manage disagreement. But, if the culture isn’t demagogic, there’s no real harm.

In other words, and I hope it’s clear this is my main point in my whole career: there are always two arguments going on in a culture: what should we do, and how should we argue about what to do.

Demagoguery answers both questions with “be rabidly loyal to the in-group.”

In a weird way, then, this means that, when we’re arguing with someone who is deep in a culture of demagoguery, and repeating the talking points that make them feel good about their political agenda, we shouldn’t argue with them about what they believe, we should argue with them about how they believe—about whether their beliefs are falsifiable, why they’re so afraid of out-group sources of information, whether they believe their own major premises.

And so I keep ending up back on teaching. We need to teach logic (not as unemotional, and not as a list of formal fallacies, but as failures in a person’s consistency—a sign (but not a necessary one) of in-group thinking, and our intervention is to get people to move to meta-cognition.

Propaganda works by not looking like propaganda

You don’t get your information from propaganda. Your sources are good and objective and unbiased. You have a good and unbiased view of the overall political situation because you know what both sides think, and you’re clear that your side is more sensible.

So, let’s talk about why they are such sheeple and believe propaganda.

First, effective propaganda inoculates its viewers against criticism of the in-group, and it does so in two ways. Inoculation is the rhetorical tactic of presenting your audience with weak versions of out-group arguments—straw men, really—and persuading your audience that they shouldn’t even listen to the other side because their arguments are so bad.

Imagine that you believe that people should be able to have guns in easy access in case there are break-ins, and you can cite statistics about people who have protected their home that way. A medium opposed to gun ownership of any kind engaged in inoculation wouldn’t mention any statistics about people protecting themselves, and would say that, anyone who wants to have guns in their home for personal protection wants to take guns everywhere, including airplanes, and that would be incredibly dangerous, so it’s clearly a stupid argument. But they wouldn’t just say that—they would have a “debate” between people who want to ban all guns and some dumb jerk who says people should be able to take guns on airplanes.

So, viewers of that program would sincerely believe that they’d seen “both sides” of the debate when, actually, they’d watched propaganda. Really effective propaganda appears to present “both sides” by having stooges who argue for really dumb counter-arguments and actually confirm stereotypes about “those people.”

Second, propaganda spends a lot of time telling you how awful the other side is and (and this is the important point), saying they are so awful that you shouldn’t even look at them.

Vehement political criticism, as opposed to propaganda, spends a lot of time telling you how awful the other side is and (and this is the important point) providing links so you can see for yourself. What makes propaganda different from vehement political criticism is that propaganda says, “Rely on us for understanding what they believe” and vehement political criticism insists you read the primary material.

If you are watching media that spends a lot of time telling you how awful the other side is, and that has spokespeople who claim to represent that other side—instead of linking to the other side—you’re watching propaganda.

As Aristotle said, all things being equal, the truth will tend to emerge. And, oddly enough, one of the ways you can tell if a source is propaganda is by Aristotle’s rule—they make sure all things aren’t equal. They know that they have very fragile arguments that will crinkle up and die if exposed to the light of counter-arguments with data, and that’s why they spend so much time in inoculation. They don’t say, “Those people are idiots—go and look at what they’re saying.” They say, “Don’t go look at those sites or listen to those arguments because we will tell you what they are and they’re dumb.”

Any medium that says there is an out-group that is evil, and you should never listen to them, and doesn’t link to their arguments is propaganda.[1]

But, by refusing to link to their opposition, they’re making an admission too–that their claims can’t withstand scrutiny. Propaganda always throws around the term “objective” (it would be interesting to see whether Hitler or Stalin used that term more–it might be a dead heat). Claiming to be objective doesn’t mean you are. Having a good argument means that it can withstand argument–good arguments don’t need inoculation.

I’ve crawled around dark corners of social media, and the worst arguments in all sorts of enclaves have links to claims that support them, but never links to the opposition. They can support what they claim. Anyone can support any claim.

People think that propaganda is rhetoric that is obviously wrong and that has no evidence. But, were that propaganda, it would never work. Propaganda always has evidence and citations. What it doesn’t have is links to opposition sources; it doesn’t have fair representations of the opposition. It doesn’t make falsifiable claims.

The whole point of propaganda is not just to persuade people of your particular claims (since a lot of those claims change for political purposes), but that some media are reliable, and others are too toxic to touch. Propaganda isn’t about “believe this” as much as it is about “never listen to anyone who isn’t in-group.”

If you are relying on your source for what “they” believe, you are drinking deep at the well of propaganda. I hope that Flavor-Aid doesn’t stain your teeth.

[In case you’re wondering why I don’t have links in this post, it’s because my claim is that propaganda misrepresents the opposition and doesn’t link to them. I found, when I started making links, that I was still enforcing the notion that there are two sides, or that propaganda is an either/or rather than a continuum–that I had an opposition whom I should represent fairly. Since I really don’t want to endorse one “side” or another, as much as make a general point about argumentation, I thought that it would make more sense to strip off the links.]

When GOP rabid factionalists discover the concept of a qualifying phrase or clause

I believe in democracy, and that means that I believe that we reason best when we reason together. A good government strives to find the best ways to get good policies is to consider the impact of a policy from the point of view of all the citizens in our diverse world. I don’t think that people of my political group should dominate—my ideal political world is not one in which everyone agrees with me. My ideal political world is one in which people of all sorts of views engage in political argumentation with one another.

Conservatives share that value of an inclusive realm of argumentation, and they believe that we should be careful to conserve the traditions we have, and that we should move slowly when we come up with a new idea. Eisenhower, for instance, supported the Supreme Court in rejecting white supremacy, and insisted on respecting the Constitution, even when he didn’t like what it required him to do.

Eisenhower believed that being conservative meant that you worked as hard as you could to get your political agenda effected by using processes you would think legitimate if the other party used them. You conserved the processes.

The problem is that people who now identify as “conservative” (who perhaps are actually “neo-conservative” or paleoconservative) don’t believe that we should be cautious about social change, nor that the restraints of the constitution should apply. They are trying to conserve their group, and their group’s status, and not the processes. Being conservative used to mean having a consistent principle about how to reason regarding social and fiscal policy. That isn’t what it means now. Now, calling yourself “conservative” means that you are irrationally committed to your party’s political policy and hate “liberals,” even when the policy flips (increasing the debt is bad if Dems do it, but fine if the GOP does it). Conservatives cannot express a principle that operates logically across all their claims.

Here’s what I’m saying: “conservatism” has ceased to be a principle or set of principles from which one decides policy, and has instead become a claim of rabid and irrational factional attachment to whatever benefits the current claims of the Republican Party.

So, to defend this policy, supporters of the current GOP will reason one way, but reason in a different—contradictory—way to support another GOP policy. This incompatible reasoning is particularly clear with the Second Amendment—that absolutist reading is not applied to the First Amendment, nor is there a consistent argument about the impact of bans.  In addition, to support the reading of the Second Amendment that it’s all guns all the time, GOP supporters ignore the qualifying phrase “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.” Paying attention to that phrase would imply that gun ownership is connected to militia duties—a militia that is regulated. And the absolutist reading of the Second Amendment ignores the historical context of the amendment (such as the lack of police force, its importance for slaveholders, and its role in wars against Native Americans). [1]

But, when it comes to do with the 14th Amendment, suddenly there are arguments for thinking carefully about the historical context ,  and they’ve suddenly discovered the importance of a claim being grammatically (and logically) qualified.

Were the current talking points about the 14th Amendment part of a principle of how to read the Constitution, then they would be made by people who also pay attention to the qualifying phrase and historical context of the Second Amendment, but they aren’t. So they’re what scholars of rhetoric call “post hoc reasoning”—you have a position, and then you go looking for ways to support it. Post hoc reasoning is irrational.

Rabid supporters of the GOP, in their race to provide talking points to justify Trump, have missed the most disturbing aspect of what Trump is saying and doing: he wants to undo a long history of Supreme Court decisions by executive order. A sophomore in high school should know that the President can’t do that. It’s not just a violation of the Constitution, but of the principle on which the Constitution is based–of checks and balances.

If Obama had suggested such a thing, or shown such ignorance of the Constitution, the very people who are supporting Trump would have hit the streets screaming. A President who doesn’t understand his own powers, who wants to be able to control every aspect of the government, is an ignorant authoritarian. If he gets his way, and gets appointed hot-tempered rabidly factional justices who will make decisions that protect the President from being called in front of a grand jury (a tactic the GOP used against Bill Clinton)[2], from being required to be transparent about financial dealings that might violate the emoluments clause, and that would allow a President to pardon anyone in order to keep people from testifying about his dealings, he will set in place decisions that would benefit any corrupt President, regardless of political party. No sensible person wants that, regardless of party.

[1] The NYTimes article overstates the connection, in that the idea of having an armed populace that trained regularly and could be called up–a state militia–was not just for slavery. It was also related to fears of the British again attacking, a desire not to have a standing army, and conflicts with Native Americans. But, in the South, the main function of the militia was to protect against slave revolts and to attack Native American tribes who might have escaped slaves.

[2] And here I will confess to a deep and abiding loathing for Bill Clinton. So I’ll point out that, because paleoconservatives and neoconservatives like Trump’s political agenda, they’re letting him put in places processes that would prevent any investigation of a President like Clinton. Processes matter more than the immediate outcome.

Binary (either/or) thinking

Binary thinking is when a person assumes that the situation can be broken into only two options. You either stop or go. You’re with us or against us. You’re loyal or disloyal. You’re us or them. Fight or flight.

It’s pretty rare that a situation is actually a binary, although there are times. But, in general, when people make bad decisions it’s because they thought it was a binary situation and it wasn’t.

For instance, imagine that you’re trying to get somewhere, and your normal route has terrible traffic. If you say, “Maybe this route isn’t working,” and the other person in the car says, “Oh, so you’re saying we should just go home,” they’re engaged in binary thinking. Or imagine that you’re trying fix a lawn mower, and what you’re doing just isn’t working, and you say, “This method isn’t working,” and the other person says, “So, you’re saying we should just give up.”

Humans are comfortable with binaries,[1] and so skeezy salespeople will always try to get you to reduce your choices to a binary. The fundamental binary is us or them.

Sometimes people think they aren’t engaged in binary thinking because they think there is a continuum between the two extremes. But, that’s still deeply fallacious, in that it’s rare that there are two options between which one must choose, especially in politics (there is not a continuum of furthest “left” to furthest “right”–political affiliations, at least as far as policy, are more usefully described in matrices), and the continuum model makes the situation a zero-sum. If there is a binary between black and white, then the more black something is, the less white it is. The less white something is, the more black it must be. Binary thinking contributes to zero-sum thinking, in which people approach a situation as though any gain for them is a loss for us. While business discourse long ago abandoned that way of thinking, it’s heavily promoted by tribal media.

[1] The research on the attractions and fallacies of binary thinking are usefully summarized in Mistakes Were Made, Superforecasting, and Thinking, Fast and Slow.