Category: authoritarianism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s imagining being someone else.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rough draft of the intro for the Hitler and Rhetoric book

[Much of this is elsewhere on this blog. I’m curious if I’m still having the problem of being too heady and academic.]

Martin Niemoller was a Lutheran pastor who spent 1938-1945 in concentration camps as the personal prisoner of Adolf Hitler. Yet, Neimoller had once been a vocal supporter of Hitler, who believed that Hitler would best enact the conservative nationalist politics that he and Niemoller shared. Niemoller was a little worried about whether Hitler would support the churches as much as Niemoller wanted (under the Democratic Socialists, the power of the Lutheran and Catholic churches had been weakened, as the SD believed in a separation of church and state), but Neimoller thought he could outwit Hitler, get the conservative social agenda he wanted, disempower the socialists, and all without harm coming to the church. He was wrong.

After the war, Niemoller famously said about his experience:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.[1]

Niemoller was persuaded that Hitler would be a good leader, or, at least, better than the Socialists. After the war, Niemoller was persuaded that his support for Hitler had been a mistake. What persuaded him either time?

Christopher Browning studied the Reserve Police Battalion 101 and its role in Nazi genocide, narrating how a group of ordinary men could move from being appalled at the killing of unarmed noncombatants to doing so effectively, calculatedly, and enthusiastically. German generals held captive by the British were wiretapped, and often talked about how and why they supported Hitler, many of whom had been opposed to him. In 1950, Milton Mayer went to visit the small German town from which his family had emigrated and talked to the people living there, writing a book about his conversations with ten of them, all of whom to some degree justified not only their actions during the Nazi regime, but the regime itself—even those who had at points or in ways resisted it. Melita Maschmann’s autobiographical Account Rendered, published in 1963, describes how she reconciled her Hitler Youth activities, which included confiscating property and helping to send people to camps, with her sense that National Socialism was idealistic and good. Robert Citino’s The Wehrmacht Retreats, David Stone’s Shattered Genius, and Ian Kershaw’s The End all describe how so many members of the German military elite not only reconciled themselves to working for Hitler, but to following orders that they believed (often correctly) meant disaster and defeat. Benny Morris’ Roots of Appeasement gives a depressing number of examples of major figures and media outlets that persuaded others and were persuaded themselves that Hitler was a rational, reasonable, peace-loving political figure whose intermittent eliminationist and expansionist rhetoric could be dismissed. Andrew Nagorski’s Hitlerland similarly describes American figures who were persuaded that Hitler wouldn’t start another war; accounts of the 1936 Olymplic Games, hosted by the Nazis, emphasize that Nazi efforts were successful, and most visitors went away believing that accounts of anti-Jewish violence and discrimination were overstated. Biographers of Hitler all have discussions of his great rhetorical successes at various moments, enthusiastic crowds, listeners converted to followers, and individuals who walked out of meetings with him completely won over. Soldiers freezing to death in a Russian winter wrote home about how they still had faith in Hitler’s ability to save them; pastors and priests who believed that they were fighting to prevent the extermination of Christianity from Germany still preached faith in Hitler, blaming his bad advisors; ordinary Germans facing the corruption and sadism of the Nazi government and the life-threatening consequences of Hitler’s policies similarly protection their commitment to Hitler and bemoaned the “little Hitlers” below him who were, they said, the source of the problems. The atrocities of Nazism required active participation, support, and at least acquiescence on the part of the majority of Germans—the people shooting, arresting, boycotting, humiliating, and betraying victims of Nazism were not some tiny portion of the population, and those actions required that large numbers walk by. Some people were persuaded to do those things, and some people were persuaded to walk past.

After the war, what stunned the world was that Germans had been persuaded to acts of irrationality and cruelty previously unimaginable. Understanding what happened in Germany requires understanding persuasion. And understanding persuasion means not thinking of it as a speaker who casts a spell over an audience and immediately persuades them to be entirely different. Rhetoric, which Aristotle defined as the art of finding the available means of persuasion, isn’t just about what a rhetor (a speaker or author) consciously decides to do to manipulate a passive audience. What the case of Hitler shows very clearly is that we are persuaded by many things, not all of them words spoken by a person consciously trying to change our beliefs. Rhetoric helps us understand our own experience, and the most powerful kind of persuasion is self-persuasion. What a rhetor like Hitler does is give us what scholars of rhetoric call “topoi” (essentially talking points) and strategies such that we feel comfortable and perhaps deeply convinced that a course of action is or was the right one. Rhetoric is about justification as much as motivation. That isn’t how people normally think about persuasion and rhetoric, and, paradoxically, that’s why we don’t see when we’ve been persuaded of a bad argument—because we’re wrong about how persuasion works.

This book is about Hitler, and yet not about Hitler. It’s really about persuasion, and why we shouldn’t imagine persuasion as a magically-gifted speaker who seduces people into new beliefs and actions they will regret in the morning. It’s never just one speaker, it’s never just speech, it’s never even just discourse, the beliefs and actions aren’t necessarily very new, and people don’t always really regret them in the morning.

[1] There are various versions. This one is from here: https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007392

Arguing against injustice: Louis Goldblatt before the Tolan Committee

In 1942, after years of fear-mongering about “the Japanese,” the US was seriously considering race-based mass imprisonment of legal aliens and citizens of Japanese ethnicity. The Tolan Committee was formed by a progressive Congressman to have hearings on the West Coast about whether such imprisonment (euphemistically called “evacuation”) should happen. Louis Goldblatt, representing the California State Industrial Union Council, was one of few people to do a fiery anti-imprisonment speech. This is the record of the speech.

       

How abusers negotiate

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-8-prototypes-for-trumps-border-wall-photos

I really wish more people read Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Granted, it gets into the weeds about various battles, but the meta-arguments about argument are brilliant. There is, for instance, what’s typically called “The Melian Dialogue.”  The Melians were neutral, a stance that the Athenians (in a “you’re with us or against us” attitude) took as hostile, and “plundered” the area, thereby completely alienating them. Then the Athenians decided to conquer the area, and offered two choices: surrender (and be conquered), or fight (and be conquered). The Athenians reject any possibility of deliberation, any appeal to higher values, and insist on a crude might makes right ethic. The Athenians refuse public deliberation (something they had been famous for loving), denigrate rhetoric, and begin the negotiations by saying persuasion is impossible, and the Melians should just be realistic: “the question of justice only enters where the pressure of necessity is equal, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must.”[1] Justice, then, isn’t an overarching principle that applies in all situations, but only something you consider if you must.[2] The Athenians, famous for their love of argument, rhetoric, and deliberation, refuse to listen to arguments.

Instead, the Athenians tell the Melians that they should submit to what would likely be a brutal surrender because the Athenians are going to crush them either way. The Athenians frame the Melians as irrational because they choose not to submit, and the Athenians present their offer to let the Melians surrender as a kindness. The Melians, not the Athenians, are responsible for any violence or cruelty on the part of the Athenians.

That’s how abusers negotiate. There are two really interesting moves that abusers make in negotiating: first, they insist that they are entitled to what they want; second, and connected, since they are entitled to what they’re demanding, the other person (or group) is at fault for refusing, and is responsible for whatever the abuser does as a consequence of being refused.

Victims of their abuse are at fault for having “brought it on themselves,” and by “brought it on themselves” abusers mean that their victims didn’t do exactly what the abuser wanted. Abusers negotiate by doing anything they can to win, including violence, for which they don’t take responsibility. The victim is responsible for the consequences of the abuser not getting their way.

It’s also how they think. They believe they are genuinely entitled to whatever they’re trying to get, that their right to the thing they want is grounded in the fabric of the universe and God/Nature’s will, and therefore they are also entirely right to do anything to get their way: the ends justify the means when it’s their ends.[3]

Hitler did this a lot, and it always played with his base. He said that Germany was entitled to Czechoslovakia because reasons and if people refused him, they were responsible for the consequences of not letting him have his way—that is, a war he would frame as justifiable pre-emptive self-defense. The victim is responsible for the consequences of the abuser not getting his way.

Hitler was never willing to negotiate on a reasonable basis about whether Germany really had a right to Czechoslovakia—he was Athens screaming at Melos. He did the same with Poland. If England and France didn’t allow him

to take Poland, THEY were responsible for the ensuing war. If they didn’t let him get what he wanted, they were responsible for what he would do.

And, as Shirer describes, it went over beautifully with his base. Hitler’s base did believe that Germany was entitled to European hegemony, and so, when Hitler described his invasion of Poland as a counterattack, they were willing to see it that way. They didn’t want war, so they said, but they were willing to support war to get what they wanted. All they wanted was to get everything they wanted without having to go to war, but they wanted it enough to go to war. England, France, and Poland could have stopped him anytime by simply surrendering, so the war was their fault. And, oddly enough, Hitler’s rhetoric throughout the war that Germans were the victims of the war played well. Germans were victims because they hadn’t been able to get what they wanted.

That’s how abusers “negotiate”—they say they want everything, and anyone who doesn’t give the everything they want is responsible for the negotiations breaking down. They aren’t responsible for making unreasonable demands. They want the premise of the negotiations to be that they will get everything they want.

Trump promised a wall to his supporters. He is, and has always been, unwilling to deliberate about whether the wall is likely to be effective, good in terms of cost/benefit analysis, or in any way reasonable. He promised it; he wants it; and he will choose to do extraordinary harm to get that wall. And, when he chooses to do the harm for a wall he chooses to support, he will blame others for the choices he has made, on the grounds that they are responsible for his choices.

That’s how abusers negotiate.

 

 

[1] Another translation is: “since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

[2] This stance is often, inaccurately called “realist” (since it’s typically very divorced from reality, it seems to me strategic misnaming), and it’s often attributed to Thucydides by people who obviously didn’t read the whole book. He is condemning the attitude—Athens’ coming to reject deliberation in favor of power politics is, he is clear, a tragedy—a bastardization of the emphasis on expediency of rhetors like Pericles and Diodotus.

[3] Arguing for a “might makes right” ethic, social Darwinism, the miracle of the market, the prosperity gospel, or any other version of the “just world model” involves mental gymnastics when the in-group is not succeeding. When the in-group is succeeding (or has succeeded), success is proof of being entitled to success (the fittest survived, might made right), but when the in-group is failing, that isn’t disproof of the basic principle of might makes right, nor is the success of the out-group proof that they deserved their success. Success of the in-group is proof that the in-group is entitled to success, but success of the out-group is never proof that they were entitled to success.

Why we should stop arguing about civility

Too often, when there is some controversial public action, we have an argument about civility—whether the action violated norms of civility, and whether there should be more or less civility. That whole argument is a red herring.

The civility/incivility binary is what people in rhetoric call ultimate terms (or, more precisely, binary paired terms). It’s fallacious all the way down, first by assuming that actions can be divided into that binary (even making it a continuum doesn’t help), and then pretending that there are objective measures of civility/incivility—that it isn’t a judgment strongly influenced by in-group/out-group thinking. The civility/incivility argument gets us nowhere, and we need to walk away from it. There are two other arguments worth having: one about fairness, and one about strategy.

1. Why the civility/incivility argument is a waste of time

In rhetoric, we talk about “ultimate terms” which are terms where arguments go to die. They are terms that are all connotation and no denotation (freedom, terrorism, rights, political correctness, fascism).[1] People think they know what those terms mean, but they get really mad if you ask them to define those terms. They’ll say, “You know what I mean.” Ultimate terms are generally defined by opposition to an equally imprecise term (civility is not incivility).

Ultimate terms are often loyalty terms (by using those terms you’re showing your membership in some group), and so asking for a precise definition shows you aren’t loyal to that group. (If you ask a certain kind of person to define terrorism precisely, they’ll get really mad; if you ask another kind of person to define neoliberal precisely, they’ll get really mad.) A lot of times, an ultimate term means “not loyal to in-group” (that’s what “politically correct” means, for instance). Ultimate terms are in some kind of binary, with a good ultimate term (what one scholar of rhetoric called God terms) associated with the in-group and the bad one (Devil terms) with the out-group (conservative v. liberal or progressive v. neoliberal). Again, people get really mad when you say they’re using something as an ultimate term.

Another sign that something is an ultimate term is that it is either only used for the in-group or only used for the out-group. So, for instance, no one says that their in-group engaged in incivility and that the out-group engaged in civility. They’re terrorists; we’re freedom fighters.

There is another problem with the concept of civility, and I wrote a long and pedantic book about it: people tend to assume that civility is an objective standard, but we think civility has been violated when we feel offended. (This is a version of complementary projection, when we project our own feelings and reaction on to someone else—I feel offended, so you were offensive.) When the in-group is hostile to the out-group, we don’t feel offended, so it isn’t incivility.

In other words, people in power always control the rules of civility. The rules of civility never apply equally to all groups.

As a side note, I will say that the ignorant nostalgia about civility really gets on my nerves. No, people did not used to be more civil. Charles Sumner was beaten into unconsciousness on the Senate floor. So, just stop clutching your pearls.

The civility/incivility argument is toxic at the base. Walk away from it.

2. The fairness argument

One characteristic of a rational argument (that is, a useful, not necessarily unemotional) argument is that people are willing to listen to one another, and that the rules of the argument apply equally to all parties.

Sarah Sanders has actively advocated allowing private businesses, such as restaurants, to refuse service on the grounds of ethics.[2]

That just happened to her. She has no right to complain about it.

That is the argument we should be making. Not the civility argument, but the fairness one. On what grounds is she saying that the Red Hen did anything wrong?

There are four.

People have tried arguing that the two cases aren’t comparable because discrimination on the basis of religion is prohibited but it’s okay to discriminate on the basis of politics–that’s exactly reversing what the ruling meant. A private business is allowed to serve or not serve anyone, unless their choices about serving are discriminating against a protected class. Anyone can throw someone out of their business if it isn’t discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religion (unless it’s done for religious reasons–at least that’s now the argument being made by people who lost this argument once before).

There is a second argument, which is that discriminating on the basis of religion is okay, but not on the basis of politics–and that’s a really interesting one. This is, in fact, the argument the neoconservatives and fundagelicals use a lot. They believe that they have sincere religious convictions for their actions, but other people don’t. It’s why they put “sincere” into the “religious convictions” criterion. They sincerely believe that they are right, and that everyone knows they are right, and some people pretend they aren’t. (I also wrote a really pedantic book about this.) One really important aspect of sloppy Calvinism (and there’s a lot of it around) is the assumption that the truth is obvious and so people who are acting on sincere religious belief will always be GOP. They think it’s a violation of their religious beliefs that they have to pay taxes to support abortion, while ignoring that it violates the religious beliefs of Friends, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and various others to pay for war, and a violation of many Christians’ beliefs to pay for the death penalty. The people who cheered the cake ruling don’t actually want religious freedom for everyone; they want the freedom to force their religion on others.

The third argument is the consequence of inoculation. A lot of conservatives believe that “liberals” believe that we should be entirely tolerant and never judge anyone. The neocon propaganda machine has been really effective at spreading three messages: 1) “liberals” have contempt for anyone who does manual labor; 2) Democratic candidates promote abortion; 3) “liberals” advocate complete tolerance and therefore are total hypocrites when they criticize anyone. All three of those are wrong, and rely on a lot of false equivalencies–no, calling someone racist is not just as bad as being a racist.

The fourth one is important for understanding why so many people are repeating the argument that Sanders is a victim of incivility (which is all part of the snowflake right whingeing about being victims of everything). It enables a kind of preemptive hostility and discrimination. The narrative is that “liberals” (a devil term) promote total tolerance of anyone, and so something like the Red Hen incident show that liberals are just as intolerant as the right AND don’t have God on their side. Any and all incivility on the side of the in-group is wiped off the slate because we just did it too. (This is another red herring, but it’s one we need to point out, and that’s tricky.)

If the argument is civility/incivility then the neoconservatives can dodge the fairness argument. The “you’re not tolerant” is also a red herring. The fairness argument is where we need to keep the debate.

3. Effectiveness

Are lefties justified in shouting neoconservatives out of restaurants? Yes. Absolutely.

Is it rhetorically savvy? No. This article  explains why, and the books in the links are really good and worth reading.

Whenever someone makes this argument—that it’s rhetorically unwise to shout people out of restaurants–, there tend to be three responses. First, a lot of people respond with “But it’s justified to respond with deliberately outraging protests.” It is. I agree. That isn’t the argument.

Second, a lot of people respond by saying that doing nothing or trying to please the extremists on the other side doesn’t work. I agree. But that’s an instance of trying to think about this issue from within the civility/incivility binary, linked to a binary of “us” and “them,” and we need to get away from both of those binaries. I don’t think we can persuade Sanders, or die-hard Trump supporters. But there are others who are open to persuasion—not immediately, and not easily, but it’s possible. And there isn’t a binary between being “nice” to Trump administration members and shouting at them in restaurants. Both of those are bad choices, and they aren’t our only ones. We have more choices.

Third, a lot of people present deductive arguments as to why deliberately outrageous arguments should work. I don’t care whether they should work; I care whether they do. I’d love for them to work; a part of me cheers every time someone shouts a homophobe out of a business, and I’ll admit to enjoying seeing Nazis punched. But I honestly can’t think of any times that it’s worked well for the left. It can sometimes work for the right, in that it gets what is inaccurately called “the middle” (not really the middle, but the intermittently authoritarian) to want more law and order because they fall easily into the “both sides are just as at fault” narrative and increased order would seem to be a solution to that problem. We should do what has worked.

Neoconservatism has made an unholy alliance with fundagelicals to promote unrestrained capitalism and authoritarian neo-Christian policies in the US, and to support an openly apocalyptic foreign policy (that is, one explicitly oriented toward nuclear war in the  Middle East). That’s bad. And as long as we argue about civility, they’ll win the argument.

They’ll lose the argument if it’s about fairness, and that’s the argument we need to have.

[The image is from MLK’s debate with Kilpatrick on NBC, available here.]

[1] In some circumstances, the terms can be used precisely. “Fascism” and “neoliberal” are, among political theorists, very precise terms, for instance. If the term is not being used as an ultimate term, then the person using it can define it without getting mad.

Demagoguery of the Elite (aka Rhetoric Society of America paper)

It’s common for people to assume that demagoguery is a subset of populism (so it is not a problem of elites), but the notion that demagoguery and populism are necessarily connected is actually problematic—and largely the consequence of some of most influential writers on demagoguery (such as Plato and Hobbtes) being what Robert Ivie calls “demophobic” as well as a misunderstanding of how the term worked in the classical era.

Basically, my argument is that assuming that demagoguery is necessarily a subset of populism is that it makes three characteristics crucial to the definition of the term:

    1. audience (non-elite)
    2. style (rhetoric with particular characteristics, especially recurrent topoi),
    3. and political consequences (sometimes simply policies with which they disagree, sometimes ones that are agreed to have been harmful).

Why have all three? You end up with a Venn diagram that, for no particular reason, makes the bad policy decisions of the non-elite more important than ones made on the part of the elite, or on the part of groups that include both.

There are four conditions under which it seems to me reasonable to restrict the study of demagoguery to the non-elite. The first is if the evidence suggests that the elite never make bad decisions; the second is if the mistakes of the elite are never due to demagoguery; the third is if the kind of demagoguery to which the elite are susceptible is significantly different from that to which the non-elite are susceptible, and the fourth is if the who study of demagoguery is part of a project to discredit democracy.

What I want to say is that, if we are instead concerned about this overlap—disastrous public decisions and a particular kind of rhetoric—then we should focus on that intersection. I’ve been doing that for some time, and, like many others, have ended up with a definition that emphasizes:

    • treating issues as us v. them (an in-group and out-group);
    • scapegoating an out-group for the problems of the in-group;
    • therefore calling for purifying our community, nation, or world of the out-group through disenfranchising, expelling, or exterminating that out-group;
    • so, it’s a reframing of policy discourse as performances of in-group loyalty.

There are a bunch of other characteristics, but that isn’t really the point here—the point is whether any of the above four conditions matters—do elites never make bad decisions? when they do, is the rhetoric different? That isn’t what I see, and it seems to me that they are just as susceptible to demagoguery as any other group, but, as I’ll argue, that’s partially the consequence of the ambiguity in the notion of elite.

Before I get there, though, I should talk about why there is the assumption that demagoguery is necessarily populist discourse, and there are two brief answers. One is that, for people like Plato, Plutarch, Hobbes, Le Bon, and even Reinhard Luthin, the study of demagoguery is part of a project to discredit democracy. For them demagoguery epitomizes the unreliability of the “masses” and their profound lack of fitness for power. It’s a circular argument: democracy is bad because it gives power to people who are susceptible to demagoguery, and demagoguery is defined in such a way that only the masses’ supposed susceptibility to it is noted.

The second is the assumption that in the classical era it always meant populism and it was always use in a derogatory way. At least until Plato (and, in some cases, even after) it was a neutral term meaning simply the leader of the democratic party—that is, the one with policies oriented toward helping the demes. The leader of the that party was a demagogue, but he wasn’t necessarily a non-elite. Pericles, Cleisthenes, Alcibiades, and Themistocles were all demagogues, and they were all members of the elite.

Assuming that demagogues were necessarily non-elite (or populist) is like a scholar two thousand years from now assuming that any Democratic candidate was a populist who supported democracy.

Nor was there necessarily the assumption that demagogues were irresponsible in their rhetoric. Andocides, in Against Alcibiades, condemns Alcibiades not for being a demagogue, but for acting like one (4.27)–that is, pretending to be a champion of the demos, when he really is not. Hyperides, in his attack on Demosthenes, says a demagogue “worthy of the name should be the savior of his country, not a deserter” (Against Demosthenes Fragment 4, column 16b, line 26), suggesting that the term might be used as a term of praise.[3] Isocrates, for instance, praises Theseus and calls him a demagogue (Helen 37); he regularly refers to Pericles as a demagogue (see, for instance, Antidosis 234, To Nicocles 16, On the Peace 122). Like many other writers, Isocrates compares current demagogues to previous ones, criticizing the current ones as worse than those before (see, for example, On the Peace 126). At one point in Aristophanes’ The Knights, one of the slaves explains, “Demagoguery is no longer a job for a man of education and good character, but for the ignorant and disgusting” (The Knights 190).[4]

Thucydides is often assumed to be an elitist who objected to Cleon on political grounds—that Cleon was a populist. But Cleon was no more populist than Pericles, and Pericles is the hero of the piece. Thucydides objected to Cleon’s rhetoric, just as he objected to Alcibiades (a demagogue) and Nikias (an elitist). Thucydides’ history is a classic Greek tragedy, and the tragedy is about rhetoric, not about class.

Aristotle, interestingly enough doesn’t use the term demagoguery to mean populists exclusively. He mentions demagoguery within the oligarchs, for instance, thereby raising the question of a demagoguery of the elite. And that’s the question I want to pursue.

There are a lot of problems with assuming that demagoguery is necessarily exclusively connected to populist policies, audience, or discourse. One of them, as mentioned previously, is the toxic fantasy that the elite are inherently better at decision-making, and therefore elite rhetoric is necessarily better in some way—a notion that posits a stable elite, and even that doesn’t make much sense. Do we mean elite in terms of economic class, political power, education, or culture? Those aren’t the same, after all. University professors might be considered cultural and/or educational elite, but we generally aren’t politically or economically elite.

And, if you define demagoguery without attention to the class of the rhetors or audience, and instead by the rhetoric, you can see plenty of instances of demagoguery of the elite. Proslavery demagoguery often had an audience of political and/or economic elites (such as Congressional debate over the gag rule, pro-secessionist rhetoric in the secession assemblies, various state and federal court decisions, and very learned books on Scriptural defenses of slavery, legal and philosophical apologia for slavery, the Dred Scott decision); eugenics was predominantly an elite and even expert discourse and generally demagogic; I’ve sat in MLA Delegate Assembly meetings and listened to demagoguery; the US Supreme Court decision Hirabayashi v. US is sheer demagoguery; Alfred Rosenberg, Carl Schmitt, and Ludwig Muller were all elite Nazis writing to other elites; they were building on elite demagogues like Houston Chamberlain, Madison Grant, and Arthur de Gobineau. So, regardless of how “elite” is defined—cultural, political, economic, educational—there are instances of demagoguery within an elite audience.

Take, for instance, Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race (1916, the quote below is from the fourth edition, 1922)—sometimes called “Hitler’s Bible” (because of Hitler’s praise of it), and profoundly influential among the elite, but not a particularly big seller. This passage, picked at random, is typical:

Notice the hedging, also the uncited references to knowledge that is vaguely out there—Grant presents himself as someone announcing facts that are well known, and his hedging makes him seem to be a nuanced and careful researcher. He isn’t—he isn’t presenting an anthropological consensus, and his argument is circular (all good things come from Nordics because any sign of civilization is taken as a sign of Nordic presence).

Dimitra Koutsantoni notes that expert discourse often relies on what she calls “common knowledge markers:” “words and expressions that exclusively underscore authors’ beliefs by presenting them as given, as knowledge shared by all members of the community” (166). Koutsantoni argues that “By emphasizing certainty in and attitude toward claims, and by presenting them as given and shared, authors control readers’ inferences and demand their agreement and sharing of their views (power entailing solidarity)” (170). Grant’s use of hedging and common knowledge markers  gives him an air of precision and expertise—he seems to be doing little more than stacking data.

Racist demagoguery surprisingly often claims to be doing little more than stacking data and citing expert consensus, even if, in the cases of David Duke’s My Awakening (1998), Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994), or Theodore Bilbo’s Take Your Choice (1948), they are oriented toward a broader audience.

Demagoguery of the elite can mean demagogic texts and arguments circulated within a political elite (such as Henry Laughlin’s technical and very demagogic testimony in favor of the 1924 Immigration Act racist restrictions), in which he was speaking as an expert (disciplinary elite) to members of the political elite; pro-eugenics demagoguery such as his might also be purely within the disciplinary elite (communications within the Galton Society); and there might also be an attempt to translate disciplinary elite consenses to a less elite audience (Lothrop Stoddard’s Rising Tide of Color).

In many of those situations, rhetors used the same rhetorical strategies typical of expert discourse—hedging, technical language, and common knowledge markers. Sometimes, such as William Workman’s surprisingly boring pro-segregation The Case for the South (1960), the texts are dispassionate (Chappell 142); sometimes hyperbolic and explicitly fear-mongering, such as Bilbo’s 1948 Take Your Choice. Emotionality, like the populist criteria, doesn’t seem to me to have an important difference.

Because demagoguery scapegoats an out-group for all the problems of the in-group, there is almost always an element of fear—an existential threat—but demagoguery doesn’t always have emotional markers. As with the Grant, Workman, or Laughlin, it can have very few boosters and instead appeal to common knowledge markers to establish the existential threat—there can be an emphasis on the rhetor’s self-control in the face of the threat, so that the discourse is not about fear in the in-group, but the threat of the out-group.

Social psychologists call this complementary projection, “in which stereotypes serve as justifications of anxieties (e.g., I fear, therefore you must be dangerous)” (Glick 135). Earl Warren, in testifying for mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans, used the existence of racist fear on the part of himself and various peace officers as proof that Japanese Americans were dangerous, proslavery rhetors regularly used their own fear of slave insurrection as proof that abolitionists were in a conspiracy to incite such insurrections, current anti-immigration rhetoric appeals to xenophobia as evidence of Mexicans being “bad hombres” and “animals.”

Demagoguery of the elite not only regularly engages in complementary projection, particularly through such rhetorical strategies as common knowledge markers, but I would argue it legitimates complementary projection, by making it seem as though there is expert consensus that an out-group is essentially and implacably dangerous. Thus, if we restrict the concept of demagoguery to populist demagoguery, we can seem to give a free pass to the equally damaging demagoguery of the elite, and thereby protect it from criticism.

My argument about demagoguery is that we should focus on the rhetorical strategies and recurrent characteristics, and not on the motives or identities of the rhetors engaged in it. In fact, I argue, the shift of stasis to identity and motive is one of the characteristics of demagoguery—not all such shifts are demagogic but demagoguery always has that shift. Thus, if, as scholars, we make the shift to the focus on identity, we have an inherently demagogic scholarly project.

In short, if we’re concerned about the ways that a kind of rhetoric contributes to disastrous public deliberation then I see no reason to assume that the populism of a rhetor’s political agenda or rhetoric is a distinguishing variable for demagoguery. The notion that elites are immune to demagoguery isn’t just false; it is perniciously so.

[2] Demosthenes uses it simply to mean a leader of the people (see, for instance, Against Aristogeiton II 4).

[3] Lane’s claim that “None of the historians, playwrights, and orators of classical Athens relied upon a perjorative term for demagogue in developing their analyses of bad political leadership” (180) seems to me slightly overstated—they seem aware that there is a perjorative connotation possible. It seems to me similar to how writers might currently use words like feminist, liberal, or progressive. But, certainly, I agree with Lane that they do not use the term in an exclusively perjorative way. Lane credits Plutarch with the demagogue/statesman distinction as we have inherited it—that is, thinking it was present in earlier writers (192).

[4] Although several scholars share this reading (Dover 69, note 1; Lane 185) it’s possible, of course, that Aristophanes is making fun of the tendency that demagogues have to accuse one another of demagoguery, and we’re not to take this comment seriously at all. Still, his criticism of demagogues is their tendency to rely on flattery—that is, not who they are, but their rhetorical strategies.

[5] Aristotle mentions a specific instance of this kind of situation in Rhodes: “the demagogues used to provide pay for public services, and also to hinder the payment of money owed to the naval captains” (Politics 1304b 30).

[6] That Aristotle could refer to “oligarchic demagogues” suggests that the term had shifted meanings between the time of Isocrates and Aristotle, and it no longer signified a leader of the demes.

Persuasion happens

Recently, I heard a really good discussion by a couple of people who do and promote a lot of good research on how people think. And one of them said, “We used to believe that you could change peoples’ minds by presenting them with research, but research shows that isn’t the case, so I don’t believe that anymore.”

He didn’t appear to notice the irony.

A lot of research on persuasion isn’t very good, in that it shows something that Augustine talks about—people are not likely to believe completely different things from listening to one speech. And people in a study who are presented with new information don’t change their minds because they shouldn’t—for all they know, since they know it’s a study, the information is deliberately false. Even the better research on persuasion shows that a lot of people don’t change their minds on issues associated with in-group loyalty on the basis of one argument.   (The one exception is if they are presented with information that the in-group supports a particular position—then they are likely to get their position in line with the in-group.)

But, as in the case above, people do change their minds. Philip Tetlock shows that even authoritarians change their minds—they just deny they did. It’s hard for authoritarians and naïve realists to admit they’ve changed their minds because admitting that they were wrong means admitting that their whole model of judgment is wrong.

And research does have an impact on that process of changing our minds. The short essays in How I Changed My Mind About Evolution have a common theme: people realized that the anti-evolution rhetoric they’d been taught depended on a misrepresentation of evolution. The inoculation technique  —presenting people with a weak version of an argument they will later hear or read—backfired because the authors in that book realized it was a weaker version.

Inoculation is, it seems to me, a particularly unethical strategy when it comes to religious issues, since it’s a violation of Christ’s requirement that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. And, unhappily, it often results in people rejecting religion rather than rejecting the narrow and bigoted religious ideology that can only survive by misrepresenting its opposition.

For inoculation to be effective, it has to be coupled with either demonization/pathologizing of out-groups (out-group views are so spiritually dangerous or intellectually infectious that you can’t even let yourself listen) or insistence on pure in-group loyalty. If inoculation is promoted in a culture that also emphasizes victimization—the in-group is in danger of being exterminated, and so listening to the out-group is treasonous—then people might not realize they’re being presented with a weak version of out-group arguments.

Inoculation (coupled with demonization/pathologizing of the out-group) isn’t specific to reactionary politics, although, because of “conservatives”’ privileging of in-group loyalty , it tends to work better with people who vote conservative, but one can see it everywhere on the spectrum of political arguments.

Non-conservatives unintentionally enhance the effectiveness of inoculation through various practices: 1) repeating misrepresentation of out-group belief systems (no, conservative Christians are not hypocritical because they cite Hebrew Bible rules about sex and yet reject the rules about shellfish)—just stop that); 2) not knowing the best arguments for the positions we oppose (for instance, not only are there instances of people stopping crimes by having a gun, but gun bans have a complicated consequence ; 3) treating all out-group members as identical; 4) relying on sources that misrepresent their own sources (Blue State, dailykos, and Mother Jones—I’m looking at you).

Projection is also important in persuasion, and one aspect of projection that works well for various in-group enclaves is to condemn others for being in an enclave. Really effective propaganda machines appear to offer both sides, by presenting the audience with the desired political outcome, and then a more extreme version (so segregationists like Boutwell could claim to be reasonable because he didn’t support violence — keep in mind that that stance worked, so that people presented Boutwell’s implacable opposition to integration was reasonable, and King’s position was unwise) All factional media insists that we are getting our information from objective sources; they only consume factional media. And, that we are consuming media that engages in inoculation means we don’t think we are in a bubble. We think we are listening to the other side.

People are persuaded by research. They are persuaded by research they consider valid and that they are persuaded represents the consensus of responsible experts on the subject.

All of those terms–research, validity, consensus, responsible experts–are vexed, and heavily influenced by in-group favoritism, but persuasion happens.

We are all persuaded. The worst thing about our current political situation is that there is so much discourse that says “I have become persuaded that persuasion is impossible, and so we must stop trying to persuade others.”

No. When people are persuaded that persuasion is impossible, they are preparing themselves for violence.

[The image is of Nazis enjoying humiliating Jews on Austria abandoning democracy and joining Germany.]