Author: Trish

You are descended from a group that had “terrorists” and “criminals”

 
Many people sincerely believe that post-9/11 is the first time that Americans felt threatened by terrorism on its soil, but that fear has waxed and waned for most (if not all) of our history. Slaveholders were in perpetual fear of slave uprisings (especially after 1841), as well as of murder, poisoning, and arson on the part of angry slaves; Abraham Lincoln was killed by a terrorist; and the post-bellum era suffered from what amounted to state-sponsored terrorism (in the form of racist lynchings), as white Southerners reasserted the subjugation of African Americans. The middle nineteenth century had spates of fear-mongering about Catholics (whom, many believed to be in league with the Hapsburg Emperor and the Pope to reinstate monarchy in the US), resulting in serious arguments as to whether they should be allowed to vote, considerable prejudice against their holding office, and some talk of restricting their immigration.The late nineteenth and early twentieth century media, law, and policy show two different sources of existential threat: Asians (initially the Chinese, but then all Asians, prohibiting naturalization); and a vague and muddled fear of Eastern Europeans, which was often synonymous with Jews, anarchists, and, after 1917, Bolsheviks (all of which culminated in the 1924 Immigration Act, that white supremacists love).
 
If you add it up, then you get a really clear sense about American attitudes toward immigration: it was fine for people like me to benefit from a policy that I will not extent to anyone else.
 

A particular kind of immigrant (WASP), who didn’t learn the language of the original inhabitants (how many Dutch, Spanish, or English immigrants decided they needed to learn the local indigenous language?), said every other kind of immigrant was a poison or parasite on the body politic. Every generation of immigrants says THIS generation (the one after them) doesn’t speak English, is essentially incapable of understanding democracy, and is more committed to the homeland politics than to being here.

The tendency for descendants of immigrants to want to pull the ladder up after themselves. They’ll say, for this group: “We should prohibit this group of immigrants because they don’t speak English, they don’t the vote the way I think they should, a lot of them engage in crime, they don’t get democracy, they’re poor, and they’re really icky, and some of them are associated with radical groups.” This group of immigrants, they say, is not like the immigrants from whom I’m descended.

Let’s start with the terrorist argument, since that persuades so many people. The argument is that “My group might have been bad, but we didn’t have terrorists, and this group has terrorists, so we can’t admit them.” Thus, people who want a way of handling immigrants now that would have banned their own family then think their policy is rational because this group is different.

Actually, every immigrant group has had terrorists. And that argument was used at every step of the way for not admitting this group. Just as now there are incidents to which people point to say this group shouldn’t be admitted, so there were incidents to which people could point–for Jews, Italians, Germans, Eastern Europeans, the Irish, Asians, and so on.

Many of the incidents or supposedly supporting texts were fabrications (wild rumors of slave rebellion plots, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, recasting of incidents of Native American self-defense as massacres, coerced confessions that show more about slaveholder paranoia than slave actions).

But there were real incidents. The slave revolt of Saint-Domingue was real, as was the bomb thrown at Haymarket, the assassination of McKinley by an Eastern- European anarchist, the guard and paymaster at the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company were murdered (Italian anarchists were executed for the crime), there really was a series of bombs mailed to various politicians in the spring and early summer of 1919, and various immigrants in the United States were advocating a Bolshevik-style revolution. And, as is often the case, criminals, especially famous ones, often were recent immigrants, or of the same ethnicity—there was a Jewish Mafia, an Italian one, an Irish one. Nineteenth-century Irish voting practices could be pretty dodgy, and cities run by the Irish (New York) or the Italians (San Francisco) were corrupt. Of course, most Jews, Irish, and Italians weren’t involved in crime, cities not run by the Irish or Italians could be just as corrupt (Kansas City), and, given the criminalization of poverty (meaning that there are things, such as getting drunk, that are only criminal if you’re too poor to have a home), the percentage of criminals who were any particular ethnicity was not proof of any kind of inherent criminality.
 
I’m making two points. First, people afraid of certain groups would not have experienced their fear as irrational—it would have seemed to them to be grounded in “facts.” They could, after all, list a lot of examples of plots, confessions, and authorities who supported their beliefs that this group was too dangerous for the US to admit. They could point to a city run by that group and show it was badly run.
 
Second, every ethnic group that came over (at least since the First Peoples) had in it criminals, people who were hostile to the “American” system in some way, people advocating violent change, and/or actual terrorists. Every one of us comes from a group with a poison skittle. That’s an analogy that only works with people who have mythologized the history of their own ethnicity and immigration in the US. If your ancestors had been held to the poisoned skittle analogy, you wouldn’t be a US citizen.
 
If we allow mass immigration of Syrians will some of those people be criminals or terrorists? Yes. Were some of the Germans, English, Irish, Italians, Jews, Swedes, Muldavians whom we allowed to immigrate criminals or terrorists? Yes.
 
A few years ago, when Berlusconi had recently come to power, largely on the basis of xenophobia and anti-immigration rhetoric, I had lunch with an Italian professor, who told me that people had tried to refute his rhetoric by showing that same rhetoric had been used by the US about Italians. But, she said, it didn’t work. Why not, I asked. Because, she said, Berlusconi’s allies showed that Rumanians and other eastern European immigrants really were committing crimes in Italy. I said, “Are you under the impression that Italian immigrants did not commit crimes in the US?” “Oh,” she said, “Did they?”
 
It’s a mistake for defenders of standard immigration policies to say that none of the people we allow in will do anything that might enable Fox to fear-monger about them. Someone will. It’s a worse mistake for people afraid of this set of immigrants to think they’re any different from the people who turned away Jewish escapees–to believe that turning Jews back to death was bad, but turning away Syrians is justified.
 
Before and during World War II, the US refused to admit Jewish refugees. One of the reasons that Jews stayed in Nazi Germany was that so few other countries would admit them—there was nowhere they could go. There’s a lot of argument about whether the Allies could have reduced the effectiveness of the Holocaust by bombing concentration camps; there is none that we could have reduced the number of people killed had we been willing to accept more people fleeing Nazism—Jews, Romas, intellectuals, communists, union members.
 
Would we thereby have admitted some spies? Probably. Would we have admitted people who would have gone on to commit crimes? Yes. Would it have been the right thing to do? Yes.
 
So, people supporting what Trump is doing—if you’re arguing that we should refuse to admit legitimate refugees on the grounds that some of them might be terrorists, spies, or criminals, congratulations—you just sent Jews back to their deaths. You can’t defend one and not the other.

A conversation about conspiracy theory web design

[context: I posted a link that had embedded a link to a conspiracy theory site]

Original post : Do NOT click on the link toward the top of the page. It will send you to the kind of site that has epilepsy-inducing web design. Someday (and I’m perfectly serious) I want someone to do a study as to why conspiracy sites all have the same kind of awful web design. The correlation is too strong for it to be a coincidence.

 

[Cody] I remember you mentioning that correlation when I was in your class. I wish I had the kind of time and insight to do it myself.

[Fred] Hmm. Interesting question. I’m sure all of those sites are made from templates (e.g. WordPress or some canned Drupal crap), so if you are used to a certain kind of “design” (using the term very loosely) it’s a simple thing to reproduce it.

More complexly, I think there is a class or segment of American society that is suspicious and even actively hostile towards beauty and design. So much of our landscape has been made so blighted and ugly by what we build. Examples are endless: Billboards in Death Valley, an outlet mall at the gateway to the Columbia Gorge, etc, ad nauseum. But so many people seem not to see it, much less care about it. It’s almost a badge of honor. (The visual equivalent of “smells like money to me”.) I imagine it must be related to the grand old tradition of American anti-intellectualism. An appreciation for beauty and design is effete, Continental, liberal, a weakness compared to the muscular disdain for anything that is not competitive capitalism.

That’s where I’d start my inquiry if I were still researching stuff like this.=

[me] That’s an interesting point. Also, they’re VERY busy, and their basic strategy of argumentation is accumulatio. So, they don’t argue by one thing leading to another, or being logically connected to another, but by the sheer accumulation of data (that are, usually, disconnected).

It’s funny–isn’t that what a mall is? Maybe it’s some version of consumerism? You just want a lot of shit, and it doesn’t really matter what any individual piece of shit means–it’s that you’ve got a lot of it. So that’s what you do with the site? It’s a lot of shit?

[Fred] I bet a big part of the Right’s hatred of Apple is related to this. How else would you explain so-called free-market Conservatives despising one of the most successful private companies in history?

[me] Huh. That would be REALLY interesting. So it would mean something like simplicity is threatening to reactionary politics?

[Cody] I would jump off of Fred’s statement and say it also represents “plainness”. The evidence speaks for itself, so why do I need to pretty it up? Also, the idea that they have better things to do, like doing REAL American work or researching these coverups than to worry about how pretty their website is.

I’d also tie it into the idea that they’re not spending money on their website’s design. Because they’re “simple folk”. That’s why a lot of them are using free sites like Bloggerand WordPress and tumblr.

[me] Wellllll… they aren’t plain sites, though. They’re very busy. But not complicated, and certainly not pretty. So it’s a weird aesthetic.

[Cody] Right, but it’s surprisingly easy to make a busy website. It’s a lot more work to try and make it all flow correctly. And, like Fred said, it’s effete.

I’d also think it’s an anti-intellectual statement. They’re not well-versed in internet design because they aren’t “those people”. To me, the interest here would be using a platform you’re not wholly familiar with to try and deliver your message. I imagine there might be a correlation with early film? Now I’m sort of just throwing darts.

[Fred] But yes, beauty and design are seen as forms of obfuscation, things that impede and obscure common sense and exchange. Beauty and design are indulgences that get in the way of the business of consumption.

[Cody] By plain, I didn’t mean to imply “simple”. My old Angelfire website back in the 90s was just pictures of Austin Powers and dancing hamsters. It was the easiest thing in the world to make, but would blind a person.

Right, it’s like fast food is American because we don’t have time to research our food. We’re too busy working and being American. Only the intellectuals and the artists have time to sit around and think.

[me] Ooooooooohhhhh….interesting. So a certain kind of simplicity is deliberate and thoughtful, as opposed to a kind of expressive get to the point that means you’re flinging data out there.

Yeah, I think you’re both right. It has something to do with being thoughtful and deliberate (bad) rather than authentic and … what? messy?

[Fred] I also think Trish is onto something with the idea of accumulation. I think there’s a common trope that associates expertise with possession. Owning all the tools for X makes you an expert (as an amateur woodworker, I can tell you plain, this is not the case), and something like that is at work in these websites that are like Hoarders but with “facts” instead of cats.

 

On Trump voters

There have been a lot of things posted explaining “Trump voters” that assume one cause. They’re stupid; they’re racist; they’re authoritarians; they’re opposing identity politics; they’re rejecting neoliberalism. That’s absurd. It’s classic ingroup/outgroup thinking, in which the outgroup (“Trump voters”) are all the same. I can’t imagine those same pundits and columnists writing articles in which they similarly homogenize “Clinton voters”—they’d recognize the error in regard to their own group.

Having wandered around pro-Trump sites before the election, it seems to me that Trump voters were, on the whole, just as diverse as Clinton voters. Given his approval ratings even at the time of the election, it’s clear that a fairly large number of people who voted for him didn’t support him. I don’t think we should be wondering about Trump voters as much as Trump supporters, and I’d suggest we not try to treat them as though they’re all the same. It looked to me as though it would be more useful to think in terms of four mobilizing passions that helped Trump: opposition to abortion, opposition to Clinton, authoritarianism, relying on charismatic leadership.

Those aren’t discrete categories—a person might have one or all or some combination of those attachments, and different people might have any of them to different degrees.

Shared among all Trump supporters (but not unique to them), it seemed to me, were two characteristics. First, they were wickedly (and deliberately) misinformed, and so narrowly overinformed that it amounted to misinformed. I don’t think the question of whether they were stupid or uninformed (which is how much criticism of them is oriented) is sensible—it’s rarely grounded in any kind of consistent definition of “stupid” or “ignorant.” I would say, on the contrary, that many of them made decisions that appeared rational within the context of the information they had. (And Trump supporters aren’t the only group making decisions that appear rational within a certain set of information.)

Second, consistent among most Trump supporters (and, btw, many supporters of candidates other than Trump) is the premise that you should vote for someone who is like you, and who will sincerely promote policies to support people like you. That’s ingroup/outgroup thinking.

Some people first and only think in terms of ingroup/outgroup. They walk through their worlds flinging every person into two thoroughly opposite categories—Us and Them. There are people whom we can trust, and two kinds of Them—those who are explicitly and eternally out to exterminate us, and those whom they have fooled, or are trying to fool.

Because we believe that we have good motives, and are basically good people, anyone who persuades us that s/he and we are the same has just gotten us to engage in all the ego-protection systems we use for ourselves. As long as we perceive them as in our ingroup, we will attribute good motives to them, even if they do something we normally condemn.

Thus, if a member of an ingroup and a member of an outgroup do exactly the same thing, most of us will explain them differently. An ingroup member who works hard has a good work ethic, and outgroup member is greedy. An ingroup member who promotes zir own family is loyal, an outgroup member is clannish. An ingroup member who uses zir position in government for personal profit is smart; an outgroup member is corrupt.

Ingroup/outgroup thinking isn’t limited to any political agenda, and the most fanatical members of any group, political or not, are highly prone to it (they may, in fact, approach every decision in ingroup/outgroup terms), but research by Jonathan Haidt strongly suggests that people who self-identify as conservative do value loyalty to group, on the whole, more than do people who self-identify as liberal. Thus, while everyone probably engages in ingroup/outgroup thinking sometimes, not everyone does to the same degree, and “both sides” aren’t “just as bad.”

Connected to reliance on ingroup/outgroup thinking is what might be called “social knowing”—that is, relying heavily on group membership for one’s beliefs. It’s been clearly demonstrated that people will engage in considerable cognitive work in order to reconcile their beliefs with what they believe they should believe. (Yes, it’s that circular.) If, for instance, I’m a Chesterian, and I mistrust little dogs—in fact, I think that mistrusting little dogs is one of the essential traits of Chesterians–and I see Chester being nice to a little dog, I have considerable cognitive dissonance about Chester. I might decide that he wasn’t really being nice, it wasn’t really Chester, he was pretending, or that little dog isn’t really little. The more prone I am to ingroup/outgroup thinking, the more I will protect my ingroup from criticism—even my own criticism—and that protection can take some cognitive heavy lifting.

In addition to becoming a foundation I protect, my loyalty to my ingroup may become the basis for any assessment I make of possibly new beliefs. People who rely heavily on ingroup/outgroup thinking assess the “credibility” of a source on the basis of group membership—disconfirming information coming from an outgroup is, a priori, unreliable. Further, any information that disconfirms important ingroup claims or that is critical of the ingroup can be dismissed on the grounds that it is from an outgroup source. That’s pretty abstract, so let me try to make it more clear.

Assume that someone believes that Clinton’s email practices caused people to die at Benghazi–I ran across people who believed that, and they believed that the Benghazi Report proved it. It didn’t–it didn’t even make that claim. What I discovered is that, although they couldn’t give me any links or citations from the report that supported their interpretation, and although I could give sources that would show how wrong that claim was, they refused to look at those sources because they must be biased.

In other words, they believed their beliefs were “objective” and, therefore, any source I gave that contradicted their “objective” believe must be biased and false. It didn’t matter if I gave in-group sources, such as conservative journals or the Benghazi Report itself. That’s called a “hermetically sealed belief system”–the beliefs reinforces each other, and are completely untouchable by outside information. “Clinton’s email practices caused people to die, and I know that true because sources I trust say so, and I don’t trust any sources that say otherwise.”

This hermetically sealed belief system is crucial for understanding why enclaves are so problematic as the basis for public deliberation. And, as I mentioned above, one thing that strikes me about Trump supporters (not just people who voted for him, but who support him) is that they are not ignorant—they are highly and deliberately misinformed, and so narrowly overinformed with context- and comparison-free information that it amounts to misinformation.

One final point about the importance of ingroup/outgroup thinking and public deliberation. For people prone to ingroup/outgroup thinking, every interaction is a competition among the groups, and every discussion is really about which group is better. Thus, if you say that Hubert’s plan regarding squirrels costs less than Chester’s, and is probably more effective, if I’m invested in ingroup/outgroup thinking, then my reaction is not, “Huh, I wonder if that’s true—I should look into that, because it would be great for our community to have an effective and inexpensive method of keeping squirrels from the red ball!” Instead, my reaction would be that you just scored a point for Hubert, and I need to score a point against you. I might do that by pointing out that Chester’s plan for keeping possums away is better than Hubert’s, or become more invested in proving you wrong than in finding the best solution for our community, or even work to make sure Hubert’s policy fails just because that would be a loss for the prestige of my group.

Being in an ideological/informational enclave is, unhappily, not unique to any group, nor is relying on social groups as bases and standards of knowledge. And the four passions are also shared with other groups—this is an argument about tendencies and frequencies, not about identities. Not all Trump Supporters, and Not Only Trump Supporters. One other point I’ll make before talking about the four passions.

To call them passions isn’t to say that Trump supporters are inherently irrational or impaired in their ability to participate in public discourse. I don’t think passions are inherently irrational, let alone bad. We participate in public discourse because we have passions. Particular passions will tend to lead us in various directions, and so it’s useful to think about which ones and what directions they tend to take us.

1) Opposition to abortion

It seemed to me that large number of people advocating for Trump did so on the grounds that he would appoint Supreme Court justices who would overrule Roe v. Wade, and thereby enable a national ban on abortions and abortificants.

Abortion is being used as a classic wedge issue, and it’s working, especially with groups one would have expected to vote against Trump (such as Latina/os). The notion that we should and could end abortion by banning it is rationally indefensible, especially if the ban is connected to reducing access to and accurate information about effective birth control—the research is pretty clear that a more effective way to reduce abortion is to do what has worked in other countries and increase access to and accurate information about birth control. Abortion must remain a viable option for situations that are, one hopes, unusual—thus, Clinton’s stance that abortion should be legal, safe, and rare.

But what I found about Trump supporters is that they believe that abstinence only is an effective form of birth control—they haven’t seen the studies that show its actual consequences, and/or they argue that it must work because not having sex necessarily results in not getting pregnant. That is, they argue deductively from premises, rather than inductively about the feasibility (in fact, it seemed to me that Trump supporters rarely considered the feasibility of policies, partially because they really didn’t like arguing policies). Similarly, they don’t believe that abortions are ever medically or psychologically necessary, because that’s the information they’re getting.

And they believe a lot of things about abortion and Planned Parenthood especially. Trump supporters on the abortion issue repeatedly asserted as a fact that Planned Parenthood was making money by selling fetus body parts and was actively promoting abortion (so that they could get more body parts to sell), and they seemed to have a perception of it as a for-profit business. Not only is the whole narrative false, it’s even internally absurd: if they are promoting abortions because that’s how they. make money, they wouldn’t bother giving out birth control.

For many Trump supporters, their views on abortion are reinforced by their perception that their particular kind of opposition to abortion is in a binary relationship to being “for” abortion. In other words, if you don’t believe what they do about abortion, then you’re promoting abortion. They don’t understand the “abortion should be safe, legal, and rare” stance because they’ve often never heard it—they sincerely believe that people who want abortions to be legal as a choice want all women to get abortions all the time. (That’s why some people accuse women who support the right to an abortion and who have had babies of being “hypocrites.”)

They don’t know the statistics about abortion rates in other countries, and sincerely believe that telling people (women, really) that birth control is a viable option guarantees that young women will end up getting abortions, STIs, breast cancer, and lead tragic, self-hating lives.

I think they’re wrong, and I think there is good data showing them they’re wrong, but they’ve never seen it. They live in worlds where the breast cancer/abortion correlation—although completely disproven—is a “fact,” and it is only a “fact” because it is repeated so often, and because the people who repeat it are ingroup members; the people who dispute it are (by definition) outgroup members.

What struck me about many of the people making these arguments is that they are perfectly sincere, and that their stances on abortion make sense given the informational world they inhabit. Since they also believe that good people are giving them this information, and they shouldn’t trust anyone who gives them other information, I think it’s hard to imagine what would change that world.

2) Opposition to Clinton

There’s a similar problem of inhabiting a world of misinformation in regard to Clinton. People who insisted that Trump was better than Clinton because she is so evil had a long list of horrifying things Clinton was supposed to have done, and it struck me that the most compelling of them tended to fall into two categories.

Some of it was simply misinformation, and had been debunked multiple times. Clinton hadn’t laughed about a girl getting raped, she didn’t have a warehouse full of ballots in Ohio, she wasn’t directly responsible for what happened in Benghazi, she didn’t approve a uranium deal, she never murdered anyone, and so on. One of my favorites (because so absurd) was probably the most common–that she’s a socialist, who wants to nationalize all industries. (This was one of two on which I made any headway with Trump supporters–I pointed out that she was a third-way neoliberal. It didn’t help in the long run, I think, because they saw the word “liberal” and thought that meant soft socialist–they didn’t know what neoliberal meant.) But these people had never heard the debunkings—they’d just heard the claims, over and over.

The other category was a set of claims that were technically true, but without context or comparison. So, they knew all the problems with the Clinton Foundation, but appeared completely unfamiliar with any of the criticisms of the Trump Foundation; they could list Clinton’s “lies,” but not Trump’s (I really think they’d never read or heard anything that pointed out his problem with accuracy); they called Clinton a Wall Street stooge because of her ties to Goldman Sachs, but were apparently unaware of Trump’s problematic financial dealings. To condemn Clinton for being too friendly to business is a legitimate criticism, but to condemn her for that and advocate voting for Trump instead means not understanding how her stances compare to his–it’s the same thing with their charitable foundations, dishonesty, corruption, and so on.

They were sincere, and, within that world, it made sense to be deeply opposed to Clinton because they didn’t have the information to make any comparison—that they might be wrong, that they might have been lied to, that they might not have been given all the information about Trump, was not part of that world.

3) Faith in charismatic leadership

Weber identified three sources of power for leaders: legal, traditional, and charismatic. His insights about charismatic leadership, and the later research on that, were tremendously important for explaining the volatile power of some leaders. Unhappily, beginning in the 1970s people in management and business coopted the term and significantly changed the concept, so that, for them, “charismatic leadership” is a good thing, and all leaders should have it.

In sociology, however, it means a leader to whom people give power because they believe him (or her) to be extraordinary, divinely chosen, heroic, almost supernatural in his/her ability to succeed regardless of the obstacles. The charismatic leader violates rationality—one follows him/her not because of the policies s/he proposes, but because one believes s/he has the kind of nearly magical perfect judgment that will inevitably succeed. Charismatic leadership is a relationship between the person who is supposed to have those qualities and the followers who attribute those characteristics to the leader.

People drawn into that relationship tend to believe that there are certain characteristics that signify a charismatic leader (boundless energy and excellent health are two that come up often, even if those aren’t qualities that necessarily correlate to good judgment). They also generally believe that we don’t need policy arguments—either the correct course of action is clear to everyone (and politicians aren’t following it just because they’re jerks, they benefit from the dithering, or they’re outgroup members), or, not matter how complicated it looks, their Charismatic Leader can see what to do. They want a leader who will cut the Gordian knot of policy.

In this world, there is no real value to area-specific content expertise—a person who has been successful as a celebrity, for instance, can succeed as a politician or diplomat if s/he has the kind of judgment attributed to a charismatic leader. There is also no such thing as legitimate difference of opinion, or complicated situations, or a reason to argue policy.

Many of Trump’s supporters described him in these sorts of terms, and, as with the other passions, this sense of him was reinforced by the list of accomplishments they believed he had—they hadn’t heard the debunking of many of those claims, they hadn’t noticed that even he was inconsistent in his claims about himself, they hadn’t heard criticism. They liked that he hadn’t stated his policies.

4) Authoritarianism

Erich Fromm argued that Nazism had two important characteristics. First, it offered people an escape from freedom. Genuine freedom, for Fromm, doesn’t mean there are no restraints on you, but that you take full responsibility for whatever choices you have made within your constraints. That’s a huge responsibility, and many people want to edge out of it. So, many people are happy to turn over the responsibility for their choices to someone else. They were just following orders (although they chose to join the organization that gave those orders, or voted for the people who gave those orders, or keep choosing not to leave the institution that requires they follow those orders). Second, it offered what later scholars would call “proxy by agency” which is that you can feel powerful even if you didn’t do the thing. Paradoxically, you feel powerful by giving up your agency.

Fromm described it as a kind of kiss-up/kick-down dynamic. You could be sadistic toward people below you on the hierarchy as long as you were masochistic toward those above you.

I think all of what Fromm said is useful, especially if put it in the context of the research mentioned above about social groups. Here’s the short version: we experience our “self” as constituted by membership in a group, and that group is defined partially (largely?) by what it is not. You are a dog person, and that is only a meaningful sense of identity if there is another possibility—being a squirrel person, or a bunny person, or an anti-dog person. But that description isn’t quite right, because there might be a continuum among people who are for us, through people who don’t care, to those who want to exterminate us. Authoritarianism rejects the continuum, and presumes that ingroups and outgroups are Real and mutually exclusive—you are with us or against us. If social groups are Real, then you are always a member of a group, and if you submit thoroughly to that group, you are guaranteed a kind of protection. And you get to kick the outgroup.

Authoritarianism relies on binaries (this is not a world with grey), and on naïve realism—the assumption that the correct course of action is always obvious to anyone reasonably intelligent. There are two ways of being against us—you might be explicitly and essentially out to kill us, or you might be a dupe of that group.

That authoritarians don’t do grey means they have trouble understanding nuanced arguments, or arguments about tendencies—it’s striking to me how often they read an “often” as an “always” or perceive opposition arguments as making universal claims—a claim that “many members of x group do y” will often be restated as “You’re saying all that all members of x group do y” and then refuted with a single counter-example. I don’t think this is deliberate straw man; I think it’s really what they are hearing in that moment.

George Lakoff uses the term “Strict Father Morality” for what is extremely similar to other scholars’ discussions of authoritarianism. People who believe in the Strict Father Model believe in punishment as the solution to most (for some it’s all) social problems, and tend to see relationships in submission/domination dichotomies. This means that they are particularly prone to handle disagreement in the way described above—a disagreement is not an opportunity to correct one’s course of action, or to find a better course of action, or even to learn. For many people, a disagreement in which you find out you were wrong is a good thing—you’ve won because you are now able to do something better. For an authoritarian, a disagreement is a challenge you lose by admitting error, changing your mind, or being persuaded. You are right because you are saying what the ingroup knows to be right, and that’s all you need to know. This seems to me a tragic world in which to live–one in which you can never admit error, and therefore can never learn from your own mistakes.

The point I’m making about these four passions is that they are enhanced by living in a world of confirmation. And, as I said, it struck me that the most committed Trump supporters with whom I argued were very likely to live in such a world—they hadn’t invented, or misunderstood, the things they believed. They had been told these things, over and over, by sources they trusted (and which told them not to trust anyone who told them anything else). I’m not saying they were gullible—they were just singly informed. And they refused to look at information that even might be disconfirming, on the grounds that it was a from a biased source–which they concluded on the basis that it was disconfirming.

There’s one other point I want to make about these observations. I think they’re empirically falsifiable. I think it would be possible to test them by finding people who supported Trump, opposed him, and the range in between, ask them how much they supported/opposed him, and then tried to place them in a continuum of commitment on each of these passions. If my impressions are right, then people most committed to most of these passions would be most vehement in their support of Trump. Being less committed to the passions would correlate to being less supportive of Trump.

And, if I’m right, then we’re wrong to focus so much on Trump. We need to focus on the problems of enclaves of information.

Authenticity and Accuracy (selection)

At the beginning of the book, I mentioned demagoguery’s tendency toward strategic misnaming and cunning projection, both of which might be characterized as deliberately misleading—for instance, policies intended to prevent members of minority religions from being able to practice their religion (e.g., religions that want to solemnize same sex marriage) or intended to force dominant religious practices onto others (e.g., prayer in school) are instances of religious repression. They are intended to restrict freedom of religion. But they’re called protection of religious freedom—strategic misnaming. And trying to characterize resisting such repression as itself repressing religion (or a war on Christianity) is projection. As discussed earlier, demagoguery often relies on claims that are clearly hyperbolic, if not actively dishonest, yet demagogues are generally described as “authentic” and the outgroup is always condemned for dishonesty. Thus, given the centrality to demagoguery of claims that simply and obviously aren’t true, why do people perceive rhetors engaged in demagoguery as honest and authentic?

That question has puzzled me since I began working on proslavery rhetoric, which often relied on obviously false claims (such as that slaveholders were outraged at mixed race relationships, or that slaves thrived in swampy areas) coupled with representations of themselves as passionate about the truth and condemnations of abolitionists as liars. At the time, I thought that it was a phenomenon that George Orwell noted—you demonstrate ingroup loyalty more powerfully by insisting on the truth of things you do and don’t know to be untrue (“blackwhite”). But, the more that I read about demagogues, the more I came to believe that many people sincerely believe them to be honest. To give simply one example: Antony Beevor describes soldiers encircled by Soviet troops, clearly abandoned by Hitler, insisting that Hitler would save them, “‘I believe in Hitler. What he said he’ll do, he’ll stick to'” (277). More recently, Donald Trump, having led audiences in cheers about jailing Hillary Clinton, and insisting she has to be locked up, announced he wouldn’t try to prosecute her after all, and his fans continued to describe him as honest, straight-shooting, and trustworthy. No matter how often he changed positions, or said things that were clearly untrue, many perceived as authentic and honest. This point seems important to me, because it has implications for what we try to do about demagoguery, and how we talk about accuracy and public deliberation.

What people perceive as authentic is the lack of filter, an apparent absence of forethought—the apparent lack of calculation is, for many people, reassuring. They believe that they are seeing the real person, and believe that authenticity matters more than accuracy. If a rhetor says what s/he really thinks, regardless of consequences, then s/he is being truthful to her own views, and people believe that is true. That expression of inner truth is, for many people, a more valuable quality than someone being truthful about our shared world. I think it has to do with the sense that the audience can then believe that a person is truly a member of the ingroup, so the authenticity comes from believing the person is incapable of being dishonest, and really is one of us. Paradoxically, this privileging of a supposed true identity over an external world means that people who claim to be realists, and who claim to reject relativism, are ultimately endorsing a highly relativist notion of truth.

This true self is performed by saying outrageous things, and, in a culture in which demagoguery is rewarded (by winning elections, getting more viewers, being able to charge more for speeches) there is necessarily a demagogic oneupsmanship that happens. The previously outrageous becomes normal, and so a person has to make an even more demagogic claim, or advocate an even more extreme policy against the outgroup.

Rationality, demagoguery, and rhetoric

One of my criticisms of conventional definitions of demagoguery is that they enable us to identify when they are getting suckered by demagoguery, but not when we are. They aren’t helpful for helping us see our own demagoguery because they emphasize the “irrationality” and bad motives of the demagogues. And both strategies are deeply flawed, and generally circular. Here I’ll discuss a few problems with conventional notions of rationality/irrationality, and later I’ll talk about the problems of motivism.

Definitions of “irrationality” imply a strategy for assessing the rationality of an argument, and many common definitions of “rational” and “irrational” imply methods that are muddled, even actively harmful. Most of our assumptions about what makes an argument “rational” or “irrational” imply strategies that contradict one another. For instance, “rationality” is sometimes used interchangeably with reasonable and logical, sometimes used as a larger term that incorporates logical (a stance is rational if the arguments made for it are logical, or a person is rational if s/he uses logical processes to make decisions). That common usage contradicts another common usage, although people don’t necessarily realize it: many people assume that an argument is rational if you can support it with reasons, whether or not the reasons are logically connected to the claims. So, in the first one, a rational argument has claims that are logically connected, but in the second one it just has to have sub-claims that look like reasons.  There’s a third usage: many people assume that “rational” and “true” are the same, and/or that “rational” arguments are immediately seen as compellingly true, so to judge if an argument is rational, you just have to ask yourself if it seems compellingly true. Of course, that conflation of rational and true means that “rational” is another way of saying “I agree.” A fourth usage is the consequence of  many people equating “irrational” with “emotional:” it can seem that the way to determine whether an argument is rational is to try to infer whether the person making the argument is emotional, and that’s usually inferred by the number of emotional markers—how many linguistic “boosters” the rhetor uses (words such as “never” or “absolutely”), or verbs of affect (“love,” “hate,” “feel”). Sometimes it’s determined through sheer projection, or through deduction from stereotypes (that sort of person is always emotional, and therefore their arguments are always emotional).

Unhappily, in many argumentation textbooks, there’s a fifth usage thrown in: it’s not uncommon for a “logical” argument to be characterized as one that appeals to “facts, statistics, and reason”—surface features of a text. Sometimes, though, we use the term “logical” to mean, not an attempt at logic, or a presentation of self as engaged in a logical argument, but a successful attempt—an argument is logical if the claims follow from premises, the statistics are valid, and the facts are relevant. That usage—how it’s used in argumentation theory—is in direct conflict with the vaguer uses that rely on surface features (“facts, statistics, and reason” or the linguistic features we associate with emotionality). Much of the demagoguery discussed in this book makes appeals to statistics, facts, and data, and much of it is presented without linguistics markers of emotionality, but generally in service of claims that don’t follow, or that appeal to inconsistent premises, or that contradict one another. Thus, for the concept of rationality to be useful for identifying demagoguery, it has to be something other than any of the contradictory ones above—surface features; inferred, projected, or deduced emotionality of the rhetor; presence of reasons; audience agreement with claims.

Following scholars of argumentation, I want to argue for using “rationality” in a relatively straightforward way. Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst identify ten rules for what they call a rational-critical argument. While useful, for purposes of assessing informal and lay arguments, they can be reduced to four:

    1. Whatever are the rules for the argument, they apply equally across interlocutors; so, if a kind of argument is deemed “rational” for the ingroup, then it’s just as “rational” for the outgroup (e.g., if a single personal experience counts as proof for a claim, then a single appeal to personal experience suffices to disprove that claim);
    2. The argument appeals to premises and/or definitions consistently, or, to put it in the negative, the claims of an argument don’t contradict each other or appeal to contradictory premises;
    3. The responsibilities of argumentation appeal equally across interlocutors, so that all parties are responsible for representing one another’s arguments fairly, and striving to provide internally consistent evidence to support their claims;
    4. The issue is up for argument—that is, the people involved are making claims that can be proven wrong, and that they can imagine changing.

Not every discussion has to fit those rules—there are some topics not open to disproof, and therefore can’t be discussed this way. And those sorts of discussions can be beneficial, productive, enlightening. But they’re not rational; they’re doing other kinds of work.

In the teaching of writing, it’s not uncommon for “rationality” and “logical” to be compressed into Aristotle’s category of “logos” (with “irrational” and “emotional” getting shoved into his category of “pathos”)—and then very recent notions about logic and emotion are projected onto Aristotle. As is clear even in popular culture, recent ideas assume a binary between logical and emotional, so saying something is an emotional argument is, for us, saying it is not logical. That isn’t what Aristotle meant—he didn’t even mean that appeals to emotion and appeals to reason can coexist; he didn’t see them as opposed. Nor did he mean “facts” as we understand them, and he had no interest in statistics. For Aristotle, ethos, pathos, and logos are always operating together—logos is the content, the argument (the enthymemes); pathos incorporates the ways we try to get people to be convinced; ethos is the person speaking. So, were we to use an Aristotelian approach to an argument, we would look at a set of statistics about child poverty, and the logos would be that poverty has gotten worse (or is worse in certain areas, or for some people—whatever the claims are), the pathos would be how it’s presented (what’s in bold, how it’s laid out, and also that it’s about children), and the ethos is whatever is situated (what we know about the rhetor prior to the discourse) but also a consequence of the person using statistics (she’s well-informed, she’s done research on this) and that it’s about children (she is compassionate). For Aristotle, unlike post-logical positivists, the pathos and logos and ethos can’t operate alone.

I think it’s better just to avoid Aristotle’s terms, since they slide into a binary so quickly. More important, they enable people to conflate “a logical argument” (that is, the evaluative claim, that the argument is logical) with “an appeal to logic” (the descriptive claim, that the argument is purporting to be logical).

What this means for teaching

People generally reason syllogistically (that’s Ariel Kruglanski’s finding), and so it’s useful for people to learn to identify major premises. I think either Toulmin’s model or Aristotle’s enthymeme works for that strategy, but it is important that people are able to identify unexpressed premises.

Syllogism:

All men are mortal. [universally valid Major Premise]

Socrates is a man. [application of a universally valid premise to specific case: minor premise]

Therefore, Socrates is mortal. [conclusion]

Enthymeme:

Socrates is mortal [conclusion]

because he is a man. [minor premise]

The Major Premise is implied (all men are mortal).

Or, syllogism:

A = B [Major Premise]

A = C [minor premise]

Therefore, B = C. [conclusion]

Enthymeme:

B = C because A = B. This version of the argument implies that A = C.

Chester hates squirrels because Chester is a dog.  

Major Premise (for the argument to be true): All dogs hate squirrels.

Major Premise (for the argument to be probable): Most dogs hate squirrels.

 

Batman is a good movie because it has a lot of action.

Major Premise: Action movies are good.

 

Preserving wilderness in urban areas benefits communities

            because it gives people access to non-urban wildlife.

Major Premise: Access to non-urban wildlife benefits communities.

Many fallacies come from some glitch in the enthymeme—for instance, non sequitur happens when the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises.

    • Chester hates squirrels because bunnies are fluffy. (Notice that there are four terms—Chester, hating squirrels, bunnies, and fluffy things.)
    • Squirrels are evil because they aren’t bunnies.

Before going on to describe other fallacies, I should emphasize that identifying a fallacy isn’t the end of a conversation, or it doesn’t have to be. It isn’t like a ref making a call—it’s something that can be argued—this is especially true with the fallacies of relevance. If I make an emotional argument, and you say that’s argumentum ad misercordiam, then a good discussion will probably have us arguing about whether my emotional appeal was relevant.

Appealing to inconsistent premises comes about when you have at least two enthymemes, and their major premises contradict.

For instance, someone might argue: “Dogs are good because they spend all their time trying to gather food” and “Squirrels are evil because they spend all their time trying to gather food.” You’ll rarely see it that explicit—usually the slippage is unnoticed because you use dyslogistic terms for the outgroup and eulogistic terms for the ingroup: “”Dogs are good because they work hard trying to gather food to feed their puppies” and “Squirrels are evil because they spend all their time greedily trying to get to food.”

Another one that comes about because of glitches in the enthyme is circular reasoning (aka “begging the question). This is a very common fallacy, but surprisingly difficult for people to recognize. It looks like an argument, but it is really just an assertion of the conclusion over and over in different language. The “evidence” for the conclusion is actually the conclusion in synonyms–“The market is rational because it lets the market determine the value of goods rationally.” “This product is superior because it is the best on the market.”

Genus-species errors (aka over-generalizing, ignoring exceptions, stereotyping) happens when hidden in the argument (often in the major premise is a slip from “one” (or “some”) to “all.” It results from assuming that what is true of a specific thing is true of every member of that genus, or what is true of the genus is true of every individual member of that genus. “Chester would never do that because he and I are both dogs, and I would never do that.” “Chester hates cats because my dog hates cats.”

Fallacies of relevance

Really, all of the following could be grouped under red herring, which consists of dragging something so stinky across the trail of an argument that people take the wrong track. Also called “shifting the stasis,” it’s trying to distract from what is really at stake between two people to something else—usually inflammatory, but sometimes simply easier ground for the person engaged in red herring. Sometimes it arises because one of the interlocutors sees everything in one set of terms—if you disagree with them, and they take the disagreement personally, they might drag in the red herring of whether they are a good person, simply because that’s what they think all arguments are about.

Ad personum (sometimes distinguished from ad hominem) is an irrelevant attack on the identity of an interlocutor. Not all “attacks” on a person or their character are ad hominem. Accusing someone of being dishonest, or making a bad argument, or engaging in fallacies, is not ad hominem because it’s attacking their argument. Even attacking the person (“you are a liar”) is not fallacious if it’s relevant. It generally involves some kind of name-calling (usually of such an inflammatory nature that the person must respond, such as calling a person an abolitionist in the 1830s, a communist in the 1950s and 60s, or a liberal now). It’s really a kind of red herring, as it’s generally irrelevant to the question at hand, and is an attempt to distract the attention of the audience.

Ad verecundiam is the term for a fallacious appeal to authority. In general, it’s a fallacy because their authority isn’t relevant—there’s nothing inherently fallacious about appeal to authority, but having a good conversation might mean that the relevance of the authority/expertise now has to become the stasis. Bandwagon appeal is a kind of fallacious appeal to authority—it isn’t fallacious to appeal to popularity if it is a question in which popular appeal is a relevant kind of authority.

Ad misericordiam is the term for an irrelevant appeal to emotion, such as saying you should vote for me because I have the most adorable dogs (even though I really do). Emotions are always part of reasoning, so merely appealing to emotions is not

Scare tactics (aka apocalyptic language) is a fallacy if the scary outcome is irrelevant, unlikely, or inevitable regardless of the actions. For instance, if I say you should vote for me and then give you a terrifying description of how our sun will someday go supernova, that’s scare tactics (unless I’m claiming I’m going to prevent that outcome somehow).

Straw man is dumbing down the opposition argument; because the rhetor is now responding to arguments their opponent never made, most of what they have to say is irrelevant. People engage in this one unintentionally by not listening, projection, and a fairly interesting process. We have a tendency to homogenize the outgroup and assume that they are all the same. So, if you say “Little dogs aren’t so bad,” and I once heard a squirrel lover praise little dogs, I might decide you’re a squirrel lover. Or, more seriously, if I believe that anyone who disagrees with me about gun ownership and sales wants to ban all guns, then I might respond to your argument about requiring gun safes with something about the government kicking through our doors and taking all of our guns (an example of slippery slope).

Tu quoque is usually (but not always) a kind of red herring, sometimes it’s the fallacy of false equivalency (what George Orwell called the notion that half a loaf is no better than none). One argues that “you did it too!” While it’s occasionally relevant, as it can point to a hypocrisy or inconsistency in one’s opposition, and might be the beginning of a conversation about inconsistent appeals to premises, it’s fallacious when it’s irrelevant. For instance, if you ask me not to leave dirty socks on the coffee table, and I say, “But you like squirrels!” I’ve tried to shift the stasis. It can also involve my responding with something that isn’t equivalent, as when I try to defend myself against a charge of embezzling a million dollars by pointing out that my opponent didn’t try to give back extra change from a vending machine.

False dilemma (aka poisoning the wells, false binary, either/or) occurs when a rhetor sets out a limited number of options, generally forcing one’s hand by forcing one to choose the option s/he wants. Were all the options laid out, then the situation would be more complicated, and his/her proposal might not look so good. It’s often an instance of scare tactics because the other option is typically a disaster (we either fight in Vietnam, or we’ll be fighting the communists on the beaches of California). It is “straw man” when it’s achieving by dumbing down the opponent’s proposal.

Misuse of statistics is self-explanatory. Statistical analysis is far more complicated than one might guess, given common uses of statistics, and there are certain traps into which people often fall. One common one is the deceptively large number. The number of people killed every year by sharks looks huge, until you consider the number of people who swim in shark-infested waters every year, or compare it to the number of people killed yearly by bee stings. Another common one is to shift the basis of comparison, such as comparing the number of people killed by sharks for the last ten years with the number killed by car crashes in the last five minutes. (With some fallacies, it’s possible to think that there was a mistake involved rather than deliberate misdirection; with this one, that’s a pretty hard claim to make.) People often get brain-freeze when they try to deal with percentages, and make all sorts of mistakes—if the GNP goes from one million to five hundred thousand one year, that’s a fifty per cent drop; if it goes back up to one million the next year, that is not, however, a fifty per cent increase.

The post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy (aka confusing causation and correlation) is especially common in the use of social science research in policy arguments. If two things are correlated (that is, exist together) that does not necessarily mean that one can be certain which one caused the other, or whether they were both caused by something else. It generally arises in situations when people have failed to have a “control” group in a study. So, for instance, people used to spend huge amounts of money on orthopedic shoes for kids because the shoes correlated with various foot problems’ improving. When a study was finally done that involved a control group, it turned out that it was simply time that was causing the improvement; the shoes were useless.

Some lists of fallacies have hundreds of lists, and subtle distinctions can matter in particular circumstances (for instance, the prosecutor’s fallacy is really useful in classes about statistics), but the above are the ones that seem to be the most useful.

What do we do now?

Writing about the proslavery argument in the antebellum era was actually painful. The Slave Power, as many people called it, completely dominated American policy deliberation for far too long. The antebellum era was wickedly factional, and not just in binaries. People could read nothing but information from a Van Buren or Calhoun (both Democratic), or Whig, or Whig Anti-Catholic….

Thus, people could live in a constructed world in which abolitionists were deliberately fanning the flames of slave insurrection, slaves were happy, “free” states were filled with runaway slaves, abolitionists were a powerful conspiracy about to use the Federal government to invade the South and engaged in immediate and forced emancipation, emancipation necessarily meant race war. That none of these things happened (think “Obama will take your guns”) didn’t have any impact on the certainty people felt about this world.

So, that’s one thing to keep in mind: for some people, being proven completely, totally, and thoroughly wrong doesn’t cause them to reconsider their beliefs.

In Fanatical Schemes I argued:

proslavery rhetors posited a consistently inconsistent philosophy of government, human nature, history, human rights, truth, and public discourse: the purpose of government is to compel obedience to the existing hierarchy; the secular and the sacred are conflated, not only in the sense that God endorses one political party and condemns the other, but that one holds political beliefs with the same degree and kind of conviction as tenets of religious faith; people are motivated to obey laws only through fear or thoughtless obedience; there was once more rigid order and obedience, but a period of flaccid indulgence has led to a degree of immorality and disorder that leaves us on the brink of chaos; the political realm is made up of good people, who are trying to maintain the order (from which they happen to benefit), and the malevolent, who are secretly plotting to bring about chaos (from which they hope to benefit); although the hierarchy benefits the privileged, and they are, openly, more privileged, they are also embattled, besieged, and martyred, albeit in obscure ways, by the system; at the same time, however, they are the system, so that anything that injures them (economically, socially, or emotionally) is an attack on the entire culture; there are no universal human rights, but socially constructed privileges that are distributed unevenly along the social hierarchy; truth is what those highest in the hierarchy say it is; disagreement not only fosters disorder, insofar as it complicates the thoughtlessness presumed necessary for obedience, but disloyalty, if it contradicts what the privileged say, as criticism or dishonors the privileged and hurts their feelings; the function of public discourse is to announce truth, rouse the public to a sense of its danger, and exhort them to take action against the malevolent plotters; freedom of speech is the freedom to agree with the dominant way of thinking; because dissent is disloyalty and fosters disorder, it is appropriate for individuals or the government to respond to it with violence; discussion alternates among epideictic, threats, and bargaining. Finally, the ends justify the means.

Of course, I wasn’t really talking about the antebellum era exclusively. I was talking about the argument for invading Iraq.

In any case, what I came to believe was that the anti-slavery rhetoric wasn’t just an anti-slavery argument—it was a different way of thinking about epistemology, citizenship, identity, biblical hermeneutics, and political discourse. And it wasn’t that proslavery and anti-slavery were contrasted by the amount of feeling they had, their degree of certainty, or their conviction. Anti-slavery activists weren’t exactly skeptical, at least not about the immorality of slavery or the urgency of their cause, but they were skeptical about “literal” readings of Scripture, and they did continuously assume a connection among compassion for others, the facts of slavery, and the privileging of the spirit of Scripture over conservative interpretations (albeit they had literal readings on their side in regard to slavery and Scripture). They inhabited a more nuanced world.

There are three very important facts about proslavery arguments: 1) they were internally inconsistent (slaves are happy, slaves are about to revolt, slaves thrive in swamp areas, slaves die in swamp areas); 2) they never appealed to premises that operated across ingroup/outgroups; 3) there was no long game in regard to slavery—it was not an economic system that could be maintained (since it depended on exporting slaves somewhere—slavery was not a labor system, but a market economy, and the product was the body of slaves)—so policy arguments had to be evaded in favor arguments about the identity of people arguing “for” or “against” slavery. (In fact, there weren’t two sides.)

But, again, the argument about slavery wasn’t just about slavery—it was about argument. Abolitionists imagined and assumed a world in which compassion, reason, fairness, and long-term consequences are part of how we reason. To give one example: Garrison published articles that attacked him. Proslavery rhetors didn’t. Proslavery rhetoric wasn’t about reason and compassion—it was about ingroup loyalty.

Garrison published arguments that attacked him because he believed his claims could withstand attack; proslavery rhetors argued for hanging anyone who disagreed. I think this means that, at some level, they knew their arguments couldn’t be defended rhetorically, and had to be enforced through violence. But, when talking about what proslavery rhetors “knew” it gets very complicated because they said things that blazingly contradicted other things they said, and yet I believe they probably believed all of them. They didn’t value consistency across arguments. They also didn’t value consistency across groups–it was clear to them that they should hold themselves to lower standards than they held others, because they were always and inherently better than those people.

So, this was an argument about arguments on three grounds—should your premises apply across arguments, and should we argue policy, and should the ingroup and outgroups be treated the same.

And what struck me is that proslavery rhetors did manage to control discourse such that they created a world in which certain blazingly false claims were accepted as true, simply because they were repeated. But, also, they assumed and reinforced the notion that participation in public discourse wasn’t about finding the best solution to a community’s problems—it was about looking the most loyal to the ingroup.

And, paradoxically, looking loyal to the ingroup is best displayed by an irrational commitment to an impractical policy. So, and this is really important, public discourse as performance of ingroup loyalty and public discourse as policy deliberation (including what is best for the ingroup) are completely at odds.

That’s the situation we’ve been in for some time—for many people, and entire chunks of the media (including internet)—those proslavery assumptions about public discourse are the basis of their decisions. That is, all arguments can be reduced to ones of identity, not policy, logic, or fairness.

Trump never articulated a coherent policy agenda. He has an identity. He made assertions about policy that even his followers didn’t believe were literally true (Mexico would pay for the wall) and he regularly said things that were either obviously false or that contradicted something he had said or would say (his net worth, his claims he hadn’t said things he had). But he seems authentic to many people in that he seems unfiltered, and he seems to perform ingroup identity consistently.

For many people, our problem is that we have bad people in office. They are bad because they are cunning and intellectual. For many people, the claim that something is complicated is simply an attempt to obfuscate an obvious situation. Good people aren’t cunning, and they just act on gut instinct. Someone who says it’s complicated is, duh, bad.

Someone who continually says the wrong thing (especially if it’s the kind of “wrong” thing their audience would like to say) and who claims desires they have and can’t reach (“We’ll make Mexico build the wall”) is authentic. Since our problems come from cunning politicians, an authentic one will solve our problems.

I’ve spent a long time crawling around dark parts of the interwebz, and it’s true that Trump supporters have an awful lot of fake news sites on their pages (they aren’t alone in getting suckered—Berniebros shared a lot of those same links). Figuring out those are fake news sites isn’t rocket science; you just have to read the article and scroll to the bottom of the page. But they didn’t. For many people, participating in public discourse isn’t about investigating your position; it’s about supporting it. If you find a link that has a headline that supports your point, you share it. You don’t read it, let alone look into it enough to find out it’s false.

So, what do we do? Trump wasn’t elected because he had good policies; he was elected because people liked what they thought was his identity, and they didn’t like what they thought was Clinton’s. This situation isn’t a simple question of trying and failing to get our policy agenda passed. What we have here is a failure to agree about what public deliberation should be.

And that is what makes this so hard. Abolitionists didn’t just argue for a new policy regarding slavery; they argued for a new conception of American-ness. They won the argument about slavery, but they lost the argument about American-ness. And they responded to that loss in various ways. Some of them threw themselves into one fight heart and soul and then retired to something less exhausting (teaching, as it turns out, which shows how hard that fight was). Some of them just stayed in the game (Douglass, for instance). Some of them sort of turned it over to younger crowds. But that was after a semi-triumph (some of the Amistad case folks stepped back after they won that case, and others moved on to other things after slavery was abolished).

A few instances keep coming to mind. During the era that the Slave Power would have looked unbeatable—the 30s and 40s—people just kept sending petitions to end slavery in DC. Many of those people were women, who didn’t even have the vote. And they just didn’t stop. And they made proslavery politicians crazy, who then made the missteps that would undermine their own power (such as the gag rule)—thus, oddly enough, one of the worst losses for reasonable people turned out to be worse for proslavery folks than anyone else.

Another instance that comes to mind is Kristallnacht, when the Nazis overplayed their hand and called for open violence against Jews. Germans objected, and Nazis decided not to do that again. What they did was keep it less open, so I think we need to object when rights are violated, and just keep objecting.

I’ve mentioned before that I think our problem is the problem identified by Stealth Democracy—for many people, policy arguments are silly. Hibbing and Theiss-Morse argue that most people believe that “any specific plan for achieving a desire goal is about as good as any other plan” (224). So, most people think that politicians could solve all of our problems if they had the will, but they don’t because politicians (mysteriously) benefit from keeping the problems—loosely, they’re owned by “special interests.” People who believe this don’t believe that their interests are special interests—if they’re gun owners, they don’t see the NRA as “special interests” (but American interests); if they’re dairy farmers then special subsidies for dairy farmers isn’t special interests (and the dairy lobby isn’t really a lobby). Anti-gun lobbyists, or pig farmers, now those folks are special interests.

This is what Hibbing and Theiss-Morse say we should do: “Teaching people to appreciate democratic processes designed to deal with diverse interests is an important step toward improving their view of government” (226). That means we need to teach people that people genuinely disagree, that we are all wrong, and that what matters is now what we argue, but how we argue.

I think what we should do is :

    1. Call out authoritarians on their rejection of fairness. Point out, relentlessly, that they don’t have a consistent argument about anything—their politics are “if my group does it, it’s okay.” Just keep hammering on that.
    2. Insist that folks with whom we argue cite sources. Don’t let them off on this, and then go back to #1,
    3. Stop teaching bullshit about bias. Comp is still prone to a binary of biased or objective, so we end up teaching a really shitty version of relativism.
    4. Similarly, we need to teach a sensible version of logic and fallacies—everything I can find in rhet/comp is pre-1970s in terms of notions of about logic. So, we’re endorsing the rational/irrational split when argumentation hasn’t done that since about 1970. It’s embarrassing.
    5. I think we should probably just keep signing petitions and sending email and complaining. I used to think that was a waste of time, because Ted Cruz doesn’t care what I think. And he doesn’t. He isn’t going to change his position on anything because of anything I say. But, if the GOP understands that there are a lot of people who are willing to take the time to sign a petition or send an email or make a call who object to this law or that appointment, they might understand the cost.
    6. I think we should worry less about niceness, and also call out incipient racism, homophobia, sexism, ableism, and so on. We need to shut people the fuck up if they condemn something as political correctness. We don’t have to argue, but just indicate we’re not okay with it.
    7. And I guess we just have to keep hoping, and realize that we are where we are because people put one foot in front of the other in much worse situations.

Demagoguery, metaphors, and policy argumentation

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A couple of folks have asked me questions about demagoguery. Guess what, I’m pretty informed about this!

The basic point about demagoguery is that it insists that we don’t have to engage in policy argumentation—we can settle all issues through deciding who is in the ingroup and who is in the outgroup. Demagoguery says we are in an ultimate war of extermination of us versus them.

Policy argumentation has two parts: need and plan. The need part of the argument should put forward plausible, well-supported, and well-defended claims regarding the need (problem or ill) being significant, inherent (it won’t go away on its own), and attributable to some cause (a narrative about causality).

The plan part of the argument should describe a specific plan (not just a set of slogans) that can be plausibly argued is feasible, will actually solve the specific problem identified in the need portion (this is where the narrative about causality is crucial), and deal with the problem of unintended consequences.

Demagoguery rejects all arguments about plan as weak-kneed unmanly dithering. It identified the need/problem as the presence of some bad group, and the obvious solution is to expel them from the community, prevent them from joining it, imprisoning them, and/or killing them.This narrative of our being in a supernaturally determined battle between good and evil has no place for thoughtful policy argumentation.

Thus, that the plan might not be feasible, or might have costs higher than the benefits, or might not be logically related to the need we’ve identified—all of those issues are irrelevant. The feasibility of a proposed plan, for instance, doesn’t really matter; any plan will work, as long as we stay right with God/Nature/History. It may even be that committing to an unlikely plan, with very little chance of success, after little or no deliberation, is the best approach to take: our refusal to worry about feasibility shows that we have extraordinary faith in the ingroup’s relation to God/History/Nature, and it is faith, not feasibility, that is most likely to invite divine assistance. In this narrative, heroes are irrational and impractical. Thus, this apocalyptic metanarrative prevents pragmatic and inclusive deliberation.

This posture of standing strong in the midst of the end of the world can be fairly complicated: demagoguery has to square the circle of inspiring fear while not looking fearful (since fearfulness is being paired with thinking and deliberating)—there are often claims of extraordinary courage in the face of a terrible situation, or a representation of one’s self as calm and reasonable while making apocalyptic predictions, and the odd insistence of the sheer rationality of hyperbolic claims (I will admit, this is one aspect of demagoguery that often makes me laugh).

Desperate times require desperate measures, and those desperate measures are usually some kind of punitive policies. Demagoguery seems to correlate closely with what George Lakoff has called “Strict Father Morality.” The government’s role is to act as a Strict Father to the country; if the country, or some part of it, has gotten out of order, it is because of lax policies, and we need to enact more punitive ones (for more on Strict Father Morality, see Lakoff, Moral Politics, especially Chapters Five and Six). Lakoff’s point is that this view of the government and public policy is reflected in metaphors associated with ingroup and outgroup.

In addition to the ones Lakoff argues are associated with Strict Father Morality, demagoguery associates metaphors of vermin, disease, taint, queerness (that is, transgressive behavior), monstrosity (that is, hybridity), disorder, lack of control (licentiousness), impurity (again, hybridity), thinking, and demonic possession with the outgroup. It associates metaphors of purity, tumescence (specifically, and masculinity, generally), order, action, decisiveness, and control with the ingroup. It associates dithering, wavering, impaired masculinity, and weakness with people considering protecting or defending the outgroup in any way, or any criticism of the ingroup.

Thus, the solution to demagoguery isn’t less democracy, but more. But it has to be more argumentation about policy, not identity.

Why I thought Trump might win

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Why did I think it was likely that Trump would win?

This will be really quick, and, if folks are interested, I’ll try expand later, but I thought a Trump win was likely (by which I meant 45/65, but then in the last week it became 50/50). Here’s why:

As I think y’all know, I periodically crawl under in the dark side of the interwebz, and I’ve been spending a lot of time lately wandering through pro-Trump FB pages and various evangelical websites. Folks in those places aren’t low information—they’re high misinformation.

What you see in an entire world of information is that Clinton:

    1. personally murdered or had murdered a lot of people;
    2. is prone to seizures;
    3. laughed at a rape victim;
    4. told the families of Benghazi victims that they should “move on and get over it;”
    5. supports “abortion” up until five minutes before birth, so she thinks a woman should be able to kill a perfectly healthy fetus until the moment of birth;
    6. subverted the constitution because the DNC tried to get her the nomination;
    7. and a bunch of other stuff.

Just to be clear, I wouldn’t have voted for Clinton had I thought any of that was true. None of it was, of course, but they didn’t know that.

Meanwhile, the main problem with American politics on these pages–pro-Trump and more or less secular and fundagelical–are slightly different. For the pro-Trump secular pages, it’s what’s described by the Stealth Democracy folks. Commenters on those pages believe that the solutions to our problems are simple. Politicians don’t go for those simple solutions because they want to keep their jobs by making things complicated and they’re corrupted by “special interests.”

“Special interests” are any interests other than the person making that criticism. So, since I’m a normal person, and I am a ferret rancher, the government should do lots of things to promote ferret farming. I’m not a special interest; I’m American. But, my neighbor, the lynx farmer, gets things—THAT is special interests.

So, there is a profound rejection of the pluralism of our world, and a normalizing of experience.

Why, then, don’t politicians do that obviously rational thing and support ferret farming? Because they are professional politicians, who get a lot of money from lobbyists to promote special interests like lynx farming.

Here’s what those folks believe about Trump:

    1. He’s an amazingly successful businessman;
    2. He has incredibly good judgment (thank Celebrity Apprentice for that);
    3. He isn’t beholden to anyone;
    4. He isn’t smart or subtle or well-educated: he doesn’t bullshit;
    5. He never lies; he engages in hyperbole, but he never deliberately manipulates anyone else;
    6. He’s like them. He isn’t a member of the cultural or intellectual elite.

On the evangelical side, it’s more complicated. To be fair, they resisted him much longer than the secular GOP did.

But, still and all, they accepted all the claims about Clinton, and they have made a nasty deal with their consciences about being so oriented toward killing. The fundagelical right thoroughly supported segregation, has never complained about police brutality, never met a GOP-supported war it didn’t like, loves it some death penalty (despite what Christ said), is all in favor of indiscriminate killing because some bad people might die, and supports social services policies that kill people.

There are lots of studies out there about doing a single good thing gets unconsciously interpreted as a “get out of guilt” free card for a far larger number of douchey behaviors. For instance, people who buy organic in a grocery store are less likely to be nice to the people collecting money for a good cause just outside the door. (This explains why drivers in the Whole Foods parking lots are unmitigated shitheads.)

Fundagelical Christianity in the US has been damaged by an attachment to sloppy Calvinism in the form of prosperity gospel. Unhappily, fundagelical Christianity has come to preach that we should not treat outgroups as we insist on being treated. (Making Christ’s golden rule a non starter.) We can help them, but only if help is associated with trying to make them part of our ingroup.

Government assistance is bad, not because it’s assistance, but because it’s secular.

All assistance should be connected to conversion. (Hence, people say that slut-shaming “abortion information centers” are more appropriate than giving women birth control.)

Basically, a lot of fundagelicals believe that the government is the problem, not the solution. And they believe they should contribute a lot to their church and not to the government.

Therefore, they’re drawn to cheap stances. Wanting to prohibit abortion costs nothing.

Actually reducing the number of abortions would cost a lot and it would involve giving women autonomy over our bodies. But claiming to be opposed to abortion, while also opposing the policies that would actually reduce abortion, reduces the cognitive dissonance created by the very death-oriented policies of the fundagelical right.

It’s a “get out of guilt free” card.

Finally, fundagelical Christianity has bought into imparted justification—that a saved person is a good person, with good judgment. So, for them, all arguments are identity arguments: is this person saved. And, unhappily, that comes down to: does this person claim to support the positions I think are necessarily associated with my view of being Christian.

So, there’s an analogy to the ferret farmer. The ferret farmer sees her interests as universal, and the basis of Americanism, and the lynx farmer as a corrupt special interest. Similarly, fundagelicals see their (quite specific, and even problematic) notions about religion as “Christian” and will not admit that people who don’t share their agenda on homosexuality or abortion are Christians. They’re special interest lynx farmers.

Anyway, I started to worry when I realized that the National Enquirer effect was in place for Trump supporters.

The National Enquirer is always wrong, in that it spends all the time saying this celebrity couple is breaking up. When, as sometimes happens, the couple does break up, the audience takes that outcome as proof that it was on to something, as opposed to admitting it was wrong far more often than it was right. Paradoxically, that fundagelicals have been predicting the end of the world for over a hundred years and have always been wrong has strengthened, not weakened, many people’s beliefs that the end is nigh.

All of the “scandals” about Clinton turned out to be wrong (and far less important than Trump’s) but they got better play. The moment I thought Trump would win was when, for the third week in a short period of time (maybe four weeks?) the National Enquirer had a headline about Clinton being ill or corrupt or whatever. Wandering in Trump pages, I learned that people were operating on a kind of “no smoke without fire” premise.

In other words, Trump’s appeal was to people who are living in a world excessive (and thoroughly false) information and a denial of difference as a value. They also hate complexity. And there is an odd kind of epistemic narcissism—their beliefs are the basis of all truth. But that’s a different post.

Thrillers and Hitler

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“You’ve read the story,” he said. “I grant you it reads like a dime novelette; but there it is, staring you in the face, just the same. All at once, both in England and America, there’s some funny business going on in the oil and steel and chemical trades. The amount of money locked up in those three combines must be nearly enough to swamp the capitals of any other bunch of industries you could name. We don’t know exactly what’s happening , but we do know that the big men, the secret moguls of Wall Street and the London Stock Exchange, the birds with the fat cigars and the names in -heim and -stein, who juggle the finances of this cockeyed world, are moving on some definite plan. And then look at the goods they’re on the road with. Iron and oil and chemicals. If you know any other three interests that’d scoop a bigger pool out of a really first-class war, I’d like to hear of them.” (The Last Hero 43-44)

One of the odd characteristics of Hitler’s rhetoric, as Kenneth Burke noted in 1939, was that he appealed to a blazingly contradictory narrative about the Jews. Jews, Hitler said, were rapacious capitalists, out to screw over the working class, AND they were all Bolsheviks, out to screw over the wealthy. Burke said that Hitler’s answer was simply, “Aha, that makes them even more clever!” But, why would a narrative which obviously involves Jews operating for completely oppositional goals (rapacious capitalism and Bolshevik overthrow of capitalism) motivate people to believe that Jews are evil and dangerous—wouldn’t that argument clearly show that “Jews” are not all the same, and don’t have the same motives (and that “Jewish” and “Bolshevik” are not interchangeable)?

Why did that argument work?

In 1930, Leslie Charteris published The Last Hero, a thriller about his Robin Hood hero Simon Templar’s attempts to right the wrongs of the world. The basic premise of the book, also the premise of the next book (Knight Templar or The Avenging Saint) is that there is an international conspiracy to get major nations into war. That global conspiracy is composed of people (mostly Jews, as indicated in the passage above) in the steel, oil, and chemical industries who think they will benefit in the short term by a massive European war.

Simon Templar, The Saint, is willing to be fairly ugly in his means, including murder and torture, but because his ends are always blazingly good all of what he does is to be admired. He is up against completely evil people, who want to drag people into a war as bad as the Great War, perhaps worse. They just happen to be Jews.

This plot device, esssentially a MacGuffin in its simultaneously empty and excessive signification, comes up also in John Buchan’s 39 Steps, and almost too many other popular sources to name. The basic premise of a thriller—that there is a large plausible conspiracy against the hero—needs to be simultaneously simple, credible, and insane. And, so, that the Jews are behind it fits the bill.

They caused the Great War, and benefitted from it, and so are looking for another. This, to us, might seem an insane narrative, and it is delusional at best, but it was common, and its omnipresence contributed to the success of fascism. So, paradoxically, a belief that war was a Jewish plot imposed on naïve but well-meaning world leaders contributed to one of the most destructive wars in world history.

World War I was, in this narrative, not caused by excessive nationalism, fear-mongering rhetoric, a sense of fatalism about a European war, a passion on the part of the French to regain the Alsace-Lorraine, a passion on the part of the Germans to expand within Europe, sheer incompetence on the part of people trying to manage the diplomatic crisis created by terrorism, or a hovering opportunism on the part of nations (not Jews) to benefit from a war. There remain arguments about who caused the war (Germany’s brinksmanship, Russia’s mobilizing, Britain’s dithering, with the largest number of scholars on the side of Germany) but there isn’t really much disagreement as to what—and it was a concatenation of screwups that enabled leaders engaged in wishful thinking to engage in a war very different from the one they wanted.

Paul Fussell famously argued that the Great War forced a lot of people to accept irony and ambiguity as fact of life, to accept the war as a Great Fuck-up. But many people didn’t (and don’t) want to admit that that unnecessary war was caused by mistakes, misjudgments, and missed telegrams. That such devastation could have been unplanned and unintentional is unimaginable to some people, and for such people, a conspiracy theory, even one that posits a vast network of thoroughly evil people, is preferable to the possibility that we are subject to what almost amounts to random chance.

It was nearly impossible to believe that the war had been fought for good reasons, or that the war had been conducted intelligently, or that it had even really been necessary. There were various responses available: that war is unnecessary, that the methods of negotiations among countries are flawed, that people fuck up, that the world is open to horribly random events. All of those narratives obstruct any attempt to think of political issues as absolutely clear choices between right and wrong. A vast conspiracy turns it back into a clear story of good and bad people.

A vast conspiracy is also rather nice for an author, especially of thrillers. The author doesn’t have to keep coming up with villains, and that the conspiracy is vast, evil, and cunning can be used as duct tape to put together plot points that might otherwise require more explication than the author wants to give, or the readers want to drag through.

And that’s an important point about thrillers: they are supposed to be thrilling, with car chases, basements slowly filling with gas, treks across moors, speedboats, fights, and snappy dialogues. So the conspiracy—whatever it is—has to made plausible in as few words as possible, and that means relying on beliefs readers already have about what conspiracies possibly and plausibly exist. The notion of a Jewish conspiracy goes far back into the Middle Ages, and authors like Buchan and Charteris simply changed the details of the narrative.

There was, in other words, a kind of easy anti-Semitism in interwar literature, easy both in the sense that it was easy to use and easy to believe. Most of the conspiracies are, if you think about them at all, profoundly implausible—makers of steel, oil, and chemicals didn’t actually want another world war, as war had as many risks for them as potential gains (they might want remilitarizing, or some skirmishes, but not a “first-class war”) and, of course, the conspirators are supposed to be brilliant, but engage in silly and pointless actions (such as elaborate ways of killing the hero). They act against their own interest because all they want is to be evil. They are precisely the sort of conspirators who would screw over the wealthy on behalf of the poor and the poor on behalf of the rich, at the same time. Just because.

I don’t know if authors like Charteris and Buchan were personally anti-Semitic; Charteris famously loathed fascism, but Buchan openly admired Mussolini. But none of that matters. It wouldn’t matter if they were hostile to fascism and even hostile to anti-Semitism, if they used Jews as the villains simply because it was easy. What matters is that they did, and it was easy. Easy anti-Semitism made their plot problems easier, and all those plots that reinforced the notion of a convoluted and internally contradictory conspiracy made Hitler’s own conspiracy theory more plausible. There’s no reason to imagine that authors of thrillers were trying to help fascism—they were trying to write books—but they did.

StatesMEN and demagogues

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Briefly, my plaint about scholarship on demagogues has four parts, three of them described previously:

    1. It’s methodologically flawed to try to distinguish demagogues from statesmen on the grounds of motives, since someone’s interpretation of a political figure’s motive is very nearly indistinguishable from their perception of that political figure as a member of the ingroup or outgroup.
    2. It’s methodologically flawed to try to identify the characteristics of demagoguery by looking at what characteristics are shared among political figures the rhetor doesn’t like, because that ensures there will not be any identification of ingroup demagoguery.
    3. If our goal is to prevent communities from getting talked into policies they will later regret, it’s a mistake to do so by trying to identify the responsible demagogues because looking for word magicians assumes what’s at stake—it assumes that communities get into bad decision-making processes because magical individuals lead them there.
    4. It’s methodologically flawed to try to identify demagogues by looking at politically successful and repellent figures because that focus necessarily means we’re looking only at individuals who had the political power (or luck) and identity that would enable them to gain power.

Here I’ll explain briefly what that last one means.

Access to political power has always been carefully circumscribed, and yet supposedly politically excluded groups have always found ways to participate in politics—such as antislavery women who, without a vote, sent thousands of petitions to Congress, with tremendously important impact.

Women’s groups were also important in pro-segregation political agitation, as well as pro-Nazi, despite—in both cases—their political agitation being in direct defiance of the political agenda and ideology on behalf of which they were agitating. Any excursion into the bottom half of the internet will show a lot of women and members of marginalized groups engaged in demagoguery, and they are not uncommonly agitating for their political marginalization, demagogically.

They have little or no power, and their motives are uninteresting. But, rhetors like that can have tremendous power, if there are a lot of people acting as they are. They can promote demagoguery in small groups, via their social media, in their social interactions. They can also help to ensure that criticism of their demagoguery is silenced, through boycotts, shunning, refusing to hire, firing. They can also legitimate demagoguery through approving of it explicitly or implicitly.

In fact, demagoguery is only dangerous when it’s supported by large numbers of people who will refuse to vote for political figures who deliberate or compromise, shun, fire, refuse to hire, or boycott people who aren’t sufficiently fanatical about the ingroup, refuse to testify about ingroup violence, or refuse to condemn it. Those aren’t major political figures—those are the people who create the wave that the major political figures ride.

In other words, focusing on demagogues, rather than demagoguery, is yet another way we let us off the hook.

[image from here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/10/06/hitler-s-killer-women-revealed-in-new-history.html]