Category: charismatic leadership

Right-wing rhetoric as pre-emptive self-defense

The right has shifted to a very old kind of rhetoric—our political situation is one in which a war has been declared on us and our values.  Our attempts at self-defense have just riled THEM that much more, and they are now determined to exterminate us. They have moved from symbolic violence and political oppression to actual violence. Therefore, we are justified in trying to exterminate them from the political scene, because that is a controlled and measured response to their actually trying to kill us—no system of ethics, no sense of fairness, no concerns about legality or process should limit what political actions we take against THEM.

This never ends well.

It’s also never literally true. It’s only ever used by people in positions of power whose “existential threat” isn’t that they’ll be exterminated, but that they will lose their current political power (usually hegemony).

After all, a genuinely minority group, whose existence (as opposed to political hegemony) was threatened wouldn’t have as one of their responses the extermination of some other group. They wouldn’t have the power to make that happen. Only a group that has the ability to exterminate an out-group—that is, the group with the greatest political power–can make this threat a plausible basis for large-scale political action.

There isn’t a war on Christmas, or a war on Christians; Aryans weren’t threatened with extermination; slaveholders didn’t have to worry about a race war that would enslave them; the GOP doesn’t have to worry that “liberals” will storm gated communities. In all these cases, media worked their base into political violence against an out-group on the fallacious grounds that it was justifiable self-defense (the out-group intended to exterminate them). It wasn’t, and they weren’t. And we’re there again.

Currently, the right-wing propaganda machine is doing two things: preparing its base for a factional state of exception against any non-Trump supporters, and setting up the talking points to rationalize political and judicial violence against non-Trump supporters.

There’s a lot of talk right now about Nazis, and the right-wing talk about Nazis (and a non-trivial amount of left-wing rhetoric) gets it completely wrong.

Here’s what happened with Hitler: he said things a lot of people were saying, but he said it in a way that made many believe that he completely understood them, that he was a reliable ally against Marxism, that he would break the logjam of current politics, that he would cleanse the Agean stables of current politics by getting rid of all the bad people. In other words, he told people that politics isn’t a question of politics—that is, political discourse isn’t about argumentation regarding our policy options, but a question of identity. There are good people, and there are bad people, and politics is a question of getting good people (meaning Hitler) in place, and everyone having faith in his ability to get things done.

Politics, in this world, isn’t about policy argumentation, but about pure commitment to the person who seems to have good judgment about everything, including all political issues.

Hitler came across as a person with fanatical commitment to values a lot of Germans thought were good values—German hegemony, a revitalized military, economic autarky, crushing the left. He never supported his policy agenda with policy argumentation (he couldn’t). But, he persuaded a minority of people that he had a good plan; he persuaded a larger number of people that he was better than communists. Once he got into power, because the conservatives refused to acknowledge that democratic socialists are not communists, he enacted policies that made things better for a lot of people in the short-term.

And, because a lot of people liked the short-term what, they didn’t look into the how. Hitler improved the lives of many people in Germany, and granted the “Christian” right and the military a lot of what they wanted, so they went along with the politicization of the judiciary, the demonization of dissent, and the criminalizing of opposition political parties. They did so because, in the moment, they were getting what they wanted. They liked the outcome, but they were all eventually pulverized in the maw of the how to which they acquiesced.

It’s never about the what; it’s always about the how.

And one important part of Hitler’s how was his use of exterminationist policies justified as a kind of pre-emptive self-defense. Union leaders, communists, and democratic socialists were the first people rounded up by the Nazis, on the grounds that their beliefs constituted a threat to Nazis. The assertion was that they intended to exterminate Nazis, and therefore Nazis were justified in suspending constitutional rights in self-defense for a war that hadn’t yet happened. A lot of people don’t realize that the Holocaust and other serial genocides were justified as self-defense, against a group that, it was claimed, had been at war with Aryans already. Hitler and the Nazis insisted on calling the attack on Czechoslovakia a counter-attack. And many Germans, including the ones who might have been able to mount the kinds of protests to slow things down, didn’t protest because they liked their better financial situation, they liked the rollback of lefty policies (they liked the bans on homosexuality, birth control, and women’s rights), and they liked the sense that Germany didn’t have to apologize anymore. They liked being proud of being German. They liked winning.

For a long time, large groups of Americans have been mobilized to support any political figure who advocates banning abortion, regardless of anything else about that figure. If, that person also insists that gun ownership should be unregulated, and politics is about expelling or exterminating the out-group, they can count on a fanatical base. None of those slogans (they aren’t really policies) is defended through policy argumentation (the gun issue gets the closest, but it’s still pretty far away).

And they aren’t argued via policy argumentation because they can’t be—they’re incoherent. The argument is that abortion should be banned because it is bad, and so banning it will end abortion but banning guns will not reduce shootings and the constitution says gun ownership for militia members should be protected but that means that no one can restrict gun ownership at all but the first amendment doesn’t protect all speech so the theory underlying the NRA reading of the second amendment doesn’t apply to any other amendment but it’s a good argument and banning immigration will reduce immigration so banning works with abortion and immigration but with guns it just criminalizes the activity but that argument doesn’t apply to abortion or immigration because. Just because.

The NRAGOP (that is, the part of the GOP that dutifully repeats and acts on NRA slogans) insists that the second amendment be read as though any restriction on individual gun ownership in any public space is prohibited. But they don’t read the first amendment as providing the same protection for speech (see, for instance, their attempt to prohibit doctors from talking about guns in the household, the restriction of what the CDC can say about guns, or the contradictions about teachers’ first versus second amendment rights). So, yeah, the NRAGOP argument about the second amendment is not grounded in a consistent principle about how to read the constitution because the NRAGOP doesn’t read the first and second amendment the same way.

And anyone who says that banning guns is useless but banning abortion and immigration would be helpful doesn’t understand how major premises work.

When you can’t defend your policy agenda rationally, and the GOP can’t, because it can’t explain why it’s the party that tried to hang Clinton is not only supporting Trump, but Kavanaugh, and is enacting policies that increase the debt (while having gotten its panties into a bunch about the debt), can’t defend its contradictory readings of the first and second amendments, doesn’t support policies that would actually reduce abortion, and, well, the GOP can’t defend its policies rationally.

So, what it does is claim that the possibility that white fundagelical men might lose some of their power means that everything that matters about the US will be exterminated, and so people who support their political agenda should react in panic.

That’s proslavery rhetoric. That’s prosegregationist rhetoric. It’s hyperbolic and destructive.

If the GOP has a good policy agenda, then it can defend that policy agenda through policy argumentation. It doesn’t because it can’t.

And that’s important. The GOP can mobilize its base on all sorts of grounds, and can give talking points to your family and friends, in which they shift the stasis to which group is better, or who supports abortion, or whether HRC laughed about a rape, but what it can’t do is give them the means to engage in policy argumentation. Because their policy agenda is indefensible on those grounds.

Right-wing propaganda and being clever about resentment

Tucker Carlson on the protestors of Kavanaugh.  It’s kind of rhetorically brilliant.

One of the rhetorical problems that the Right Wing Propaganda Machine faces is that it is fueled by resentment–all of its rhetoric relies heavily on telling “real” Americans that they don’t work as hard, but get more; they look down on real Americans; they are living off the hard work of real Americans, while continually screwing them over. It’s called producerism, the notion that there are producers, and there are parasites, and it’s long been a staple of right-wing toxic populism (a rhetoric not limited to Republicans, as this book shows).

Producerism is a kind of tricky rhetoric to use unless you’re arguing for unions, and it’s especially tricky if you’re using it to you argue for policies that actively hurt the working class. And if you’re trying to use it to argue for a political party that is giving massive tax cuts to the rich, and you’re irrationally and blindly obedient to probably the laziest President in American history, how do you do that?

Carlson can’t argue that those are the children of rich kids, and thereby condemn rich kids, because there are rich kids in the White House, who are openly using their position in the White House to make themselves richer.

So, he picks two professions in the elite that his base likely hates: orthodontists and lawyers.

One of many fascinating things about the very calculated turn on professors (it started in the late 90s) is that it wasn’t just on the basis of professors being communists or atheists (since it’s easy enough to show that most professors aren’t communists or atheists) but as rich people who don’t really work. They are, as the interviewees in Cramer’s Politics of Resentment say, people who sit down to work, and who shower in the morning. That’s true of bankers, too, or hedge fund managers, or CEO, or Trump. The RWPM needs the rage of resentment, and needs it carefully turned away from being resentful of unjust tax cuts, Trump’s corruption, Graham’s allowing Trump to buy his compliance, so it has picked targets who can’t really fight back, aren’t really the problem, but about whom it’s easy to build up rage.

This is projection–there are people who are screwing over the working class, but it isn’t professor, orthodontists, or lawyers (well, lots of them are lawyers, so maybe I have to modify that). It’s a specific kind of projection: scapegoating. And it works.

 

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

What it’s like when you’ve been reading Nuremburg Interrogations, Tapping Hitler’s Generals, Shattered Genius, The End, The Wehrmacht Retreats, and Trump Administration officials saying they’re protecting America by standing by Trump

A recent anonymous editorial says, “We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous. But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.”

This author, call them Franz, wants the Trump administration to succeed, and believes the administration is significantly damaging to the US. So, Franz wants an administration to succeed that he believes is damaging to the US. Wait, wait, that isn’t what Franz meant at all.

The problem with Trump is that he is basically a fascist. He doesn’t want a government accountable to the people through a critical press; he wants (and, to a large degree, has) a media that will repeat in a fawning way anything he wants said, that will defend him through any sophistries and casuistries and outright falsehoods necessary (how tall is he? how much does he weigh?).  Trump wants to be a one-person government, he wants to be head of a one-party state, in which there is nothing but fawning adoration of him, and a government of charismatic leadership. Franz thinks all of that is bad, and yet Franz does everything he can to keep Trump from being held accountable for how bad Franz thinks Trump is.

The sensible (and honorable) thing  for Franz to do would be to step outside the administration and call for impeachment. But Franz isn’t willing to do that honorable thing. Why not? Notice that Franz never explains that point. Franz wants to be seen as a hero without actually explaining why he hasn’t engaged in the genuinely brave action his beliefs would imply–openly condemning an administration he thinks is (sort of–he likes the political agenda, sometimes) bad, but not really, because not bad enough for him to take a hit to his political career.

Basically, this coward has done an anonymous negative Yelp review on Trump.

He says he likes the Republican, not Trump’s, policy agenda. Even without Trump, the GOP has Congress, a reliable propaganda machine, and an increasingly and openly Republican judiciary, and impeaching Trump would put Pence in power. So, why not do it?

Because, and this is what Franz doesn’t want to say, without rabid Trump supporters, the GOP wouldn’t have Congress. Franz wants the political energy and power gained by fomenting Trump’s fascism, but Franz thinks he doesn’t actually want fascism.

Oh, yes, he does. Franz doesn’t want the end product of fascism, but he wants the support of fascists. Franz supports fascism. Franz needs fascists. Maybe Franz should rethink his political agenda since 1) it depends on fascists, and 2) it depends on his hiding his ethical agenda from the public.

The German generals disliked Hitler from the beginning, recognizing him as pretty much a shallow thinker and an idiot about military affairs, and many of them were not Nazis, but they were reactionaries, and they loathed what they thought of as Bolshevism (which included liberalism and democratic socialism). They stuck with Hitler because they believed that “many of [his] policies have already made [Germany] safer and more prosperous.” They would have said that they supported his “effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.” Because he did all that. Seriously, Hitler did that. Franz would have liked Hitler. Hitler undid the socialist agenda of the Weimar democracy in regard to regulations about labor, he promised industrialists all sorts of things, and he promised the military what it wanted.

Am I saying that Trump is Hitler? No, because I really don’t think he is, but I do think he’s a fascist (not in the loose way it’s thrown around in the media, but in the way scholars like Paxton describe it). I’m making a more complicated point: Franz is presenting himself as a hero and savior. Is he? And the way to answer that question is to ask whether we would praise the same behavior on the part of other people who made the same arguments Franz is. Franz’s way of defending Trump is how supporters of Hitler defended him. It’s a bad way of defending someone.

That was complicated, so I’ll try to be more clear. Franz says that he has to try to mitigate Trump’s awful behavior because he likes Trump’s policy agenda (and he thinks the two are separate). He can’t leave Trump because then he might not get that agenda. And that is exactly the way that various people justified working with Hitler.

Is Franz’s defense a good defense? No. Not because Trump is like Hitler, but because Franz is like the people who supported Hitler. Had Hitler had to rely only on true believers like Himmler and Goebbels, he would have tanked. He succeeded because of people like Franz.

It isn’t about the policy agenda. It’s about the world you create in the course of getting that agenda. That’s what supporters of Hitler didn’t understand, and it’s what Franz doesn’t understand. You’re supporting a toxic process because it will get you the momentary political gains. The momentary political gains don’t matter. The process does.

So, Franz, your desire to hold on to a GOP majority—that is, your tribalism—means you’re throwing the US under the bus. You’re trying to present yourself as a hero, but you’re an enabler. The kindest thing I could say about you is that you’re Franz. Were I less charitable, I’d point out that you’re Wilhelm.

The image is from here: http://ww2today.com/24th-september-1942-hitler-sacks-his-chief-of-staff-franz-halder

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.

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.

“Charisma Isn’t Leadership, and Other Lessons We Can Learn from Trump the Businessman”

“One can only hold the masses by habit or force” (Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talks, 335, 24th-25th February 1942).

What I want to suggest in this talk is that charismatic leadership is a tempting way to solve the problem of institutional compliance in a culture of outcomes-based ethics—that is, if the dominant mantra is survival of the fittest, might makes right, or some other system that says a process/action was ethical if it led to success (such as any version of what is generally inaccurately called “Darwinism”).  I argue that charismatic leadership, especially as imagined in current popular management discourse, is an attempt to ground compliance to institutional norms in normative agreement rather than legitimacy, tradition, or coercion (none of which are possible in an outcomes-based ethical system, such as is assumed in social Darwinism, the magic of the market, or the just world model). Because institutions grounded in such a system don’t have access to compliance arguments grounded in fairness, and coercion is expensive, charismatic leadership (which its emphasis on agency by proxy) appears a sensible rhetoric. Further, as imagined in current popular management discourse, charismatic leadership when coupled with the current dominant lay political theory, can easily create the conditions under which fascism seems the most sensible governmental system. Basically, my argument is: the combination of management rhetoric’s promotion of charismatic leadership as the ideal model, lay political theory about disagreement and deliberation being unnecessary, and the fantasy that all we need in government is a good businessman means that fascism will appeal to a lot of Americans.

I’ll begin with something not particularly controversial among political scientists/theorists: for an institution to be stable, people within that institution need to obey the laws. Why shouldn’t all of us in this room take all these chairs home and sell them on e-bay?

It’s conventional to characterize the various mobilizing ideas (that is, the ideas that mobilize you not to steal chairs) as:

What matters for these purposes is that the top three are often characterized as systems grounded in legitimacy, and the bottom three are grounded in authoritarianism (of various degrees).[1]

My first claim is that a culture of outcome-based ethics makes grounding any institution in legitimacy virtually impossible, leaving such institutions or cultures reliant on some version of authoritarianism, perhaps even fascism. I’ll argue that charismatic leadership is an attempt to square the circle, and get the kind of compliance that comes from ideal normative agreement by reframing blind obedience.

By outcome-based ethics, I mean any ethical system that says that triumph is the measure—that is, success is sufficient proof that success was merited (what social psychologists call the just world model). A culture or institution in which triumph is the measure of merit (the ends justify the means, might makes right, the proof is in the pudding, survival of the fittest) will not value setting ethical standards that apply across groups.  Fairness across groups is explicitly rejected in those moral systems as giving aid to people who don’t deserve it, as makers carrying the takers, or, at best, as unnecessary. Outcome-based ethics are generally profoundly individualistic—at most, they advise fairness within one’s in-group, but even that is shaky.

Corporations have yet another rhetorical/motivational problem. Increasingly, employees are expected to behave with more than mere compliance—to work more than 40 hours a week, to sacrifice health and homelife, more than they will be compensated. The ideal employee gives more to the corporation than she gets back in monetary compensation—the ideal employee values loyalty more than is fiscally rational. But this is not a symmetric relationship—the corporation is not expected to value loyalty to employees more than its fiscal bottom line. Business pundits generally justify businesses cracking open pension funds, closing down, firing people, minimizing benefits, and other practices on the grounds that a business should make decisions on purely economic grounds; but businesses don’t want employees reasoning the same way.

Look at it this way. Imagine a corporation that says that the best employee is the one who bills the most hours or sells the most units, regardless of whether the job really required that many hours or the customer needed that many units. If the incentives are such that anything short of breaking the law and getting caught is allowed, then on what grounds can the corporation say “When it comes to clients, all you should worry about is maximizing your profit, but don’t treat the organization that way”?

Were the “it’s okay to see everyone else as an opportunity to maximize your profit” a consistently applied ethic, the question wouldn’t be whether it’s right or wrong for us to steal the chairs and sell them on e-bay (whether we would want our possessions to be treated that way—an issue of fairness), but the possible profits, the likelihood of getting caught, the relative costs and benefits. If it’s okay to falsify your timesheet in order to get more money out of customers, on what grounds is it not okay to falsify your expenses in order to get more money out of your corporation?

It’s the same problem with a culture—if maximizing your share of goods is the major ethical dictum, then on what grounds should you obey the law? Only if you’re likely to get caught, if obeying the law directly benefits you, or if the costs of disobeying are higher than the benefits of law-breaking. Needless to say, that ends up being a chaotic culture.

There are two closely-related ways that cultures of outcome-based ethics can try to restrain the damage inherent to that ethical system: first, appeal to in-group/out-group ethics, mobilizing in-group identification to create loyalty to the in-group (so we won’t steal the chairs because A&M is our in-group, and we feel that stealing would be disloyal to that group—in other words, and this is the important part, replace the cultural strength provided by fairness with the power of in-group loyalty); second, get that in-group loyalty attached to a particular person (in other words, charismatic leadership).

For in-group loyalty to trump the message to maximize self-interest it has to be really powerful. The ideology has to promote

    • “the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;”

That is, the ideology has to say that looking out for yourself is really looking out for your group and vice versa. So, instead of it being an individualistic social Darwinism (if you succeed it’s proof that you deserved the success) but group-based. Instead of it being your right as an individual to dominate others, it has to be:

    • “the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.”

It’s possible sometimes to get that level of commitment to a group—that’s what both political parties try to do at their conventions, with mixed success—but it’s unlikely for a corporation to be able to get people to identify with the corporation (especially in a world in which a dominant message is that employers don’t have to be loyal to employees past the point of profitability). Thus, the strategy more likely to work is to get identification with the leader of the corporation or with individual managers.

And so we’re extremely likely to have that strategy promoted through two other mobilizing passions:

    • “the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny;
    • the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason;”

This structure isn’t an invitation for everyone in the corporation to contribute to decision-making; it isn’t one in which all employees are asked to do whatever they think is the right thing to do—it’s hoping for a system in which people believe so much in the leader that they do whatever s/he says, and that they try to please the leader at all times by doing more than is required.

As such, it’s a kind of distortion of Kant’s ideal normative agreement—since all deliberation is handed over to the natural chiefs, then all the “perfect information” an individual needs for making their decisions is what the chieftain has decided is the correct course of action.

There are many disturbing moments in Adolf Eichmann’s interrogation and trial, and one that rattled one of the judges which is especially relevant to this argument is when, having boasted (and bemoaned) that he had the obedience of a corpse, he also claimed that he had also always lived by the Kantian notion that, as Eichmann said, “the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws” (Arendt 136). Carsten Lausten and Rasmus Ugilt explain Eichmann’s argument. For Eichmann,

“there existed no difference between the Fuhrer’s will and the moral law or, in more general terms, between legality and morality. He could thus recognize his subjection to Hitler’s will as an unproblematic act. He had personally sworn him the oath of allegiance, and this included an obligation toward his word of command (Arendt 1992, 149). The Fuhrer’s word was given immediately and imperatively. It had the power of the law (Gesetzkraft) and hence was not to be doubted (Arendt 1992, 148).” 
(167)

This is often discussed as Eichmann’s distortion of the Kantian principle but Arendt notes that it wasn’t his alone. Hans Frank, Hitler’s personal attorney, had defined “the categorical imperative in the Third Reich” as “Act in such a way that the Fuhrer, if he knew your action, would approve it” (qtd. in Arendt 136). And, in fact, during the Nuremberg trials, other Nazis invoked Kant to defend the ethics of their action (or, more accurately, the ethics of their refusal to accept responsibility); but it was the “Kant” of Hans Frank, one in which the will of the chieftain is entirely integrated into the deliberations of individuals. It’s the “leadership principle” (or “Fuhrer principle”). It’s fascism.

And here I want to point out how charismatic leadership is described in much management discourse. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Management (Ed. Nigel Nicholson, Pino G. Audia, and Madan M. Pillutla. Vol. 11: Organizational Behavior. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. p40-41) says there are three stages in charismatic leadership.

“The first stage concerns the leader’s sensitivity to the environment. Charismatic leaders can be distinguished from non-charismatic leaders in this stage by their heightened sensitivity to deficiencies and poorly exploited opportunities in the status quo.”

“Stage two of the leadership process concerns the act of formulating future goals or directions. Charismatic leaders are distinguished by a sense of strategic vision versus rational or purely tactical goals. Here the word vision refers to an idealized, highly aspirational goal that the leader wants the organization to achieve in the future. In articulating the vision, the charismatic leader’s verbal messages construct reality such that only the positive features of the future vision and the negative features of the status quo are emphasized. The status quo is usually presented as intolerable, and the vision is presented in clear specific terms as the most attractive and attainable alternative. Charismatic leaders’ use of rhetoric, high energy, persistence, unconventional and risky behavior, heroic deeds, and personal sacrifices all serve to articulate their own high motivation and enthusiasm, which then become contagious among their followers.”

“In the third and final stage of the leadership process – aligning followers’ actions to realize goals – leaders in general build in followers a sense of trust in their abilities and clearly demonstrate the tactics and behaviors required to achieve the organization’s goals. Charismatic leaders accomplish this by building TRUST through personal example and RISK TAKING and through unconventional expertise. They also engage in exemplary acts that are perceived by followers as involving great personal risk, cost, and energy.”

I want to emphasize that a leader who is charismatic is not necessarily someone engaged in charismatic leadership—charismatic leadership is a very specific kind of relationship between leader and follower. It is a method of policy determination that allows agency by proxy for the followers (they are agents only insofar as they identify with the leader).

Whether it’s good for businesses is much more up for argument than one might think from airport bookstores, but that isn’t really my point. My argument is that the shift to charismatic leadership is necessitated by the problem of how to motivate people when fairness across groups is precluded by the dominance of outcomes-based ethics, especially in a context of deliberately asymmetric ethical responsibilities (that is, the corporation wants loyalty from employees, but is neither promising nor delivering loyalty to them). And the result is a kind of leadership that crosses over into several of the characteristics of fascism.

Again, whether that’s good, bad, or even necessary for business isn’t my point. The problem for democracy arises when the dominance of this semi-authoritarian soft fascism gets entangled with the dominant lay political theory.

Unhappily, at least for theorists of democratic deliberation, a large number of Americans (perhaps most):

“want to distance themselves from government not because of a system defect but because many people are simply averse to political conflict and many others believe political conflict is unnecessary and an indication that something is wrong with government procedures. People believe that Americans all have the same basic goals, and they are consequently turned off by political debate and deal making that presuppose an absence of consensus. People believe these activities would be unnecessary if decision makers were in tune with the (consensual) public interest rather than with cacophonous special interests.” (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 7)

At the base of this belief is that there is no such thing as legitimate political disagreement—the true course of action is obvious, and there is a kind of “normal American” whose interests politicians should be protecting. They don’t because they are influenced by “special interests”—“special interests” being “any interests other than mine.”

So, for instance, descendants of immigrants, who believe that America benefitted by immigration policies that allowed their ancestors in don’t want those same policies now—immigration policies that helped them were the right choice then; the same immigration policies, helping people exactly like their ancestors, are special interest.

This view delegitimates the interests of any group proposing alternate policies; it thereby delegitimates democracy itself. This view—that the interests of one group (my group) are the only legitimate ones—is implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) advocating a one-party state. It is also implicitly eliminationist—the people who are claiming to have different interests don’t count, shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and should probably be expelled. Any system of government (or political thought) that relies on the sense that there is one kind of citizen whose desires are the only legitimate basis of public policy has at least one foot on the ladder of extermination.

In short, a large number of people believe that they are living in Kant’s ideal normative agreement, in which the only view that matters is theirs and the people like them, and they imagine that “people like them” all agree on the best government policies. It isn’t that they are motivated by hate for others, but simply that their common sense suggests to them that they are normal, they know what they want, and that the government should be organized to give normal people what they want most—if not all—of the time.”

And, of course, it doesn’t because that isn’t really how big institutions of any kind work (for one thing, “normal” people actually want very different things). The problem is that when it doesn’t, when policies are compromises, constrained, or have benefits that aren’t immediately obvious, instead of concluding that it’s actually complicated to come up with a good policy, people feel betrayed by their government because their narrative is that the obvious course has been ignored in favor of special interests—Real Americans aren’t getting what we deserve because not-Real Americans have corrupted the government. Real Americans are getting screwed over by non-American influences. Or, in other words, such people’s reaction to politics is based in

    • “the belief that one’s group is a victim,”
    • “dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of class conflict, and alien influences;”

Whether the implicit authoritarianism and proto-fascism of charismatic leadership is good, bad, necessary, or just a fad in business management isn’t my point. My point is that that model of leadership is, as Weber famously said, fraught and dangerous, and it is profoundly anti-democratic. Businesses don’t have to be democratic, so this model isn’t necessarily a problem in business.

But, it’s when the model is moved over to government that we have serious problems. And the fantasy that we should hand our government over to someone who has good decision-making capabilities, and that such a capability is demonstrated by being rich (as long as he’s in-group)[1]

There are four sets of ideologies at play here: 1) outcome-based ethics, but a group-based version (if the in-group succeeds, that’s proof that the in-group was entitled to success, and anything that enables that success is ethical); 2) management rhetoric about charismatic leadership; and 3) lay political theory that says we should empower someone who gets what “normal Americans” want; 4) the assumption that government needs a successful (in-group) businessman to lead it.

At that point, we can add up what political passions we have ready to be mobilized, and it’s (in bold)

    • a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;
    • the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;
    • the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;
    • dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;
    • the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
    • the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny;
    • the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason;
    • the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success; the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.

So, the combination of management rhetoric’s promotion of charismatic leadership as the ideal model, lay political theory about disagreement and deliberation being unnecessary, and the fantasy that all we need in government is a good businessman means that fascism will appeal to a lot of Americans.

As  you can see, though, there are a lot of things missing. While there is a lot of media promoting these bolded notions, and major politicians running on the basis of those passions, we’re okay as long as there isn’t media claiming that the in-group is in danger of extermination, that exclusionary violence on the in-group is legitimate, that we are facing an overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of traditional solutions. In February of 1942, Hitler boasted to his tablemates:

“It’s enough for me to send for Lorenz and inform him of my point of view, and I know that next day all the German newspapers will broadcast my ideas. [….] With such collaborators at my side, I can make a sheer about-turn, as I did on 22nd June last, without anyone’s moving a muscle. And that’s a thing that’s possible in no country but ours.”(Hitler’s Table Talk, 22nd-23rd February 1942 (p 332).

Ruh roh.

[1] I have to point out that, if you look at that list, you see Aristotle’s three kinds of persuasion—deliberative, epideictic, and judicial—but let’s set that aside. Ideal normative agreement is unlikely under most conditions, since it assumes that disagreement is an illusion, and that everyone always already actually agrees, but it does get the deepest and most powerful levels of commitment. I’ll come back to this point, though.

It isn’t about a person being racist; it’s about doing something racist

When I was wandering around pro-Trump pages and groups prior to the election, I found a large number of people who said, “I don’t like being called racist, and so I’m voting for Trump.”

While I do believe that all racists voted for Trump, I don’t think all Trump voters were racist. And, really, whether they are racist or not doesn’t matter as much as whether we can talk about racism rather than racists. What’s interesting about that argument is that it isn’t just a pro-Trump argument–not all the people who object to being called racist voted for Trump after all–but why people would vote for someone with an obvious record of very racist statements and actions because they themselves feel unjustly accused of racism.

And, so, really, this is about how to talk about racist statements and actions.

Sure, some of the people who come out regularly to support Trump’s racists statements, are avowedly racist—the neo-Nazis who support Trump wholeheartedly [1].  But I want to talk about supporters who aren’t Nazis, don’t like Nazis, and don’t like being called Nazi (or racist).

Being a racist person in our culture (especially media) is associated with all sorts of horrible things—with being vicious, immoral, evil. If you think in terms of good and evil being absolute binaries—something is either good, or it is entirely evil–and you think of racism as evil, then saying that someone is racist is telling them they are entirely evil. And their response is, quite reasonably, they aren’t entirely evil. In fact, they’re good people because they think racism is evil.

This whole situation is complicated because of how racism is a natural out-growth of three conventional ways of thinking—what sociologists call in-group favoritism, what social psychologists call “faith in group entativity,” and what cognitive psychologists call “confirmation bias.”

In-group favoritism

We tend to think in terms of “people like us” and “people not like us.” And, completely unconsciously, we tend to think that “people like us” (the in-group) is better. So, if an in-group member does the same thing as an out-group member, we’ll explain them differently. The in-group member did it because of being a good person (if it’s a good thing), and an out-group member did it for bad reasons.

If I steal a parking place from you, and I appear to be in-group, you’ll either explain my behavior (she was in a rush, she didn’t see me) or make me not in-group (she looks like an LSU fan). There are all sorts of things that factor into your decision as to whether I’m in- or out-group—what bumper stickers do I have on my car, what kind of car am I driving, how am I dressed, what race/ethnicity am I. Racism is simply the tendency to make race, completely unconsciously, one of those factors. Being racist doesn’t make you evil; it makes you human. [2]

If you’re twitchy about people who appear to you to be transgender, and I am otherwise entirely in-group, you might be slightly more hostile in your interpretation of why I took the place than if I were in-group in terms of your ideas about gender, but still less hostile than if I were out-group in every way (a liberal transgender LSU fan). But you would never think, “Oh, I liked that person till I thought gender was not an issue, and now I don’t.” Biases happen in moments of perception—it’s not easy to see when we’re being biased.

People think of racism as a self-aware pure hostility to every member of every other “race.” If that’s what racism is, then you couldn’t do it without knowing, and you couldn’t be friends with anyone of other races, and you would never do anything kind to any member of any other race. The kind of people who support Trump think that’s what it means to be racist—to hate every member of every other race, and so they think they’re being accused of being like that. And so they’re mad. And, if someone in their in-group (especially a person they see as representing their in-group publicly) says something that might be racist, they’ll find ways of excusing it, largely on the grounds that “He isn’t racist, so he can’t have said something racist.”

But that has never been what racism is—it’s never been pure hostility to every other race. Let’s start with the premise that genocide is racist—all advocates of genocide, or race-based slavery, could think of members of other races for whom they had affection. Adolf Eichmann, who relentlessly pursued the eradication of European Jews, emphasized that he had Jewish friends (and he did). Slaveholders talked about their affection for some slaves, advocates of segregation claimed that their stance came from concern for non-whites (see Bilbo’s introduction to his racist book arguing for getting all African Americans out of America, or David Duke, an actual Nazi, talking about his affection for his African-American maid).

So, simply having kind feelings toward people of other races doesn’t make us not-racist. Racism isn’t about feelings that individuals have for others.

In our culture racism is bad, and we have a hard time thinking of acts as bad without immediately jumping to the actor being equally bad. That was a complicated sentence. Here’s what I mean: I spend a lot of time in the courses where racism comes up (courses on racism, free speech, demagoguery, going to war, Hitler) and I say that “being racist doesn’t mean a person is evil.” And some students hear me saying that racism is okay, and they’re shocked. And that isn’t what I’m saying. Not-evil people say and do racist things. We all do racist things, and we aren’t all evil.

Racism is very bad, but not every act of racism is equally bad, and the worst kinds of racism are the consequence of institutional practices, that don’t necessarily involve anyone being deliberately hostile to someone else.

Think about this in terms of disability. My campus is really bad for anyone with even mild mobility issues—lots of the larger classroom have stairs such that you can’t get to the stage if you are on a scooter or in a wheelchair (and it would be really difficult on crutches), there aren’t enough ramps or curb cuts around campus, elevators are wonky and small (and there aren’t enough), there are buildings with stairs in the middle of hallways and at most entrances, and some ramps are too steep. The people who designed those buildings didn’t do so because they were trying to make it hard for anyone with disabilities to navigate campus—they didn’t say to themselves, “Wow, I sure hate people with disabilities—I’m going to put a stairway here.” Instead, they were designing at a time when the style was to have entrances have a few steps—the idea is that they look more elegant that way. The architects didn’t think of what it would be like to navigate the building or campus with a mobility disability (or any other kinds, really) because that concern was invisible to them. They didn’t think. So, what they did was bad and discriminatory, but it didn’t come from evil intentions; it came from a lack of thought.

So, culturally, we need to talk about the harms caused by actions, policies, and institutions, and not whether the individuals involved are good or evil. The next time Trump says something racist, we need to stop shifting the stasis to whether he’s racist—what matters is that thing was a racist thing to say. As long as we allow the stasis to shift to whether he is racist, then his PR people can point out a single non-racist thing he did, or some relationship he has with a non-white, or condemn the people who quote him, or some non-white says he’s okay, or point out that he didn’t do something even more racist.  What he says matters more than who he is. If someone comes back with a “Well, it was an unfortunate comment,” then we can point out he’s got a lot of comments like that. He says a lot of racist things, and that matters, not because of what it means about his soul, but because what he says matters.

People want to believe that our group is basically good, and we are drawn to someone who tells us that. When people are told that someone they believe represents the in-group (when they identify with that person) then they feel that they have been accused of being racist, and that means they feel accused of being evil.

I think it would help if we imagined people as more like those architects—not evil, but thoughtless.

And yet there is a moment when you can stop calling the architect unintentionally thoughtless. If an architect has a history of designing buildings that are inaccessible, and it’s pointed out, and they keep doing it, then we can condemn their architecture as being discriminatory—it doesn’t matter if they have a friend in a wheelchair, or don’t make jokes about disabled people. We can say they shouldn’t design any more buildings.

We can say that a person with a long history of racist statements shouldn’t be in a position of decision-making in which race might matter. That isn’t attacking a group, and it isn’t attacking the person who likes Trump; it’s criticizing Trump. (Of course, charismatic leadership makes this complicated.)

Group entitativity

Social psychologists talk about “group entativity”—that is, the degree to which someone thinks about groups as Real Things. For some people, groups are just ways of grouping things that could be grouped in other ways—you might take a group of college students and group them by year, astrological sign, writing skills, major, paper topic. The value of that way of grouping would depend on what you were trying to do. If you were trying to put students together for group writing projects and wanted to make sure that each group was balanced in terms of skill, then grouping them by astrological sign wouldn’t make any sense. It would make more sense to group for diversity of writing skill. If you were going to have student groups work with a research librarian, then grouping by paper topic would probably make the most sense. That way of seeing groups is as functional and pragmatic.

That pragmatic way of thinking about groups makes some people nervous, since they want to see social groups as Real—they want to believe that people in this group are Really Different from people in that group. They believe that all you need to know about someone you can know by inferring their group memberships, and they reason deductively from that—if you’re a woman, you must be bad at sports. (If you’re a woman, and good at sports, they’ll often invoke the No True Scotsman rule.)

Some people, in other words, strongly believe in group entativity. Sometimes they’ll work to make the groups absolutely perfectly distinct—such as prohibiting African Americans from learning to read, so that they could maintain their belief that African Americans aren’t intellectual, or prohibiting Japanese or Jews from owning land, and then condemn them for not being grounded.

People who believe in Real groups often believe that the fundamental Real distinction is between Good and Bad people. So, when you say that someone in their group is racist, they hear you saying that their group is made up of Bad People. And they know that isn’t true, because they know they do good things.

It’s the same problem with hearing someone say that white people have an advantage—some (white) people hear that as saying that they didn’t work at all, or work for anything. They hear that as a claim that white people are lazy. And that means their group is bad.

They hear it that way because, if groups are Really totally different from one another, then either a group earned what it has achieved through good things or it didn’t.

The notion of white privilege also threatens the Just World Hypothesis, which is central to the Prosperity Gospel. So, saying that the playing field isn’t even, and not everyone who succeeds worked harder than anyone who didn’t, threatens some people’s sense of their group, themselves, and their sense of the very world. That’s why they get so mad.

Confirmation Bias

I’ve written about this a lot, but it’s central. People who believe that groups are Real, and that only Bad People are racist are also likely to believe that you can just look and see if someone is good or not. In other words, they don’t recognize that we are all subject to confirmation bias.

But, if they think in black or white terms, then the notion of confirmation bias is really threatening. If things are either completely good or entirely bad, and research suggests that our perception is flawed, that must be saying that we can never tell whether someone or something is good or bad. It must mean we have no judgment at all, and they can point to lots of times they had good judgment, so their judgment is good, so confirmation bias is wrong.

A sweet case of confirmation bias.

Demagoguery and the “That thing you said was racist” problem

When you have people who reason from identity (people in this group are good, and people in that group are bad), it’s really hard to get them to see that their in-group information sources are giving them bad information. They will believe things that come to them from the in-group because the in-group is good.

If you’re in an echo chamber, as it’s called, it doesn’t look that way because you’re very aware of all sorts of in-group disagreements. You can see disagreement, so you think you’re in a world of dissent. And, if you equate in-group membership and reliability, then you also believe what your in-group information sources tell you that the out-group is saying about you.

Right now, our media world reminds me of the world described by Queen Bees and Wannabes, in which manipulative people create solidarity by repeating nasty things other people (are supposed to have) said about you.

The most damaging aspect of demagogic media, and this is just as true of Fox as it is of OccupyDemocrats, is that it normalizes demagoguery—that is, making every issue an us vs. them issue.

Whether someone said something racist isn’t an us vs. them issue. It’s a what did they say issue.

So, telling someone that they said something racist, or that someone they like said something racist, involves keeping a clear eye on the stasis—it isn’t about which group is better. It’s about what they said. Keep the stasis there.

 

[1] It doesn’t bother Trump supporters that neo-Nazis like Trump; they think revolutionary Marxists liked Obama, and they think that evens things out. Of course, revolutionary Marxists hated Obama, as they hate all third-way neoliberals.

[2] I’m not saying that all forms of in-group favoritism or out-group aversion are the same, equally bad, or anything along those lines. They are wildly different in impact depending on things like social structures, history, power.

[3] It’s important to be careful about how class is factoring in to this—so, if it’s a poor Lithuanian family, don’t ask whether you would judge a rich Moravian (because you’re Moravian) family the same way. Ask whether you would tell the same story about a poor Moravian family.

Excerpts from William Shirer’s This is Berlin (1999)

William Shirer was a correspondent in Germany in 1939 and 1940. Below are some excerpts from his broadcasts.

9/19/38. “Isn’t it wonderful,” I’ve been told a hundred times today by scores of people who did not hide their sense of relief. “Isn’t it wonderful. There’s to be no war. We’re going to have peace.”

[….] Not only National Socialist Party members, but others. They all felt that Chancellor Hitler had brought them undoubtedly the greatest victory of his career. “And mind you,” a German newspaperman said to me tonight. “It’s a bloodless victory.”

[….] “Like the occupation of the Rhine. Like the Anschluss with Austria. Done peacefully, without war.” I’ve heard these phrases a dozen times today. (15)

4/23/39.  [His perception of what the majority of Germans believe]

First, that Great Britain, backed by Daladier, Stalin and Roosevelt, is forging an encirclement of German designed to crush the Reich.

Secondly, that Hitler is right if, profiting by the lessons of 1914, he desires to break that encirclement before it is successfully completed.

Thirdly, that eastern and south-eastern Europe is a natural part of Germany’s Lebensraum—or space necessary for its existence—and that neither Britain nor anyone else, including America, has any right to interfere with Germany’s action there.

Fourthly, that Hitler, whether they like him or not, will get what he wants in eastern Europe, and get it—as he got Czechoslovakia at Munich—without a war.

Fifthly, that there will therefore be no war, and that they—the German people at any rate—do not want war. And that war can only come if the “encirclement powers”, jealous of Germany’s success, attack the Reich, in which case they will gladly fight, and this time, they say, Germany will win.

And sixthly, the mass of the German people, whatever they thought of Hitler before, or even though they still do not like many aspects of the regime, do feel that he has outsmarted the “foreign tyrants”, as they call them, who were trying to keep Germany down, and that he has restored it to its proper place in the world. And that without a single shot being fired, nor the life of one German soldier sacrificed. (42)

10/6/39. At a press conference in the Wilhelmstrasse tonight, one skeptical newspaperman asked how the Western Powers would be assured that Herr Hitler had no further demands, since that had been said before. The answer was that only now are the real foundations for a lasting peace in the interests of all there. (107)

10/8/39. Germany waits—and I must say waits hopefully—for the answer of Paris and London to what the Nazis consider was a very generous peace offer from Herr Hitler. (108)

11/19/39. [T]he papers keep repeating what Great Britain would do to Germany and Germans in case of victory. In a front-page editorial this morning the Volkischer Beobachter, official Nazi organ, tells its readers that England’s aim is not only the destruction of Germany, but the enslavement of the German people. (139)

12/30/39. Herr Hitler tells people in this New Year’s proclamation that what he terms “the Jewish international capitalism in league with the reactionaries” is really responsible for this war. Says he, and I quote, “The German people did not want this war. I tried up to the last minute to keep peace with England…But the Jewish and reactionary warmongers waited for this minute to carry out their plans to destroy Germany. These war-gentlemen wanted the war, and now they’ll get it.” (173)

1/9/40. Dr. Robert Ley, one of the most important members of the Nazi regime, states it clearly in the Angriff tonight. Says he: “We know that this war is an ideological struggle against world Jewry. England is allied with the Jews against Germany. How low must the English people have fallen to have had as war ministers a parasitical and profiteering Jew of the worst kind… England is spiritually, politically and economically at one with the Jews…For us, England and the Jews remain the common foe…Germany has won the first battle. Hore-Belisha has fallen.” (181-2)

2/25-26/40. The Montag, for instance, headlines the speech GERMANY WILL BREAK THE TERROR OF THE WORLD PLUTOCRACY. A struggle of Germany to free itself from the terror of Britain and France. A struggle against world-plutocracy and the world-Jews for freedom. That’s the way this war is being presented to the people of Germany. (204)

4/9/40. The German government, to use the term of an official proclamation issued in Berlin, has “taken over the protection and Denmark and Norway for the duration of the war.” (237) [The official propaganda was that England was about to invade them.]

The German occupation of Norway and Denmark, which the German newspapers tell us was done to safeguard their freedom and security…(239)

4/10/40. To give you an idea of the state of mind in Berlin today, let me cite the German press. Its front-pages glorify today’s achievements of the German army and tell the readers that Germany today, as the Nachtausgabe says, has merely taken steps “to safeguard the freedom and security of Norway and Denmark”. The same paper blames England and France for what happened. The Borsen Zeitung says, “England goes cold-bloodedly over the dead bodies of the small peoples. Germany protects the weak states from the English highway robbers.” And the same paper concludes, “Norway ought to see the righteousness of Germany’s action which was taken to ensure the freedom of the Norwegian people.” (241)

5/6/40. The German press continues to devote most of its headlines to warning that the British are about to spread war by aggressive action in the Mediterranean, in the Balkans, even in Spain. Observers here still wonder what is back of this press campaign, remembering that we had a very similar one in regard to Scandinavia six weeks ago. (263)

5/10/40. At a hastily convoked press conference at the Foreign Office at 8 a.m., Herr von Ribbentrop read to us the memorandum in which Germany explains why she marched into the two Low Countries. The argument, summed up, is that Britain and France were about to attack Germany through the two little countries, and that Germany therefore deems it necessary to send in its own troops to safeguard the neutrality of Belgium and Holland. The memorandum also blames the two countries for not having maintained a really neutral attitude. Belgium, for instance, is blamed for having built its fortifications against Germany, not against France, though it would seem that the Belgians this morning should be glad they did. (268)

5/15/40. Dr. Ley, one of Herr Hitler’s chief lieutenants, writes in the Angriff tonight: “Hitler brought Germany to reason and made us happy. We’re convinced we will now bring Europe to reason and make it happy. That’s his God-given mission.” (277)

6/1/40. Press attacks on France continue. Said a German radio commentator: “There can be no peace in Europe until the Negro-ized and Jew-ized people of the plutocrat Reynaud are taught with a sharp sword that no crime goes unpunished.” (306)

6/2/40. As to the invasion of Holland and Belgium, most Germans you meet believe the justification given by the government and the army—namely, that the Allies would have attacked if the Germans hadn’t beaten them to it. Thus the German move is always referred to in the press as the “counter-thrust”. Exactly the same explanation was given for the Norwegian campaign and, I think, accepted by the great majority of people. One must remember that when Germany went into Poland last September, the official communiques described it as a “counter-attack”. (309)

7/19/40. In other words, Hitler offers peace to Britain. On what terms, he does not say. But one thing is evident. The German people will now follow him as never before, for they will say: He offered England peace and no strings attached to it. He said he saw no reason for going on with the war. If the war goes on, it’s England’s fault. That’s what the German people will say. (355)

8/1/40. Nearly every day now one or the other of the German newspapers gives us a glimpse into the New Europe which the Third Reich is now planning for this continent as soon as the war is over. Today Dr. Ernst Timm, writing in the Borsen Zeitung, gives us a further glimpse.

The last result of nationalism in Europe, he says, was the union of all Germans in one nation. The next phase in Europe will be known by what he terms “European Responsibility”, a responsibility, he adds, which has been taken over by Germany. He finds three points in his new conception of Europe.

    1. Only a nation in Europe which is conscious of its European responsibility has a right to take part in the new reconstruction. A people like the French, which he says has become mixed with Negroes and Jews, has no right to European leadership.
    2. Only peoples who through their greatness and their life-force are capable of European contributions have the right to self-responsible action.
    3. The European leader-peoples, as he puts it, carry the responsibility not only for their own national fate, but also for that of the smaller peoples who are placed in their Lebensraum—or living space. (367)

Hitler and Rhetoric

As Nicholas O’Shaughnessy says, anyone looking at the devastation of World War II and the Holocaust is likely to wonder: “How was it possible for a nation as sophisticated as Germany to regress in the way that it did, for Hitler and the Nazis to enlist an entire people, willingly or otherwise, into a crusade of extermination that would kill anonymous millions?” (1) The conventional answer is to attribute tremendous rhetorical power to Adolf Hitler. Kenneth Burke calls Hitler “a man who swung a great deal of people into his wake” (“Rhetoric” 191). William Shirer, who was an American correspondent in Germany in the 30s, describes that, listening to a speech he knew was nonsense, “was again fascinated by [Hitler’s] oratory, and how by his use of it he was able to impose his outlandish ideas on his audience” (131). Shirer says Hitler “appeared able to swing his German hearers into any mood he wished” (128). Shirer is clear that Hitler owed his power to his rhetoric: “his eloquence, his astonishing ability to move a German audience by speech, that more than anything else had swept him from oblivion to power as dictator and seemed likely to keep him there” (127).

Scholars don’t necessarily agree, however. Ian Kershaw says, “Hitler alone, however important his role, is not enough to explain the extraordinary lurch of a society, relatively non-violent before 1914, into ever more radical brutality and such a frenzy of destruction” (Hitler, The Germans, and the Final Solution 347). While Hitler’s personal views were important, and neither the Holocaust nor war would have happened without his personal fanaticism and charisma, they weren’t all that was necessary: “Concentrating on Hitler’s personal worldview, no matter how fanatically he was inspired and motivated by it, cannot readily serve to explain why a society, which hardly shared the Arcanum of Hitler’s “philosophy,” gave him such growing support from 1929 on—in proportions that rose with astonishing rapidity. Nor can it explain why, from 1933 on, the non-Nationalist Socialist élites were prepared to play more and more into his hands in the process of “cumulative radicalization.”” (Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution 57)

In other words, Hitler’s followers were  not passive automatons controlled by Hitler’s rhetorical magic. So, how powerful was that rhetoric?

The answer to that question is more complicated than conventional wisdom suggests for several reasons. First, while Hitler was quick to use new technologies, including ones of travel, most of the Nazi rhetoric consumed by converts wasn’t by Hitler. People like Adolf Eichmann talk about being persuaded by other speakers, pamphlets, even books.

Second, no one claims that Hitler was a creative or inventive ideologue: “Hitler was not an originator but a serial plagiarist” (O’Shaughnessy 24). Joachim Fest said Hitler’s beliefs were the “sum of the clichés current in Vienna at the turn of the century” (qtd. in Gregor, 2), and Gregor says, “Neither can one claim that Hitler was an original thinker. There is little in his writings or speeches that we cannot find in the penny pamphlets of pre-1914 Vienna where he began to form his political views. His racial anti-Semitism rehearses the familiar slogans of many on the pre-war right. His visions of German expansion echo the ideas of the more extreme wing of the radical-nationalist Pan German movement [….] And, in essence, his anti-democratic, anti-Socialist sentiments similarly reproduce the conventional thinking of broad sectors of the German right from both before and after the First World War.” (2)

If Hitler wasn’t saying anything new, to what extent can we say he persuaded people? What did he persuade them of?

A closely related problem is that large numbers of Germans supported Hitler politically but rejected the central aspects of his ideology—such as his eliminationist racism and his desire for another war. Although he’d long been absolutely clear that those were central to his views, when he began to downplay them (especially in 1932 and 33), many people believed those were trivial aspects that could be ignored. Many people supported him strategically, especially the Catholic and Lutheran churches, both of which were outraged by the Social Democrats’ (democratic socialists) liberal social policies (e.g., legalizing homosexuality, supporting feminism, and, especially, breaking the religious monopoly on primary schools). Since Hitler and the Nazis were socially conservative, and Hitler promised to allow the churches more power than the Social Democrats would allow, many Protestants voted for Nazis, and the official Catholic Party (the Centre Party) Reichstag members voted unanimously for Hitler taking on dictatorial power (for more on this background, see Evans; Spicer).

Some scholars refer to “the propaganda of success,” by which they mean that Hitler gained the support of people not because he put forward good arguments, or even because of anything he said, but because they liked his locking up Marxists and Socialists, industrialists liked his support of big business, people liked the increased amount of order, they liked the improved economy, they liked his conservative social policies, a lot of Germans liked his persecution of immigrants, and a lot of people either liked or didn’t mind the legitimating and legalizing of discrimination against Jews (even the churches only objected to discrimination against converted Jews). And large numbers of Germans didn’t particularly like the idea of democracy—the premise of democracy is that political situations are complicated, and that there aren’t obvious solutions. Or, more accurately, there are solutions that appear to be obviously right from one perspective, but are obviously wrong from another perspective. Democratic processes assume that the various perspectives need to be taken into consideration, and so the best policy for the community as a whole will not be perfect for anyone and will take a lot of time to determine—many people would rather that a powerful leader make all the decisions and leave them out of it. After Hitler had been in power a year, many people felt that their lives were better, and that’s all they really cared about—that they were headed down a road that would make their lives much worse didn’t concern them because they didn’t think about it.

Finally, many people came to support Nazis because they liked that Hitler made them feel proud of being German again. He didn’t make them feel proud of being German by changing their minds about anything, but by insisting publicly and endlessly that they were victims—that nothing about their situation was the consequence of bad decisions they had made. He wasn’t saying anything that was new, but it was new for a political leader—he was simply the first major German political figure in a long time to say, unequivocally, Germany was for Germans, and Germans were entitled to run Europe (if not the world).

All these characteristics of Hitler’s relationship with his supporters—his lack of originality, strategic acquiescence, hostility to democracy, narrow self-interest on the part of many Germans, and the propaganda of success—mean that it’s actually an open question as to whether Hitler’s rhetoric was unique, let alone how much power we should ascribe to it. And so this course will consider the questions: what were Hitler’s rhetorical strategies? how unique or unusual was (is) it? what kind of impact does it have? to what extent (and under what circumstances) does it work?

 

Works Cited

Burke, Kenneth. “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle.'” Philosophy of Literary Form. U of California P, 1974.

Evans, Richard. The Coming of the Third Reich. Penguin, 2005.

Gregor, Neil. How to Read Hitler. Norton, 2005.

Kershaw, Ian.  Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution. Yale U P, 2009.

O’Shaughnessy, Nicholas. Selling Hitler: Propaganda and the Nazi Brand. Oxford UP, 2016.

Shirer, William. The Nightmare Years: 1930-1940. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1984.

Spicer, Kevin, ed. Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust. Indiana UP, 2007.