Category: concepts in rhetoric

They do it too!

It’s really common in a comment thread for someone to respond to a criticism of one group with a comment along the lines of, “The other group does it too.” So, for instance, if someone says, “Trump supporters are motivated by tribalism,” I’ll count comments till I get to the, “Liberals are tribalists too” or “Both sides engage in tribalism.” The unintentional irony of that response brings me a wicked pleasure.

It’s entertaining because it’s a response that only makes sense if you think of all political discourse as being about which of the two possible groups is better. In other words, it’s a response that assumes rabid factionalism.

Here’s what I mean: why is the person making that comment?

Imagine this exchange:

C: I’m going to vote for Clinton because Trump supporters are motivated only by rabid factionalism.

H: Clinton supporters are tribalist too.

That’s a discussion in which the “just as bad” response is relevant, because it’s showing that the major premise of C’s argument is inconsistent with his own actions—he’s claiming that his vote is motivated by a rejection of factionalism, so that he’s thinking of voting for someone who promotes factionalism is relevant. (I’m not saying the response is true, but it’s relevant to argue about whether they are just as bad.)

Imagine this one:

C: To win over Trump supporters, we need to show them how harmful his policies are to them.

E: That won’t work because Trump supporters are motivated only by rabid factionalism.

H: Clinton supporters are tribalist too.

H’s comment is completely irrelevant to the question of how to persuade Trump supporters. And it’s irrelevant twice over: 1) Clinton supporters could be carry pitchforks and torches and the most rabid factional supporters the world has ever known and it has no relevance for whether Trump supporters are too factional to be persuaded by argument, and 2) the world isn’t divided into Clinton supporters and Trump supporters.

For that comment to make sense, every single issue would be reducible to the relative goodness of the only two groups that constitute the American political realm. That’s how H sees it. H thinks he’s being “fair” and “objective” because he thinks he’s condemning both groups equally. He isn’t. He’s stuck within a limited and politically damaging ideology about purity and motives.

That is the attitude about politics–that all political disagreements can and should be about which of the two possible groups is better (and it’s a zero-sum relationship)—that fuels rabid factionalism.

Political discourse should be policy discourse. Displacing policy discourse with arguments about relative goodness doesn’t help.

 

Arguing against injustice: Louis Goldblatt before the Tolan Committee

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

       

How trolls get played

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

There are many ways in which working class people have the same political “interests” (the term used for goals, needs, policies). Concerns like good public schools, good roads, good police protection, affordable housing, affordable access to good healthcare, and so on aren’t limited to one kind of working class group. But they are necessarily class issues in two ways: first, rich people aren’t as dependent on the government to provide various services and so, if they only think in their short-term narrow self-interest, they can think that a strong social safety net isn’t a high priority. Rich people don’t need to care whether public schools are good, since they can send their kids to private schools. They can set up gated communities with good roads and private security forces. They don’t have to care whether there is low-income housing or affordable health insurance since they can pay for the expensive versions of both. Second, if all the working class got together—regardless of their membership in various sub-groups (religion, race, region)—it’s likely that they would advocate for stronger social safety nets, and it might end up with rich people and corporations having to pay higher taxes than either do now.

So, if rich people didn’t want to have to pay money to help working class people, what they would need to do would be to persuade working class people not to band together, not to think about their issues in policy terms. They would try to persuade some large part of the working class that their interests are the same as the rich.[1]

And the easiest way to do that (and the way it’s always been done) is to create an “out-group” (Those People) and persuade some large number of the working class that, as long as they’re doing something that harms Those People, they are winning. You can also tell them that their superiority over That Group would be threatened by [a policy that would actually benefit them]. It’s awful how well that works.

What a lot of people don’t realize about how slavery worked was that it enabled rich planters to exploit poorer whites. Proslavery rhetoric identified slaveholding with “being white,” as a wonderful life possibly available to every white man. Proslavery rhetoric also told poor whites that, no matter how poor they were, they were better than the richest or most successful non-white. Proslavery rhetoric guaranteed honor to every white man.[2] Conditions were pretty bad for poor whites in the South, with less access to public education, less industry, and various other issues, than people like them in some other areas, but proslavery rhetoric thwarted poor white political action by very rich people claiming solidarity with the poor whites they were underpaying, overworking, and often screwing over.

The same thing happened in prosegregation rhetoric (as the very Southern WB Cash pointed out in the 40s): rich whites could prevent any kind of labor action by pointing out that unions allowed non-whites to join. They created a kind of “herrenvolk democracy“–a race-based democracy that, instead of material gain, gave poor whites whiteness as a prize (a prize only meaningful if denied to others).  A lot of poor (and screwed-over) whites would rather get screwed over by rich whites than admit they had common cause with African Americans (a point Cash made). Segregation (white supremacist) rhetoric said that, no matter how poor you are, you are better than the richest or most successful non-white. In other words, pro-segregation rhetoric didn’t argue the really complicated policy issues about segregation (especially the significant harms for all working class people of the rejection of unions, hostility to support for public schools, aversion to good science education, and shoddy labor laws). It got assent by redirecting policy issues to simple zero-sum Us v. Them arguments.

In other words, white supremacist rhetoric (proslavery or prosegregation) meant that people voted on issues entirely on the basis of whether they were voting for something that would preserve their racial status. And, if the policy harmed the “other” race, that was good enough. Thus, they could often get tricked into voting for something that preserved their racial status, and harmed them in every other way—poor whites supported employment laws, laws about schools, restrictive laws about literacy that hurt them because they were happy that those laws hurt non-whites more. That’s the next step in this process of getting citizens in a democracy not to argue politics—reframe all policy issues into the question of whether the policy hurts (yay!) or helps (boo!) the out-group, regardless of what it does for the in-group.

It’s a really Machiavellian way to go about getting support for a policy, and it works far too often. If you persuade your base that every political issue is us v. them, and that the world is a zero-sum of us v. them, then you can persuade your base to support policies that hurt them as long as they believe it hurts “the other group” more.

The term for this is a “wedge” issue. You get a wedge into a group that really should be allied (such as the Irish and the freed African Americans in the early 19th century), and you separate them, and race is a great way to do that (so is religion). Poor people (regardless of race or religion) generally have the same policy goals; working class people have the same political needs regardless of race. It wasn’t just the South that did this. In the nineteenth century, Jacksonian Democrats gained the support of the poor Irish for policies that didn’t help them purely on the grounds that those policies hurt African Americans more.

Putting politics in terms of us v. them enables the screwing-over of people rests on first creating a lot of resentment of the out-group, and often scapegoating, including scapegoating the out-group for the consequences the in-group policy will have. Sources on every side of the American political spectrum agree that the American skilled working class has been hurt, and sensible sources agree that the causes are complicated. Mechanization, globalization, and union-busting have significantly hurt the skilled working class, and yet immigrants are scapegoated for unemployment (immigrants didn’t cause jobs to leave the US, and immigrants didn’t take union jobs). But, once that resentment against immigrants (or any other group) is created, and a base is persuaded to think that it’s a zero-sum between Us and Them, then all a party has to do is get its base to vote and behave in ways that hurt Them.

Under those conditions, it seems unnecessary to argue policies, and that may even be the intent. Slaveholders didn’t want slavery debated—at all. They wanted it to appear that you either fully supported slavery in every possible way or you were actively advocating race war against whites. Any restriction of slavery would hurt them after all, and any reasonable and thorough debate of the institution of slavery would lead to restriction. And so, slaveholders were so committed to prohibiting deliberation of slavery that they talked themselves into unnecessarily aggressive policies that alienated people who didn’t really care about slavery (through things like the Gag Rule, Bleeding Kansas, assaulting a Senator in the Senate, the Fugitive Slave Law, the war with Mexico, the Dred Scott decision, pushing “black codes” on “free” states, the open advocacy of forcing “free” states to allow slavery). The South would have done better to have allowed open debate about slavery. But even people who didn’t own slaves were persuaded that it was either “us” (advocating unrestricted slavery) or “them” (rabid abolitionists who wanted race war). So, any violence against “them,” any policy they hated—that was good enough.

There are lots of examples in history when communities were dominated by this kind of “as long as it makes Them unhappy, I’m good with this policy” thinking. That’s worth considering—if this is a good way for people to make decisions, we should be able to point to times it worked out well. And I yet to find an example of a time it did work well for any length of time as a way of a large group making policy decisions. I can think of lots of examples of times it was disastrous—it’s what motivated Athenians to send troops on campaigns that were guaranteed failures, or support campaigns that were failing (as in the Sicilian Expedition). The whole philosophy is captured in the saying, “cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

But, in the short run, it can seem like a good idea. It’s a great way for a TV channel, organization, radio show, politician, or political party to build a base (after all, you probably said to yourself, “THEY DO IT TOO!”), and it’s more fun to engage in the two-minute hate about the other group than get into the weeds of the various political options available. In the long run, though, if you make decisions purely on the basis of whether it pisses someone you hate off, you’re making bad decisions, often ones that hurt you.

And, if all you try to do in social media is piss off the other side, you were persuaded to do that by someone who knows how useful it is for them. Trolls think they’re just doing it for the lulz. They aren’t. They think they aren’t earnest. Their refusal to think very clearly about their actions is carefully and earnestly encouraged by media, political parties, and interests that find their mindless resentment of Them very profitable. Trolls might think they’re in it for the lulz, but someone is into their activity for the bucks. Bucks the trolls aren’t getting.

Trolls think they’re playing earnest people earnestly involved in political deliberation; on the contrary, they’re getting earnestly played.

 

 

[1] What’s interesting about the current attempt to keep working class people from seeing their concerns as shared with others in their economic system is that it’s only in the short-term narrow self-interest of corporations and rich people to thwart discussion about what would help the working class. After all, it benefits everyone in a nation if the populace is well-educated, scientifically literate, if they have access to good healthcare, a strong infrastructure, low crime, and public servants (teachers, fire fighters, police, public defenders, social workers) who are well-paid, well-trained, selectively hired, and enjoy helping the public regardless of class, race, religion, and so on. That’s a good world for everyone.

[2] Another thing a lot of people who admire the institution of slavery and the CSA don’t realize is that whiteness was actually not what we now imagine it to be—for instance, neither eastern Europeans nor Italians were considered white, and Catholics also had a shaky claim on the term.

Argutainment, bias, and democratic deliberation

I was talking with a colleague who exclusively consumes right-wing media, and mentioned a study, and he said, “Is it a good study? A lot of those people are biased.”

I was stunned. He doesn’t mind bias; he consumes nothing but biased media. I mentioned this to him once, and he said, “Oh, so the Communist News Network is better?”

When I’m arguing with someone on the internet, and persuade them that they’ve been repeating something entirely false (and, yes, it is possible to do that), I try to point out that they are getting their information from an unreliable source. If the person is repeating Fox/Limbaugh/Savage talking points, they’ll often say, “Oh, so you think I should watch MSNBC instead?” as though that ends the argument. If they’re repeating a DailyKOS/Mother Jones talking point, they’ll often say, “Well, at least it isn’t Fox News.”

I think their responses are important, and indicate just how far we are from a world in which we argue together. All of these responses above assume that you either get all your news from “conservative” sources or from “liberal” sources, and, however much conservative sources might botch things, they’re better than “liberal” ones (and vice versa). I’m not going to defend liberal sources; I’m going to argue that the underlying assumption (you either get your information from conservative or liberal sources) is the problem.

To make that argument, I’m going to have to set out a hypothetical example about a country whose public discourse is divided into Chesterians and Hubertians

And here’s why I have to use a hypothetical and deliberately silly example. There are a lot of people who believe that politics is entirely a question of whether the good people (their party) or the bad people (THAT party) triumphs, and so every political question turns into which group is better and/or whether a politician is us or them. You trust people who are “us” and you mistrust “them.” The second you smoke someone out as “liberal” or “conservative,” then you can dismiss everything they say. And you spend the whole time reading or listening to someone looking for the cues/clues that would tell you which side they’re on That’s bad for democracy. Very bad.

It’s bad because it’s inaccurate (no issue only has two sides) and it keeps people from thinking about in-group flaws (no side is entirely right).[1] That way of thinking about politics means you never hear criticism of your in-group[2] If I tried to use real examples to talk about our political discourse, most (all?) of my readers would spend all their time trying to figure out if I’m in-group (trustworthy) or out-group (unreliable). That’s how reading works in a polarized public sphere.

Because our current political situation is so polarized, and people are so trained to look for “bias” as “signs of group membership,”[3] I think it’s helpful to talk about two political figures: Chester and Hubert. Chester and Hubert agree that there is a squirrel conspiracy to get to the red ball (because duh), but they disagree as to whether little dogs are reliable allies against the squirrels.[4] Chester argues that all little dogs are evil, and Hubert argues that all dogs are potential allies, and rather likes a lot of little dogs.[5]

These were real dogs I had, huge, both of whom were obsessed with keeping the red ball from squirrels, and they really did have different attitudes to little dogs. Chester’s hostility was confirmed (for him) by some bad experiences. In other words, Chester assumes that every out-group member is hostile, aggressive, and must be handled with aggression (and he had reason to do so), and so he used his larger size to dominate others. Chester assumed a world of conflict, in which opposition had to be crushed even before it showed itself to be opposition. Again, it’s important to emphasize that he came to that conclusion because of experiences.

Hubert assumed that his larger size meant that he was safe, and that, if things got ugly, he would be fine. He came to that conclusion because of experiences—that he had been able to defuse potentially explosive interactions. Interestingly enough, he also had had bad experiences with little dogs, but he didn’t generalize to all little dogs from them (a point pursued elsewhere).

So, assume a world in which the voters are choosing between Hubert and Chester, and therefore we have a world of Hubertians, Chesterians, and the undecided, who sometimes vote one way and sometimes another.

Once you frame it that way, then any one of us can generate all of the political rhetoric while still half asleep: policy arguments reframed as identity arguments; treating bad in-group behavior as incidental but bad out-group behavior as essential; different standards for in-group and out-group; we’re rational, and they’re irrational; we have good motives, and they have bad ones, and so on. I won’t go into all those, but just want to emphasize four connected ones that aren’t always obvious: the explanation of all politics as a zero-sum conflict between good (in-group) and bad (out-group) so that every argument can be settled through evidence that the in-group is better than the out-group (even if in ways completely unrelated to the issue at hand); once that is the stasis for every political argument, then a kind of retroactive fairness can get invoked (more on that below); finally, the in-group = good/out-group = bad means that people choose to live in informational enclaves thinking they’re getting all the information they need (via inoculation); fourth, and finally, that means that the solution is not to try to find the single right source. It means looking for reasonable sources that will critique your views.

1. The explanation of all politics as a zero-sum conflict between good (in-group) and bad (out-group) so that every argument can be settled through evidence that the in-group is better than the out-group (even if in ways completely unrelated to the issue at hand)

The basic assumption is that the entire world can be divided into good and bad people and that all the good people join the good political party. There is also an assumption that good people always make good choices, and therefore support good policies. So, you can end all political arguments by pointing out that the other group supports a bad thing (any bad thing, even if completely unrelated to the policy under discussion). And, if any policy benefits the other side is any way (or is supported by them) it must mean it hurts us, and is therefore bad. Because the out-group members are all the same, anyone not in-group is out-group and so can be used to characterize what the out-group really is.

There are a lot of problems with that view, including that there aren’t two oppositional sides in a zero-sum relation.

In this world—in any world—there are multiple disagreements. There might be, for instance, Chesterians who think little dogs should be expelled from the nation, although that isn’t what Chester thinks or says. There might be Hubertians who think that, since little dogs and squirrels are kind of alike, we shouldn’t be worried about squirrels.

Chesterians will use the existence of squirrel sympathizers to condemn Hubert as a squirrel sympathizer. Chester TV will do nothing but quote squirrel sympathizers when they represent Hubert’s views, and they will give endless publicity to any Hubertian squirrel sympathizer. If they can, they will clip Hubert’s speeches to make him seem like a squirrel sympathizer. They won’t show Hubert disagreeing with sympathizers (or, if they do, they’ll frame it as dishonesty).

Hubertians will use the existence of Chesterian expulsionists to condemn Chester as an expulsionist. Hubert TV will quote Chesterian expulsionists when they represent Chester’s views, and they will give endless publicity to any Chesterian expulsionist. If they can, they will clip Chester’s speeches to make him seem like an expulsionist. They won’t show Chester disagreeing with expulsionists (or, if they do, they’ll frame it as dishonesty).

Chesterians who only watch Chester TV and Hubertians who only watch Hubert TV will be deliberately misinformed about Hubert and Chester, while firmly believing that they aren’t because they have evidence. They can point to Hubertians and Chesterians (or Hubert/Chester quotes), and so they will believe that their position is rational and true.

The moment you believe the lie that there are only two sides is the moment you agree to drink Flavor-Aid. You might choose your flavor, but you’re drinking.

2. Once we agree that all political debates are about which group is better, then a kind of retroactive fairness can get invoked

Imagine that, in this rabidly factional world, Chesterians storm Hubertian rallies with bricks and bats. In response, Hubertians do the same to Chesterians.

Chester TV will cover the later violence of Hubertians as proof that the former violence of Chesterians was justified.

One of the more confusing talking points I ran into on the Michael Brown shooting was that Brown had committed a crime and therefore whatever the police officer did to him was justified.[6] The police officer didn’t know that Brown had committed a crime at the time of the shooting, something people making this argument granted, but didn’t think it was relevant. Their point was that Brown deserved what he got because he was a bad person, as shown by the later revelation of his shoplifting.

Of course, death is not the penalty for shoplifting, and we are supposed to be in a world in which people are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, but what was done to him was just because of information not known at the time.

This has puzzled me a lot, but I think I now understand it. The Chesterians don’t see their violence as having provoked the counter-violence on the part of Hubertians. They see their violence as a kind of pre-emptive revenge. They were right to have engaged in violence because the Hubertians were going to have engaged in  violence someday anyway.

The later violence on the part of Hubertians was proof that they were hostile to Chesterians all along.[7] This explanation will make sense to viewers of Chester TV because Chester TV has presented Hubertians as essentially violent all along. When Chesterian political figures and pundits say, “The best cure for our politics is to shoot a few Hubertians every day!” Chesterians interpret such statements as metaphorical and hyperbolic (regardless of the number of Chesterians who proceed to go out and shoot Hubertians). But, when Hubertians say, “The best cure for our politics is to shoot a few Chesterians every day!” Chesterians interpret such statements as literally calling for violence against them. Thus, they can justify literal violence against Hubertians on the grounds that it is self-defense, regardless of the actual chain of events.

Viewers of Chester TV will have heard an uncountable number of Hubertians calling for violence, so their view of Hubertians as essentially violent will seem to be entirely rational—they can easily recall lots of evidence to support that perception. Their perception of Hubertians will seem to be entirely rational and true.

3. The in-group = good/out-group = bad means that people choose to live in informational enclaves thinking they’re getting all the information they need (via inoculation)

And here I’m back at the beginning: why do people who consume nothing but rabidly factionalized media criticize other media for being biased? Clearly, they have no objection in principle to biased media.

There are, loosely, two reasons: first, they’re naïve realists, who believe that they (and they alone) have unmediated perception of The Truth; second, inoculation.

As to the first, if Hubertians believe that The Truth is always obvious to good people, and, of course, they think Hubertians are good people, then anything on which all Hubertians agree is The Truth. Duh. Hubertians believe that Hubertians are justified in anything they do, and so it is simply a reality and a fact that Hubertians’ values should be the basis of all judgment. So, Hubertians should have free speech to say anything any way they want in any circumstance, because Hubertians are objectively right, by virtue of being Hubertians. Hubertian protests are justified; Chesterian protests are disruptive. Hubertians who destroy property and disrupt processes are freedom fighters; Chesterians who do that are terrorists. Hubertian protestors who wear masks are justified because oppression; Chesterian protestors who do so are villainous. How do you know? You just ask yourself. A viewer of Hubert TV, who had been told that even listening to Chester TV or thinking Chesterians might have a point is ridiculous and disloyal, would be able to recall dozens of examples of the inherent and essential goodness of Hubertians, and therefore know that zir stance on the inherent and essential rightness of what Hubertians are doing is just simply and obviously true to anyone willing to look at the facts. That is naïve realism.

In case it’s unclear, I’m saying that both Chester TV and Hubert TV are propaganda. But, no one willingly consumes propaganda, so why wouldn’t the respective viewers go for a non-propaganda source?

Because really effective propaganda presents itself as giving “both sides.”

Notice the “both sides” move. Propaganda reduces the complexity of available positions to “us” versus “them.” And it then presents itself as being “fair” by claiming to present an accurate version of what “they” think. On the contrary, it presents four views of the “other side:” 1) quotes (sometimes strategically clipped, but not always) of extreme and generally marginalized positions that can be presented as perfectly representative of “the other side;”[8] 2) bad paraphrases, strategically truncated quotes, or humorless repetitions of things major figures have said; 3) broad generalizations about how they hate us; 4) weak versions of “their” criticisms of in-group policies and candidates. The third one is interesting—any criticism of an in-group policy or individual is reframed as an attack on all of “us.” Once an audience is trained (and the whole point of propaganda is to train people), then the audience looks for signs of someone being out-group, and then, if they determine the rhetor is out-group, they don’t even notice what argument that rhetor is actually making, because they believe they already know what any member of the out-group has to say.

So, Chester TV has some “Hubertian” pundits (they probably aren’t), and they’re idiots, and they make stupid arguments. The “debate” between them and the Chesterians has three parts: first, Chesterians making arguments that fit with the claims and values Chester TV always promotes (so, to Chesterians, those speakers would seem to be “objective” and saying “true” things); second, “Hubertians” (they aren’t) making weak arguments ; three, the Chesterians pundits summarizing the Hubertian arguments (thereby creating a kind of vocabulary—here’s how to talk about Hubertian arguments; here are the words that signal a Hubertian). There might be other parts of the show in which marginalized out-group members are shown saying outrageous things (but are identified to the audience as representative of the out-group) and mangled or truncated or willfully misinterpreted quotes of major out-group figures.[9]

This process is called inoculation.[10]

Inoculation works by giving people a weak version of a virus they will later encounter. When they encounter the strong version of the virus, the body, having been prepared by its encounter with the weak version, doesn’t even let that shit in the door.

Rabidly factional Hubertians don’t want Chesterians to get any votes or support, and won’t grant that any of their concerns might be legitimate. But, really, once we’ve divided all possible political positions into two groups, we’ve almost certainly included some positions in the out-group that have some merit.

Chesterians might be wrong about little dogs, but still might have some legitimate concerns about whether little dogs can really effectively protect the red ball from squirrels. And they might be able to make good arguments about those legitimate concerns. A Hubertian committed to democratic deliberation would want those concerns voiced, heard, and interwoven into the public deliberation.

A rabidly factional Hubertian wouldn’t want anyone to think that Chesterians might ever be right, so they’d need to try to train their audience to dismiss unheard, not only any Chesterian argument, but any criticism of Hubertians. And, so, rabidly Hubertian media would engage in the four moves above—they’d inoculate their audience against listening to anything a non-Hubertian might say.

That’s how political inoculation works (when it works). Chester TV and Hubert TV present their viewers with weak versions of the out-group arguments, and some cues as to out-group identity. Thus, when a Hubertian, call her Emma, hears anyone say something that could be interpreted as negative about little dogs, she thinks, “Ha! A Chesterian! They think all little dogs are squirrels, and that’s a stupid argument, so this person is stupid, and I shouldn’t listen to them!”

Emma sincerely believes she’s being fair in that dismissal because she sincerely believes she’s listened (with an open mind) to Chesterian arguments. Hubert TV, after all, has a show that she watches regularly in which Chesterian and Hubertians debate. What she doesn’t know is that she’s only exposed to the stupidest Chesterian arguments.

And she will never figure that out if: 1) she thinks all argument can be reduced to Chesterian and Hubertian, and 2) she doesn’t actively seek out the best Chesterian arguments. Just changing the channel to a Chesterian one won’t work because she’s been inoculated.

4. Fourth, and finally, that means that the solution is not to try to find the single right source. It means looking for reasonable sources that will critique your views.

If Emma decides to see “both sides” for herelf, and tunes in to Chesterian propaganda, she won’t go away with a useful understanding of the realm of possible political views.[11] In fact, it will confirm for her that Chesterians are all idiots since what she’ll see will be stupid versions of Hubertian arguments..

Personally, I think no one should rely entirely on TV for information about politics. And here I should engage in full disclosure. I stopped watching TV news a very, very long time ago. I did the math and realized that 30 minutes of news was 22 minutes (at best) once the ads were taken out. Then take out sports, weather, the cat in a tree (aka human interest), and you’ve got at most eleven minutes of actual news, or around 1500 words, with no sources. In 30 minutes, you can get through between 3750 and 7500 words, depending on your reading speech. Turn off the TV and pick up a newspaper, in other words. Or, better yet, go to an online version that has links to the original sources.[12]

I think a lot of political TV is just the two minutes hate, but I also think that there’s nothing inherently wrong with the two minutes hate, if you know that’s what you’re doing. Political TV is infotainment, and as long as we remember it’s a subset of entertainment, that’s fine. The two minutes hate is about believing that your in-group is entirely right, and therefore you can feel deeply certain that you are entirely right, and you are always and in every way better than the out-group. If you need to spend more than two minutes believing those (very false) things, then there are some very concerning issues, and I’d like to sell you shares in the Brooklyn Bridge, because you’re poised to make a lot of really bad decisions. Basically, all cons appeal to that premise, and so you’re easy to con.

Here’s the important point about making decisions: your decision is wrong. You are wrong. I’ve said a lot of things in this piece that are wrong, but I don’t know it now.

We’re always wrong on little things, because there is no decision that is entirely right, but we’re also necessarily going to be wrong about big things. We have all made bad decisions, wrong assertions, and unjust accusations. It’s just that some of us are willing to admit it, and other aren’t.[13]

Cognitive psychologists emphasize cognitive biases. There is no human who can look at the world without bias or prejudice (there probably isn’t any animal that can do that): you look at this experience in the light of previous experience. You are “biased” by what you have already done, what you believe, and who you are.

There are two biases that are particularly important for the point I’m trying to make: what social psychologists call the fundamental attribution error (the notion that other people are transparent to us) and in-group favoritism.

I’ll start with the second, since it’s actually the cause of the first. We think we’re good people with good motives, so we think that people who are just like us (and who like us) are also good people.[14] When you watch Hubert TV, you’re predisposed to agree with everything if you’re Hubertian, because you believe deep in your soul that you’re getting your information from good people, no matter how much you tell yourself you’re being objective.

However, imagine that the Hubertians fling themselves around about a prominent Chesterian whose wife has appeared in public with bare arms. And then imagine Hubert TV  goes on to support a Hubertian whose wife has porn photos. How does Hubert TV manage the cognitive dissonance? They got their base worked into a frenzy about bare arms, and now they have to deal with porn photos?

Inoculation. Hubert TV  never shows the photos, and they have sufficiently inoculated their base against any site that says anything about the photos, so that they would never click on the link. Their base can continue to feel moral outrage about Chesterians who had a wife with bare arms while they support a Hubertian who has a wife who actually has porn photos.

And I can say, from experience, that, when confronted with that information, Hubertians will dismiss it on the grounds that Hubertt TV hasn’t shared it. They say, Chester TV is presenting this information because they’re out-group. The source of the information means the information can be dismissed (the genetic fallacy). That’s in-group favoritism.

Imagine a slightly less dramatic example (moral outrage over bare arms versus justifying porn photos),. Imagine two candidates for President who face accusations that they groped women. Imagine that there is plausible evidence that the Chesterian candidate groped women (although there is dispute about consent). Imagine that Hubertians made political hay of this, and tried to get that President impeached. Imagine that they then thoroughly supported a candidate who bragged that he groped women without their consent.

At this point, Hubertians have to admit it’s entirely tribal. There is no logical world in which their outrage is principled: it’s factional.

Hubertians could try to claim a sort of retroactive vengeance (Chesterians said adultery was okay, so it’s okay if our candidate had rapey adultery), but the fundamental attribution error enables a different strategy: give bad motives to the out-group and good motives to in-group members. An out-group member who lies about his adultery is evil, but an in-group member is protecting his family.

And motive is the Bermuda Triangle of argument, where everyone is lost, because it just ends up being a reiteration of in-group=good and out-group=bad.

As long as the question (what rhetoricians call the stasis) of political discourse is: is the person making this argument in-group or out-group, then democracy is gerfucked.

As long as people get all of their information from a source that says that THIS source is all you need, then they are suckers.

As long as people think that political issues are really identity and motive issues, and it’s a good idea to get all their information from in-group sources, they’ll end up drinking someone’s flavor-aid. Instead of trying to pick whose flavor-aid, it would be better for us to try to get away from tribalism and move toward a sense that we are a democracy. All citizens matter, and so genuinely good public policies aren’t grounded in some notion that only in-group members are really citizens—maybe we should all try to find the solutions that, on the whole, honor the needs of all current and future citizens. Maybe, instead of trying to do down the other, we should try to think about what makes the US a city on a hill for how democracy can find good and inclusive solutions.

[1] “In-group” doesn’t mean the group that’s in power—it means the group you’re in. So, for fans of Limbaugh, other fans of Limbaugh are the “in-group;” for fans of Maddows, other fans of Maddow are the “in-group.”

[2] You can think you are. Cunning versions of one-party propaganda include what appears to be criticism of the in-group, and a lot of descriptions of Their criticism of in-group politicians, so people who are completely in an enclave genuinely think they’re not. More on that later. Here I’ll just mention that one of my favorite examples of this is how the Weathermen engaged in a lot of self-criticism, for not being radical enough. That kind of self-criticism made people feel that they were “objective” about their practices.

[3] A practice encouraged by way too many argumentation courses and textbooks. But that’s a different rant.

[4] Yes, I said there aren’t issues with two sides, and then seem to have presented an issue with two sides. Of course, this controversy would have far more than two sides: those who argue that the red ball doesn’t matter, that albino squirrels are allies, that we should distinguish between small dogs and toy dogs, that cats have a role to play, but I put it into two because, in the US, it will come down to two candidates for President who will ask for a vote.

[5] And here I have to explain the origin of this example (since the Chester FAQ—probably the single-most read thing I’ve ever written—has disappeared). Chester was a Great Dane/shepherd mix, built for comfort and joy, who loathed little dogs. And while it’s true that big dogs are astonishingly often attacked by little dogs (especially when the big dogs are on leash), and while it’s also true that the whole experience of the little dog who went under Chester and bit his scrotum would be traumatizing, it’s also true that Chester unfairly assumed that all little dogs had bad intentions. Hubert (a Great Dane), who agreed about squirrels being evil, and who agreed about the importance of the red ball, got along fine with little dogs. He got along well with all dogs, including ones who attacked him. Sure, he got attacked by little dogs a lot (seriously, anyone with a big dog can tell you this is common), and a couple bit him and drew blood, but he always responded by looking at them with a kind of, “Really? You want to do this?” He broke up fights in dog parks by running into the midst of the fight and looking at all the dogs in the fight with that same, “Really? Do you want to go there?”

[6] This was not the argument that Brown had assaulted the police officer. The people I came across making this argument were saying that the officer was justified in shooting him because Brown had shoplifted.

[7] This makes sense if you don’t think of groups as evolving, but as ontologically-grounded and therefore permanent identities–actions as signs of those identities.

[8] Rush Limbaugh gave Andrea Dworkin more attention than she ever got in feminist theory classes; he loved quoting her out of context, as though feminism = Dworkin. I still run across references to her as though all feminists believe everything misogynists think she is supposed to have believed. Lefties regularly quote the “we create reality” as though it means something the speaker clearly didn’t mean. That is a meme that won’t die.

[9] At this point, you’re probably thinking of examples of out-group media doing what I’m describing, and you’re right, it does. But you have liked, shared, retweeted, or believed something that made all these moves, regardless of your political affiliation. If you think you haven’t, you’re just that much more of a sucker. I’m not saying everyone is equally suckered, or “both sides do it just as much” (I keep saying there aren’t two sides, so I’d never endorse any “both sides” argument).

[10] Seriously, I think, second to the notion of philosophical paired terms, it’s the most important rhetorical concept for understanding what’s wrong with our political deliberation.

[11] I think tuning in to opposition propaganda is useful, in that it helps one recognize the current talking points, but it doesn’t help a voter think effectively about policy issues.

[12] It’s also useful to try to find the smartest version of various policy positions—instead of watching Fox News, read The Economist or The Wall Street Journal (or studies published by the Cato Institute or the Heritage Foundation); The Nation is good for social democratic policy advocacy, New York Review of Books for third-way neoliberal. Reason is generally the best source for Libertarian—the list could go on.

[13] Propaganda says your only bad decisions involved not being committed enough to the in-group. Really cunning propaganda invites you to be slightly attracted to an argument they then identify as out-group, so that you then are more fiercely committed to the people who will tell you what to believe (the Weathermen were really masters of this; so is Fox—honestly, it’s kind of breath-taking it’s so skilled).

[14] This is why douchey salespeople will compliment your taste in whatever they’re selling, and will try to find a way to bond with you quickly; they’ll often do it by bonding with you about how much the both of you look down on some other group, but that’s a different post.

What I have to say about civility (selections from Fanatical Schemes)

[Selections from Fanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus]

[The argument that the Civil War was caused by the extremism of “both sides”] typifies one conventional way of understanding conflict, exemplified in the saying that “it takes two to make a fight.” According to this view, if there is a violent conflict, it is the result of at least two parties who refuse to compromise, so both parties are to be equally blamed for their intransigence. This sense of a public sphere of compromise and concession is often connected to privileging civility, a powerful, but very vague, concept. “Civility” tends to be defined through negation: it is not emotional or abusive; it does not involve personal attack; it is not offensive. Offending one’s audience, it is argued, alienates them, and persuading them necessitates moving them to one’s side, not pushing them away:

When the ebullitions of passion burst in peevish crimination of the audience themselves, when a speaker sallies forth, armed with insult and outrage for his instruments of persuasion, you may be assured, that this Quixotism of rhetoric must eventually terminate like all other modern knight errantry and that the fury must always be succeeded by the impotence of the passions.  (John Quincy Adams, Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory I: 365.)

The hope is that a rhetor can find a civil way to make any argument–including dissent. Yet, dissent is inherently disruptive, and necessarily upsetting to anyone who identifies with the current system. Hence, as various scholars have noted, privileging discourse that is not upsetting necessarily furthers the disenfranchisement of the already marginalized (see especially Darsey).

This notion of the power of civil discourse is wonderfully optimistic, as it suggests that there might be a discursive solution to every conflict, that violence happens when only rhetors make their arguments badly. In its most extreme form, this theory of rhetoric makes an absolute distinction between the content and form of an argument, so that abolitionists were not wrong to want slavery abolished, but in how they made their case. Had abolitionists tempered their rhetoric, had they not armed themselves with insult and outrage, they might have persuaded slavers to free their slaves; this was the argument that Channing made in Slavery. Condemning abolitionists for their vehemence, Channing promises a different kind of criticism of slavery: “I propose to show that slavery is a great wrong, but I do not intend to pass sentence on the character of the slave-holder” (16). As demonstrated by the reaction to Channing’s book, his readers did not see the distinction; his book was characterized as “pouring oil on a conflagration” (Austin 11), and, despite Channing’s claims to reject violence, “it is insurrection that he preaches” (Austin 14). The 1836 anonymous response insists that, although Channing may not have intended “to excite the blacks to take ‘vengeance,’ and free themselves,” “no work has appeared (so far as I know) so well adapted to produce precisely that attempt” (11). Proslavery readers saw no difference between his rhetoric and the rhetoric of the people he condemned.

As will be discussed in the seventh chapter, the issue of civil language came up continually in regard to the anti-slavery petitions presented to Congress. When a Representative from Massachusetts, George Briggs, pointed out that the language was respectful, James Bouldin (from Virginia) responded that the very nature of the petitions–their criticizing slaveowners–meant that they were inherently disrespectful (40). If “civility” and “respectful” are seen as synonymous, there is no such thing as civil criticism of people higher in any hierarchy. Criticism is only permitted when it is superiors criticizing inferiors, which means, necessarily, the hierarchy itself cannot be criticized; substantive social change is impossible. It is equally impossible if “civility” is defined by the reaction of the audience–that is, if it is assumed that “uncivil” and “upsetting” are synonymous, then civil disagreement on central issues is impossible. Under such limitations, rhetoric cannot solve political conflicts.

I do not mean to suggest that the narrative of proslavery forces provoked by abolitionists is obviously false; it is clear that anti-abolitionism significantly increased in the mid-1830s, and proslavery rhetors certainly blamed abolitionists for their actions. Although I will argue that seeing abolitionist rhetorical stridency as the catalyst for anti-abolitionism is a mistake, it occurs naturally from the sensible project of looking at what participants in a debate say about their motives in getting uglier. In addition, our habit of imagining issues as binaries, coupled with how difficult it is to articulate the relation between rhetoric and reality, means that there is a tendency to assume that discourse either really is or really is not about the purported issue. To suggest that proslavery rhetors were not really provoked by abolitionist rhetoric seems to imply that that rhetoric did not really bother them, and that’s an absurd proposition. People argued about slavery because they genuinely (and vehemently) disagreed about it.

[….]

If “civility” and “respectful” are seen as synonymous, there is no such thing as civil criticism of people higher in any hierarchy. Criticism is only permitted when it is superiors criticizing inferiors, which means, necessarily, the hierarchy itself cannot be criticized; substantive social change is impossible. It is equally impossible if “civility” is defined by the reaction of the audience–that is, if it is assumed that “uncivil” and “upsetting” are synonymous, then civil disagreement on central issues is impossible. Under such limitations, rhetoric cannot solve political conflicts.

[….]

Abolitionist rhetors were no more emotional than proslavery ones, and they were far more rational. Emotionalism and rationality are not at opposite ends of a spectrum; they are only tangentially related (unless one has the circular, and useless, definition of each as the absence of the other). William Lloyd Garrison, whose writing style I personally find irritating, engaged in rational argumentation insofar as he accurately represented his oppositions’ arguments and engaged them. He strove for internal consistency, his paper presented multiple sides of various arguments, he published arguments with which he disagreed. Harriet Beecher Stowe, another author often condemned for polemicism, demonstrates deep knowledge of proslavery rhetoric in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Passionate, sentimental, committed, and assertive, these authors still managed to represent proslavery arguments clearly and accurately. Abolitionists were not more histrionic than proslavery rhetors, but they did have more uteruses among them, and I would suggest that the extremely sexist tendency to perceive women as more emotional, coupled with a desire to shift the stasis away from slavery, facilitated the creation of a political, and then scholarly, consensus about the fanaticism of abolitionists. Women were excluded from public discourse because they would be emotional and irrational; they would, in other words, behave the same way proslavery rhetors already did. Whether we are to understand histrionic outbursts as a point of white male privilege, or to see proslavery rhetors’ condemning abolitionists for doing what they themselves do as yet another instance of cunning projection, is unclear to me. But it is clear they did it.

A famous exponent of an extreme version of this tendency is Frank Owsley, who blamed “egocentric sectionalism” for the war, a flaw practiced more by the North than the South: “The people in one section failed in their language and conduct to respect the dignity and self-respect of the people in the other section” (Stampp, Causes, 56). It is striking the extent to which this echoes proslavery rhetoric. By “the people” of the south Owsley means slavers–if anything, abolitionists had far more respect for the dignity and self-respect of slaves and African Americans than did slavers–and the war was caused by not respecting their feelings. Owsley does not condemn the south for failing to respect the feelings of the north; this is not, despite his concluding sentence (that unity is in danger when “one section fails to respect the self-respect of the people of another section” 58), an image of mutual respect.[i] Less extreme versions of this explanation arise in Tise and Faust, both of whom still accept that there was something provoking in abolitionists’ rhetoric. What one wonders is just what Owsley, Tise, and Faust think abolitionists should have done instead–there was, as made clear in the gag rule, no way to criticize slavery that was not provocative; slavers took any criticism as a personal attack.

To blame abolitionists for incivility is to preclude abolition. My grievance is not with the notion that public discourse ought to have certain standards, and that billingsgate should be avoided–I hope it’s been clear that I consider proslavery rhetors’ reliance on smear tactics was juvenile, hypocritical, and destructive. The problem is that conventional notions of civility, which tend to emphasize whether the audience is offended, inevitably put an impossible burden on dissenters. That latter point cannot be emphasized enough. While calls for social change might themselves call for more or less violence, they always necessarily involve criticism, and no one likes to be criticized. To prohibit anything other than “civil” political discourse, as long as “civil” is defined as discourse that does not upset anyone, is to prohibit social change.

 

[i] It is also interesting that Owsley asserts that “The language of insult which the so-called fire-eaters employed, however, was not usually coarse of obscene in comparison with the abolitionists; it was urbane and restrained in a degree–but insulting” (58). This is simply not the case.

Why we should stop arguing about civility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. The fairness argument

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

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

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

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

There are four.

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

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

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

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

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

3. Effectiveness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A rambling narrative about my writing projects

My first publication was in The Nation Weekly (a journal that briefly existed in the 70s), and the second was in a collection about Writing Centers. Both of those were things I happened to write for various reasons that someone else wanted to publish for their own reasons. In graduate school, a colleague wanted to publish a special issue about reading, and I was working on how John Muir read the landscape, and so that happened.

I then entered into years of hostile readers, bad choices about where to submit, misunderstandings about the genres of academic writing, and a failure to seek out better advice. (That’s kind of funny if you think about it—I was failing to try to figure out my rhetorical situation.)

It was clear from my dissertation work that John Muir’s inability to persuade conservationists to preserve the Hetch Hetchy Valley when he had previously been so successful was the consequence of the intellectual milieu changing—from Romanticism (dominant when he was first writing) to a kind of proto-third-way-neoliberalism (the best use of public resources is the one that advances market interests while remaining in public ownership). It was also clear to me that there was a hermeneutic and epistemological issue at play: people disagree(d) about what to do in regard to the environment because they disagree(d) about what the natural environment means—how to read it. And people disagree because of questions of how to know what we read: are our value judgments in the environment or in our minds? (This is valuable regardless of whether people value it, or this is valuable to the extent that people value it.) Everyone was reading Nature as though it were a book, but they brought different notions of how to read, and that’s why they disagreed about what to do.

There was another interesting glitch, that I couldn’t quite process. There were, as I was writing my dissertation, major scholars who argued that you could dismiss environmental concerns on the grounds that the kind of people who had those concerns were irrational.

So, I thought, my first book should trace out the connections I suspected were there: attitudes toward nature, epistemologies, and hermeneutics, and somehow it would end up on that point about dismissing arguments on the basis of motivism. It would move from the American Puritans up to Muir and the Hetch Hetchy Valley debate.

Looking back on this, I came to see that graduate school sets people up for the mistake I was making. In graduate school, you read the most famous scholars’ most recent work (except in the case of teacher who wants to trash another school of thought or scholar, in which case you read their early work, and spend a class talking about how simplistic and jejeune their article is). Scholars, toward the end of their careers, write in a completely different way from people early on—they can engage in grand narratives, broad brushes, and assertions that come from having thought about something for thirty years. We try to write what we read, and so junior scholars are set up for failure by trying to write in the way that an established scholar can write—the rules are different.

Eventually, I tried to write a book that started and ended with John Muir, but was almost entirely about the American Puritans. (A university press was interested, and kept telling me they would let me know—their editor was ill. There were many emails about how they would let me know in three weeks as the tenure clock was in the final seconds and a dean was telling the department not to support me. I have literally never heard a final word from them. They were discontinued. I was denied tenure. I got a better job.) I also directed a first-year comp program and pissed off a dean. I tried to publish an article about Horatio Alger, and another about Robert Montgomery Bird, and both were stymied.

I moved to a department that had more people publishing in the history of rhetoric, and those faculty gave me really useful readings of my manuscript, and I connected with a better press, and I got a book manuscript accepted, and then I published pieces from it (not the normal chain of events).

That book was about the 17th century New England Puritans, and how their notions of rhetoric, epistemology, and public deliberation did and didn’t fit together. No one in rhetoric and writing had written on the Puritans for a long time, and so I couldn’t make the normal scholarly moves of “They say but I say.” There was no current “I say.” Also, it irritated me off that one part of my argument was that we got the transmission model (the thesis-first) from the Puritans, and it came from their belief that persuasion doesn’t really happen. You tell  people the truth, and they recognize it. Good people act on that truth, and bad people dismiss it (a model of persuasion oddly persistent even in current studies). One of the reviewers (a comm and not comp person) insisted I put my thesis first. I grumped about it.

I intended that book to be the first part of a series, so that the next book would be looking at the rhetorical theories, epistemologies, hermeneutics, and attitudes toward nature in the late 17th and early 18th century American culture. I read a lot of 19th century American popular literature, but I couldn’t write that book. The erasure, dismissal, rationalization, and rhetorical shittiness about the indigenous peoples was too awful for me to manage. For instance, I had an article about Robert Montgomery Bird and the paradox that the same actions were to be condemned when done by Native Americans but considered heroic when done by “whites” (aka, why I can’t watch most movies). One reader said, and I’m not kidding, “But don’t you think they deserved it?” I put that and the Horatio Alger article away.

grrrrr

I have been a fan-girl of Hannah Arendt since junior high school when I read Eichmann in Jerusalem. In graduate school, for reasons even now I can’t determine, I ran into a Habermas article with an amazing endnote about how rhetoric (bad) and communicative action (good) interact. He cited speech act theory, so I took a class with John Searle (I think I got a B+, and I still really appreciate that class). As a Comp Director, I found myself in a lot of uselessly non-arguments about argumentation—people opposed teaching argumentation because they believed that no one is ever persuaded of anything (they taught the 5 paragraph essay, and they had noticed that that genre is unpersuasive, and so concluded persuasion is impossible). Their perception of persuasion is that a person has the truth, and tells it to another (the recipient) and then that person has the truth. If the recipient doesn’t have the truth at the end, then it’s proof that persuasion isn’t possible. (You hear both of those arguments a lot still.)

That’s an obviously silly model of persuasion, but, oddly enough, it’s dominant, and not restricted to one political group or philosophical approach. You can hear poststructuralists, neoconservatives, neopositivists, and behavioralists all cite studies that show no one is actually persuaded by evidence, and cite studies to support their position. (I think that’s funny.) Wayne Booth and Jurgen Habermas both nailed this one, showing that a lot of people toggle between two models of persuasion (neither of which is the one on which they actually operate): they toggle between the notion that you are persuaded by unemotional logic or you are persuaded by emotion. Oddly enough, the people arguing for it’s all emotion cite scientific studies to support their point. If they really believed it’s all emotion, they wouldn’t cite studies; they would just assert their point. Their engaging in argumentation shows that they think argumentation does potentially have an impact. This is sometimes called the pragmatic contradiction.

This problem (people engaged in persuasion who insist that no one is ever persuaded) starts from asking the wrong methodological question. You have a person who believes s/he has the truth (the experimenter) and s/he asks the experimentee what s/he believes, then presents an assertion that the experimentee is wrong. The experimentee doesn’t immediately convert on the basis of this short interaction, and the experimenter concludes that persuasion doesn’t happen! The experimenter has given the experimentee objective evidence (rational) that the experimentee doesn’t instantly accept, so the experimentee is irrational.

The irrational (no logic, all emotion)/ rational (no emotion) split is like dividing everything into round or green. Some people (roundists) are very narrow in their definition of what is round, and they declare everything that doesn’t fit that narrow definition as green. Therefore, skyscrapers are green. The greenists are very narrow about what is green, and call everything else round.

This might seem like a silly example, but it’s how American media presents politics. Major televisions media accept the Us or Them binary and then find all sorts of reasons at this or that moment to draw the lines differently. Unhappily, too many Christians do the same, accepting the premise that all the various positions can be divided into two, and then you argue about where the Us v. Them line is drawn. Given Christ’s message, we really should know better.

In any case, my point is that believing that squirrels are evil beings trying to get to the red ball is rational, and truly patriotic, means that you will perceive anyone who disagrees with you on that point as irrational and unpatriotic. And I saw that how “argumentation” was (and is) taught would reinforce that foundational fallacy.

I was convinced that the hostility to teaching argumentation in first year composition came from two places: 1) different conceptions of what it means to participate in democracy; 2) the rational/irrational split. So, I thought, I would write a book that would show the connections between models of democracy and pedagogies and that would end more hopefully and pragmatically, with a long discussion about what advances in argumentation meant for the teaching of argument.

So, what became Deliberate Conflict was supposed to be about half of a book. I wrote that book, and then farmed out parts (that isn’t how you’re supposed to do it) and it was too long. I had to take my favorite part (about Arendt) and put some of it into an article.

I had a bit of a glitch with moving (having been given tenure) to a new place and with certain promises being given that were cheerfully reneged, and so had to write two books to get associate professor and three for full. (And, yes, I’m bitter about that, since the two people who made that happen have never apologized or even acknowledged that their regneging might have caused me some grief. One of them has twice told me it was no big deal.)

Here things get complicated, since I was given my first paid leave in my career. I got my degree in 1987, and it was 2003 (or 4—I’m vague on that). I had been directing a very large first year composition program at my first job, and a slightly smaller one at my second. I HAD A LEAVE. I sent out a bunch of articles.

One of the articles I sent out in 2003 or 4 was the one a colleague (in 1992 or so) had told me was unpublishable because my argument about how whites justified pre-emptive violence against indigenous people “ignored that they started it,” and it got an award. The best vengeance is success.

I had long since moved on to the argument that agonistic rhetoric was the bomb, and the post-bellum shift away from agonism was bad. And a graduate student asked me, “If antebellum methods of teaching rhetoric were so good, why couldn’t we solve the slavery problem rhetorically?” So, I set out to write a book about the slavery debate. It was an elegant plan for a book, with five chapters: the public pro-slavery; the counter-public pro-slavery (since I wanted to undermine the public/counter-public binary which is often a good/bad or bad/good binary), the public pro-slavery, the counter-public anti-slavery, the public pro-slavery, and the mediators (that no one talks about anymore, but were once the heroes: Webster, Clay, Calhoun).

It ended up being a book about the proslavery argument between 1830 and 1835. (In other words, every book I’ve written has started out as a much longer book.)

The Civil War didn’t happen because both sides were fanatics, nor because they couldn’t compromise. The Civil War happened because the Constitution gave an advantage to slave states, slavery became the single identifying sign of Southernness, and fanaticism on behalf of slavery was a sure path to political success in a slave state. The Civil War happened because, having won every “compromise” in regard to slavery (that is, the US was becoming increasingly a slave nation) the slave states saw a political opportunity when Lincoln was elected. Their extremist rhetoric got them extremist politics and a war they never needed to have.

They thought they needed the war because they lived in an informational enclave in which various events (e.g., the mass mailing of AAS pamphlets) were a fact, although they didn’t actually happen (there was no flooding of the South with those pamphlets). They also lived in a culture in which it was dishonorable to argue pragmatically about various outcomes, including failure, and so it was the classic situation of amplification.

I was working on this book in 2003, and I thought the Iraq War was the same situation. It was a war that never needed to happen, and it happened because large numbers of people believed things that were false (Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and he had WMD), but they lived in a world in which those myths were foundational facts.

That seemed to me demagoguery. And, so, I got interested in demagoguery. And I read everything recent about demagoguery (there was not much in rhetoric and writing) and wrote an article arguing that rhetoric should pay attention to demagoguery. And the responses are there to read. I ran into a really kind and smart person at an airport who asked if I was going to respond to them, and I said no. I wanted to get the argument going, and I thought I had, and I also thought that responding to those articles would have involved my saying, “Yeah, I’m just gonna repeat what I said, since y’all obviously didn’t read the article I wrote, and just responded to something in your heads.”

I never said demagoguery was about emotionalism, for instance. Sheefuckingeesh.

And then I started working hard on a book about demagoguery. And it was going gangbusters, and it’s a weird book, and it was sent to readers, one of whom said demagoguery was a dead issue.

The book is a point by point refutation of common notions about demagoguery. Demagoguery isn’t just about the demes, it isn’t necessarily emotional, it has a weird relationship to expert discourse. I deliberately chose to have a section on a person I admire. And it has a chapter in which my point is that rhetoric can enable someone to identify shitty expertise discourse. But it’s a weird book, inductively argued.

In any case, my point in all of this is that a scholarly trajectory isn’t something you direct from the beginning. Trajectory is, I’d say, entirely the wrong metaphor. It’s more like following scat. You have something you’re hunting, and you follow the scat of the thing you’re hunting. I’ve had a lot of setbacks—a press that was uncommunicative and then went under, a dean out to make sure I was denied tenure, people in power who cheerfully reneged on promises, unsympathetic reviewers. But I’ve also had a lot of good breaks, reviewers who saw promise, editors who turned hostile reviews into a forum, hitting the job market at good moments, supportive colleagues and challenging students.

Nicholas Taleb has an analogy I think is really helpful. He says that you should imagine a study in which a thousand people are asked to engage in Russian roulette. After five shots, there will be some people standing. He points out that those people will be asked about their strategies, and whatever those people say they did will become the mantras for success in…. in his case, it’s finance.

There are no strategies that will guarantee success in our field. There are some really good books out there about what are strategies you can try, but there’s no guarantee.

You do any job for love or money. No one does academia for money, so it had better be for love. And what is it you love? When I started teaching, it was for love of teaching, but promotion required publication, and I came to love research. (I still don’t love publishing.) And this Robinson Jeffers poem has always moved me:

“I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade’s curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting
Hash, of the splendor of things.
Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax,
The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings.”
–This wild swan of a world is no hunter’s game.
Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast
Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your . . . self?
At least Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.

He’s referring, of course, to Yeats’ “Wild Swans” poem, and his own sense that he could never be Yeats. And, initially, he’s seeing writing as nailing down the thing about which he’s trying to write (note my own “nailing” metaphor above). But we will never nail to the wall anything about which it’s worth writing. We need to love what we’re trying to write about. We need to love the thing we’re chasing. It isn’t about shooting something; it’s about following a trail. I generally hate my writing, and find the slippage between what I say and what I’m trying to say sometimes incredibly discouraging. But I love democracy, and I try to make that good enough.

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.

[Some of] These People Are Animals

[From this article]

From Understanding Genocide

“We cannot expect bystanders to sacrifice their lives for others. But we can expect individuals, groups, and nations to act early along a continuum of destruction, when the danger to themselves is limited, and the potential exists for inhibiting the evolution of increasing destructiveness. This will only happen if people–children, adults, whole societies–develop an awareness of their common humanity with other people, as well as of the psychological processes in themselves that turn them against others. Institutions and modes of functioning can develop that embody a shared humanity and make exclusion from the moral realm more difficult.” (Staub 35)

“Similarly, the philosopher Beryl Land has written about how very often, before the Nazis exterminated Jews, they first reduced them to a ‘subhuman state’ through ‘systematic brutality and degradation.’ This, he argued, made killing them more ‘palatable,’ because it is easier to kill a person once he or she no longer resembles a human being. [….] [P]erpetrators could have focused on the degraded and pathetic state of their victims as justification for both their past and future victimization, even though the perpetrators were actually responsible for their wretched state.” (Newman 59)

I know that people defending our President’s characterizing people trying to come to America as “animals” by saying that he just meant some Mexicans–members of a dangerous gang. And that’s a common move. He didn’t mean everyone; he only meant one part of that group, and it is a justifiable and accurate way to characterize that one part. Thus, Trump’s use of the term “animals” for some people trying to come into the country is nothing like Nazi rhetoric.

Nope, that makes it exactly like Nazi rhetoric about Jews. It’s also exactly like pro-internment rhetoric about Japanese Americans, anti-immigration rhetoric directed at Italians, eastern Europeans, the Irish, the Germans, Muslims, red-baiting, and, well, every argument for disenfranchising, expelling, or exterminating some group.

Nazis regularly acknowledged that not all Jews were bad. What they argued is that some part of that group was so dangerous that none of them should be treated as full citizens (the same argument about all the groups mentioned above), and all should be treated with extreme suspicion.

That kind of move–allowing the worst members to stand for the entire group–is only something that happens with an out-group. But it does happen. And Trump’s rhetoric is vague; he does seem to be talking about all Mexicans, and he is heard as doing exactly that.

Trump’s rhetoric won’t necessarily hurt his chances with Latinx–it’s fairly common for recent immigrants to band together against this set of immigrants (my own family history demonstrates that), and so they are likely to hear him as criticizing some immigrants. It’s easy for people to acknowledge exceptions within the in-group. But non-Latinx aren’t.

But Trump’s way of talking about parts of some immigrant group is vague. A friendly reading says he’s talking about a small group and just failing to make clear that he doesn’t think that subset represents the whole group. A less friendly reading wonders why he keeps making that mistake.

Another friendly reading says he doesn’t make the group/sub-group distinction because the sub-group is a synecdoche for the group as a whole. After all, that’s how thinking about the out-group works–any member can be taken as representative of the whole. And, clearly, that is how many supporters of Trump hear him, especially the non-trivial number of his supporters whose racism motivated their support for him.

More important, that is how exclusionary rhetoric works, including Hitler’s, by allowing or encouraging the public to think that a group is dangerous because its representative members are. What Trump is doing, and has been doing for a long time, is encouraging people to fear immigrants because some of them might be bad. And it’s working.