Category: demagoguery

Rhetoric and Demagoguery (Denver talk)

We are, again, at a point in time when the term “demagoguery” is getting thrown around, or, perhaps more accurately, the accusation. As has often happened, the prominence, and disturbing power of an individual, gets us to worry about that kind of rhetoric, but specifically as a question of identity. We are talking about whether this or that rhetor is a demagogue. The same thing happened with Joseph McCarthy, Adolf Hitler, Charles Coughlin, Huey Long, George Wallace—when those figures were in the news, demagoguery was a popular and popular scholarly topic.

But, as will be mentioned later, in rhetoric the term (and scholarly project) were abandoned in the 70s, largely because the project was subtly circular, insofar as definitions amounted to “an effective rhetor with whom I disagree.” I think scholars and teachers of rhetoric have a really important and useful place we can intervene here, but we need to work to define the term in ways that are more rigorous and self-reflective. For several years, I’ve been trying to revive scholarly interest in the project, and below I’ll explain what got me interested—but with a focus on demagoguery rather than demagogues—and now suddenly it’s hot again.

I’d like us not to make the same mistakes that were made in the past, as far as how we, as scholars, teachers, and critics, use the term and how we imagine demagoguery working. Demagoguery is not actually a timely issue; it’s a timeless one. Demagoguery isn’t about evil and magically powerful individuals who sucker the masses; it’s about what a culture considers normal methods of political participation.

My problem with many definitions of demagoguery is that they emphasize the identity and motives of the rhetor, and that emphasis comes from what I think is a methodological error. Scholars begin by compiling a list of prominent and powerful individuals they consider dangerous. They then look to that set of individuals to see what they have in common in order to define what is wrong with that rhetoric.

Nicolas Taleb describes what he sees as a methodological error in regard to popular and even scholarly claims about what makes a successful investor. He uses the analogy of a thousand people who play Russian roulette. A lot of people will survive that first shot; some number will make it to five shots. Imagine, he says, that pundits, journalists, and scholars then approached those survivors to ask about their strategies in order to recommend them to people who want to win at Russian roulette. You would get useless information.

But it would look useful. To know that information was useless, you would have to look at the people who lost, as well as the people who won, to see if there really are strategies—if there are differences among people who didn’t make it past the first round and those who made it to the end. I think we’re in the same situation with trying to think about demagoguery—it isn’t some unusual phenomenon that guarantees success. It works in some situations and not others, and we need to think about that.

There are six methodological problems to consider with the “infer from rhetors I hate” project:

    1. Looking for the commonalities among successful and hated rhetors assumes what is at stake—that it was something about their rhetoric or identity that enabled them to succeed, rather than there being a tremendous amount of luck. If we want to know what does enable that success, we need to look at unsuccessful demagoguery.
    2. That method doesn’t enable us to see demagoguery we like—by beginning with rhetors we hate, we exclude consideration of our attraction to potentially damaging rhetoric.
    3. It also prohibits empirical research on demagoguery. And here I’m advocating a kind of research I don’t do, but that I think is valuable. If we could come up with a fairly rigorous definition of demagoguery, then we could use strategies like corpus analysis in order to be more precise in our claims of causality and consequences.
    4. Oddly enough, the standard criteria—motive, emotionality, populism—don’t even capture the most famous demagogues, or they end up capturing all political figures, so those criteria are both over- and under-determining.
    5. These criteria are demophobic and elitist, as though rich and intellectual people never fall for demagoguery, and that just isn’t true.
    6. Finally, by focusing on identities as the problem—bad things happen because we have powerful individuals who are demagogues—we necessarily imply a policy solution of purification. If the presence of these bad people is the problem, then we should purify our community of them. Since I’ll argue that policies of purification are, in fact, one of the consistent characteristics of demagoguery, that would mean, in the scholarly project of criticizing demagogues, we’re engaged in demagoguery.

Here’s my argument: I think we can distinguish demagoguery from other forms of persuasive discourse on the basis of the presence of certain rhetorical moves, not the identity of the rhetors. I think, also, we should talk about the effectiveness of demagoguery in terms of how it plays into the informational worlds that people inhabit. Demagoguery isn’t an identity; it’s a relationship.

For the scholarly project of identifying demagoguery to be effective, we need to be working with a definition that enables us to see when we are drawn to it. In addition, we need a model of demagoguery that plausibly explains a few odd characteristics about it. I’ll mention a couple:

    1. It’s obvious to us that Hitler, for instance, was a demagogue. But, clearly, he couldn’t have appeared as such to his followers—they wouldn’t have listened. If you read people who defend Joseph McCarthy (and there are many), they will argue that he wasn’t a demagogue because there really were spies in government. They don’t care that he didn’t actually identify any of those spies, that he caused to be fired people who were not spies—their argument is that he had a claim that was true in the abstract, but it doesn’t matter to them that his specific claims were entirely wrong and very damaging, not just to individuals, but to American foreign policy, especially anticommunism. His standards of “communist” ensured we lost experts who might have actually helped us in Vietnam But his defenders assume that, because he was, in a fairly abstract way, “right,” he wasn’t a demagogue. Another defense of demagogues—or ways that people try to refute the accusation—is to say the person isn’t a demagogue because he or she is nice, or a good person. I’ll come back to both of those.
    2. We talk about demagogues as magicians with word wands, who command entire populations. And while it’s true that the famous ones are politically effective through their rhetoric——demagogues are never saying anything unique. Scholars and biographers note the extent to which they were saying things exactly like a lot of other media outlets and rhetors. They were effective because they were saying things that were familiar—so what impact did they have? There is a scholarly argument as to just how personally anti-Semitic Hitler really was (I’d say very, but not everyone agrees) but there is no doubt that his public rhetoric was in line with what various Catholic and Lutheran organizations and media were promoting, with dominant racialist theory (some of which was popular in the US), and with a variety of far-right volkisch groups.

As Ian Kershaw says,

“Time after time, Hitler set the barbaric tone, whether in hate-filled public speeches giving him a green light to discriminatory action against Jews and other ‘enemies of the state’, or in closed addresses to Nazi functionaries or military leaders where he laid down, for example, the brutal guidelines for the occupation of Poland and for ‘Operation Barbarossa’. But there was never any shortage of willing helpers, far from being confined to party activists, ready to ‘work towards the Fuhrer’ to put the mandate into operation” (Hitler, the Germans 43)

It’s also useful to remember that neither the Holocaust nor WWII could have happened had Hitler been the only rhetor promoting his anti-Semitism and visions of world conquest. He had a propaganda machine. And that propaganda machine existed before he came to power, before he even began making speeches in beerhalls—the Nazis didn’t write Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Hitler and the Nazis radicalized existing beliefs about German purity and honor, and how the nation was threatened by immigrants, ethnic minorities, non-Christians, intellectuals, unions, homosexuals, leftists, and feminists. But those beliefs were preexisting.The assumption of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy that started World War I, ended it when Germany was about to win, and/or was busy seducing non-Jewish woman shows up as plot point in popular movies—not just German ones—and even popular spy thrillers in English by authors like John Buchan or Leslie Charteris.

Robert Gellately says,

“Nazi propaganda was not, and could not, be crudely forced on the German people. On the contrary, it was meant to appeal to them, and to match up with everyday German understandings [….] Thus, far from forcing unwanted or repellant messages down the throats of the population, Hitler and the Nazis carefully tailored what they said, wrote, and especially what they did, in order to win and hold the support of the people.” (Backing Hitler 259)

By the end of the war, which Germans supported, large numbers of Germans also supported the existence and use of the slave labor and death camps—things they would not have supported to the same extent before the war. The relationship between Hitler and the shift in German ideology isn’t simple to describe.

I’m not endorsing what is called the “functionalist” explanation of the Holocaust—the notion that Hitler as an individual didn’t matter, because the institutions were essentially driving themselves. I don’t think that’s the case—I think Kershaw has described it elegantly: it was the combination of Hitler’s personal fanaticism and charismatic leadership, a set of governmental arrangements and practices, conditions of the war, enthusiasm on the part of many people, and apathy on the part of others.

Just as scholars have struggled to define the exact relationship of Hitler’s personal beliefs and historical forces in the Holocaust, the field of rhetoric is struggling to find an accurate narrative for how rhetorical change happens. Narratives of persuasion toggle among fatalism, determinism, magical rhetoric, and the two modern dogma that Wayne Booth identified years ago, scientism and motivism.

I didn’t come to an interest in demagoguery via loathing individual rhetors. I came via Jurgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt through the American antebellum debate over slavery. Briefly, Habermas famously distinguished communicative versus strategic action, and most scholarship (and even pedagogy) following his line of thought was about additions to and critiques of his notion of communicative action—was it universalist, how does empirical research support it (or not). One criticism from feminist scholars such as Seyla Benhabib, I.M. Young, and Bonnie Honig, was that it was excessively averse to conflict, especially passionate conflict, and too restrictive in its formulation of reason.

Arendt’s argument for thinking (and especially her model of thinking as imagination) and her advocacy of agonism seemed a good corrective to what might be excessively rationalist about Habermas’ vision of deliberation, and also much more pragmatic. In terms of pedagogy, Tom Miller’s argument about the history of rhetorical pedagogy seemed to provide the keystone—we used to have a civic and agonistic model of teaching rhetoric, and then we shifted to an expressivist and hyper-individualized version of writing.

But here I ran up against a historical argument. If the best form of rhetorical pedagogy is civic-agonistic, and there are direct benefits to the quality of public deliberation from such a pedagogy—if the dream civic space is Habermasian/Arendtian— and such a pedagogy was dominant in the antebellum era, then why was the debate over slavery such a train wreck?

A graduate student asked me that in a seminar, and I didn’t have a good answer. So I ended up writing a book about the proslavery argument.

The argument for slavery was just a rhetorical trainwreck. Within the same document, sometimes on the same page, there would be an argument that appealed to premises that contradicted the premises of another argument—slaves are happy, slaves are always just seconds from race war, slavery will die out, slavery is eternal.

There were ways in which proslavery ideology was consistent—it was consistently authoritarian, for instance, and consistently resistant to policy deliberation or pragmatic argumentation. But, it was logically inconsistent, in terms of major premises contradicting one another, and even sometimes claims in perfect opposition. It also increasingly came to seem it wasn’t about the claims qua veridical or assertoric claims—they were phatic. What mattered about them was the extent to which they were performances of ingroup loyalty. Thus, consistently, what should have been policy deliberations—what are the long-term chances of maintaining slavery, what should happen with tariffs, what and whether railroads should be built, what should be done about the exhaustion of the soil, should we have Sunday mails, should we secede—were not times when people considered multiple alternatives, the feasibility and solvency of various plans, but were taken exclusively as opportunities for rhetors to engage in an ingroup loyalty oneupsmanship regarding their commitment to slavery.

In such a world, rational approaches to argumentation were framed as dithering cowardice, and the best way to show loyalty was to advocate a risky—even implausible—course of action. This is what I ended up calling “the rhetorical power of the irrational rhetor.” After all, supporting a reasonable plan doesn’t show ingroup loyalty as much as advocating an openly unreasonable one—that’s what shows you are a true believer, and that you believe you have God on your side. To advocate rational and inclusive deliberation was characterized as dangerously disloyal, perhaps even the consequence of such an advocate being the knowing or unknowing tool of evil forces. Dissent of any kind, even dissent about the feasibility of proposed courses of action—even if a rhetor explicitly agreed with the goals, agreed with the need, and was simply trying to debate strategy–was “refuted” with identity arguments—that you were a bad person for doubting the ability of the ingroup to succeed. And you were a bad person because you weren’t sufficiently concerned about the need.

In other words, rhetors responded to criticism of the plan with reassertion of the desperate need and performances of ingroup loyalties.

It’s important to remember that, despite the way we talk about the slavery debate, there were not two sides. Off the top of my head I generated fourteen. I’m not sure it’s useful to think of them as “sides,” as much as sets in a Venn diagram, and those positions morphed, split, and combined in the thirty years that slave states were threatening secession over the issue. A few of them include:

    • proslavery (slavery as an active good);
    • proslavery (necessary evil);
    • proslavery (slaveholders should be able to maintain slaveholding even if living in non-slave states);
    • proslavery (it will die out on its own so we don’t need to do anything);
    • proslavery pro-secession (knowing it would provoke a war);
    • proslavery anti-secession (Unionists, who believed the Union could be made even more favorable to the slaveholder political agenda, and secession was unnecessary);
    • proslavery promanumission (slaveholders should be able to free their slaves if they choose, generally associated with also believing that slaveholders should be allowed to teach their slaves to read);
    • proslavery antimanumission (the state should be able to micromanage slaveholders, such as prohibiting the teaching of reading, prohibiting manumission, and so on).
    • NIMBY antislavery (restrict it to the existing slave states);
    • anti-proslavery (the Slave Power is restricting the rights of all to protect slavery—right to petition, free speech, freedom of religion, states’ rights);
    • anti-antislavery (abolitionists are making things worse by provoking slaveholders and proslavery politicians);
    • pro-colonization anti-slavery (slaves should be freed without governmental coercion and sent “back” to Africa);
    • antislavery gradual abolition (slave states should follow the same procedures as had been used in New York and Pennsylvania, some of the people advocating this argued that slaveholders be recompensed for their losses);
    • immediate emancipation and full citizenship.

The list could go on, but I think the point is made. Proslavery rhetors didn’t want to acknowledge the broad range of possible stances, since it undermined their alarmist rhetoric—that if you weren’t in favor of the most extreme policies, then you were an abolitionist (or one of their stooges) advocating slave rebellion and race war.

At the time I was working on that book, the buildup to the Iraq invasion was happening, and I was watching the same thing happen—the demonization of deliberation (by which I mean that deliberation was actually characterized as serving the devil), dissent was treated as treason, and the complicated array of positions regarding the invasion were restricted in the most powerful media to two: for the Bush plan or against doing anything about terrorism. (In some corners, there was either oppose any military action or threat in regard to Iraq or support a war for oil.)

In fact, if you were paying attention, you could create a description of the various often overlapping positions as complicated as the one regarding slavery:

    • in favor of immediate invasion;
    • in favor of threatening immediate invasion until Saddam Hussein complied with the UN;
    • in favor of invasion after success in Afghanistan;
    • in favor of UN-supported invasion, or an invasion with a coalition of Middle Eastern countries (like the Persian Gulf War);
    • in favor of invasion with what the Pentagon considers adequate forces;
    • opposed to invasion unless Saddam stops cooperating with the UN inspectors (this position emerged after he started cooperating);
    • opposed to invading Iraq, but in favor of the Afghanistan efforts;
    • opposed to any troops on the ground, but in favor of bombing;
    • opposed to any invasion of any kind.

Again, we could come up with a longer list—that isn’t my point. The point is simply that it wasn’t a pro- or anti-invasion, but the public discourse kept reducing the complicated situation to “us” and “them.”

And various other historical train wrecks had a similar pattern—Japanese internment, the Holocaust, the Sicilian Debate, the Mytilinean Debate, segregation, American anti-immigration rhetoric, LBJ policy in regard to Vietnam…the complicated political situations were bifurcated into two groups, and, instead of arguing policy, people argued which of the two groups was better, as though that would settle what policy we should follow. And that’s when I got interested in demagoguery.

I’ve told this long story of my scholarly and teaching wanderings for two reasons. First, I didn’t come to demagoguery via demagogues, but via disastrous community decisions—slavery, segregation, Japanese internment, escalation in Vietnam, the Sicilian Expedition, the Holocaust. In fact, in most of these cases, there wasn’t a demagogue, but there was demagoguery. Second, because of that orientation, the question became what rhetorical practices were normalized in these discourse communities?

Once you stop looking for demagogues, and instead look at times that communities scapegoated some group to the point of state-legitimated violence, then you can see a similar set of characteristics:

    • Policy questions are reduced to questions of identity, which are bifurcated (with us or against us), and motive (good or bad);
    • Nuance, uncertainty, deliberation, and skepticism are rejected as unmanly and disloyal (except for skepticism about claims made against ingroup members);
    • The community is reduced to the ingroup (so that, even if “they” are legally or historically part of the community, they are never considered “real” members);
    • An outgroup is scapegoated for all the ingroup’s problems;
    • Public discourse is predominantly performance of ingroup loyalty;
    • The community is described as threatened by the mere presence, let alone political power, of that outgroup, and so the solution is some version of purifying us of them;
    • Ingroup loyalty is demonstrated by insisting that policy discussions are unnecessary because the correct course of action is obvious to all people of goodwill (disagreement is fake—either the person disagreeing doesn’t really disagree, or is fooled by the outgroup);
    • The discourse is heavily fallacious, but not necessarily emotional, and can involve appeals to authority and expertise, and can look as though there is a lot of “evidence;”
    • Public discourse focusses almost exclusively on the “ill” or need portion of an argument, with the major ill being an existential threat to the ingroup—because we are threatened with extinction, concerns like due process, human rights, and fairness are luxuries we can’t afford;
    • Finally, while there are overlaps with fascism (especially as Robert Paxton describes it), it isn’t necessarily fascist, or even political.

This is what I would suggest should serve as the criteria we look at, but I think this is a question open to empirical testing. Instead of looking at rhetors we hate, though, we would look at times of extermination, expulsion, or group oppression.

This list isn’t entirely new, and it isn’t as though no one else has ever remarked on these characteristics—Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben have both noted the state of exception, Arendt remarked on the lack of perspective-shifting in someone like Adolph Eichmann, and I’ve obviously been influenced by Kenneth Burke’s 1939 piece on Hitler’s rhetoric, George Lakoff’s work on Strict Father Morality, political scientists’ work on authoritarianism and “stealth democracy,” and Chip Berlet and Mathew Lyon’s work on Right Wing Authoritarianism. I’ve tried to focus, as I say, not just on famous rhetors like Hitler, nor only on right-wring demagoguery, in fact, not even strictly on political demagoguery. That accounts for some of the differences.

These practices don’t always lead to the expulsion or extermination of some group, for several reasons. First, demagoguery is powerful depending on the extent to which that kind of scapegoating and fear-mongering is perceived as normal. In my classes, I often use examples from PETA—I’m a vegetarian and animal lover opposed to most animal experimentation. I use PETA because I’m sympathetic to their ends, such as an article about trying to reduce interstate and international trade in various constricting snake species; the article ends up scapegoating snake owners generally, and owners of venomous snakes especially. It’s demagoguery, but probably with little impact—demagoguery about pitbulls, on the other hand, has had considerable impact.

In addition, Michael Mann’s work on ladders of extremism suggest why demagoguery can stop. His argument is that, at any given moment, the conflict between two groups could get resolved by the community as a whole choosing to revert to what he calls “normal politics.”

He mentions that heightened exterminationist rhetoric can be motivated by an ambitious rhetor who thinks it’s useful as a mobilizing passion. If the rhetor gets what he (usually) wants, then he might abandon the rhetoric (as Ward seems to suggest was the case with many southern politicians, who used race-baiting only when it would help them win an election). It can also get “resolved” by the ougroup voluntarily leaving or settling for oppression.

I’ll note that if, however, the demagoguery is motivated by a desire for political power, or increased viewers, or a plan to distract people from some other situation, then the outgroup that leaves will simply be rhetorically replaced by another outgroup to scapegoat. Now that it’s difficult to rouse much political power by appealing to fears about Irish and Italians, one sees exactly the same anti-immigration rhetoric applied to “Mexicans” and “Muslims.” Fox News had considerable coverage of Ebola prior to the 2014 election, connected to fears about immigrants—once the election was over, that coverage dropped.

At the beginning I said that I think we need to think about demagoguery as a relationship. Here I’m saying that part of the relationship is to other information available to the consumer. Demagoguery only works when we don’t think it is demagoguery, and we don’t think it is when we have a bad definition—one that relies on inference of motive, unhelpful assumptions about how easy it is to see if something is false, and equally unhelpful assumptions about what it means for an argument to be “rational.” I don’t have a lot of time to explain them, so I’m going to go through them quickly. Basically, my argument is that demagoguery works because our lay notions of what it means to participate effectively in public discourse encourage us to have unhelpful criteria for “bad” kinds of rhetors.

Here are some assumptions that people make about political decisions:

    • When it comes down to it, the solutions to our political problems are straightforward. Our political issues are the consequence of not having enough good people in office—instead, we have professional politicians who aren’t really trying to solve things. (Stealth Democracy)
    • Good people do good things, it’s easy to recognize when someone is a good person, or when a plan of action is good. So, we don’t need to argue about policy—we just need to vote for the good people who are above (our outside of) professional politics.
    • Good people speak the truth, and they don’t try to alter it through rhetoric—they are transparent. Thus, you should trust people who strike you as unfiltered, and who say things that resonate with you immediately.
    • A “rational” argument is a claim that is true (and that you can recognize easily to be true) supported by evidence, and presented in an unemotional way.

I’ve been very moved by Ariel Kruglanski’s work on what he calls “lay epistemologies,” perhaps because he confirms what Aristotle says. Kruglanski says that people reason syllogistically—this person is a Canadian; Canadians are polite; therefore, this person must be polite.

Our popular culture and, unhappily, our textbooks in rhetoric and composition, remain dominated by the rational/irrational split, despite that being a relatively recent development, and it not being what research in cognitive psychology shows. What the research shows is that there is not some distinction between emotions and logic, but a division between System 1 and 2 thinking: between cognitive shortcuts and metacognitive processes.

In System 1, you simply decide whether new information fits with what you already know. In System 2, you think about whether how you know is a good process. We spend most of our time in System 1, as we should, but we should make political decisions using System 2. Demagoguery says we don’t need to do that.

Demagoguery works with all of us when we believe that all we need is System 1—the demagoguery that “moves” us is the one that resolves our cognitive dissonances by persuading us that what we have always already known is absolutely true. We aren’t moved by new information, but by a new commitment to old beliefs.

Demagoguery depoliticizes politics, in that it says we don’t have to argue policies, and can just rouse ourselves to new levels of commitment to the “us” and purify our community or nation of them. It says that we are in such a desperate situation that we can no longer afford them the same treatment we want for us.

Metacognition is demagoguery’s worst enemy, and there is a simple way to move to metacognition—would I think this was a good argument if it were made in service of the outgroup political agenda. If people thought that way, then demagoguery would be restricted to moments of hilarity on youtube about music you hate.

In other words, I just spent 45 minutes telling y’all that what most prevents demagoguery is a culture in which we believe that you should “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” And that’s what we should teach.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Trump voters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1) Opposition to abortion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2) Opposition to Clinton

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

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

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

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

3) Faith in charismatic leadership

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

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

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

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

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

4) Authoritarianism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rationality, demagoguery, and rhetoric

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What this means for teaching

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

Syllogism:

All men are mortal. [universally valid Major Premise]

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

Therefore, Socrates is mortal. [conclusion]

Enthymeme:

Socrates is mortal [conclusion]

because he is a man. [minor premise]

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

Or, syllogism:

A = B [Major Premise]

A = C [minor premise]

Therefore, B = C. [conclusion]

Enthymeme:

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

Chester hates squirrels because Chester is a dog.  

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

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

 

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

Major Premise: Action movies are good.

 

Preserving wilderness in urban areas benefits communities

            because it gives people access to non-urban wildlife.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fallacies of relevance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do we do now?

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

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

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

In Fanatical Schemes I argued:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think what we should do is :

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

Why I thought Trump might win

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s what those folks believe about Trump:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a “get out of guilt free” card.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thrillers and Hitler

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

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

Why did that argument work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rhetoric and Demagoguery

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What I want to do today is begin by talking a little bit about the place of “demagoguery” in contemporary rhetorical scholarship, then offer my own definition, and then show its application in regard to someone I admire. And, in a way, that’s the whole project in a nutshell: scholarship in rhetoric can’t serve a useful critical purpose if it just comes down to scholars praising people we like and blaming people we don’t—rhetorical scholarship should be deliberative, and neither epideictic nor judicial.

Jurgen Habermas’ “What is universal pragmatics” has a wonderful footnote with a diagram of kinds of discourse–communicative versus strategic action.

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As is common among scholars of public discourse, Habermas’ focus is on communicative action, and the rest of his career has been spent trying to identify the ontological bases, precise criteria, and most promising models for public deliberation as opposed to instrumental reason, a.k.a., strategic action. As I said, that’s fairly common for scholars of public discourse, who tend to focus on what deliberative discourse is, how to teach it, how to foster it, how to balance inclusion and civility. Since I spent a chunk of my career working on that problem, I’m not critical of that kind of scholarship—it’s important.

But we have tended to ignore the other side of the chart– why are people so drawn to instrumental reason even in cases where deliberative approaches would be more helpful? It isn’t particularly controversial in business, management, counseling, mediation, interpersonal mediation, and a variety of other fields that businesses, communities, and relationships benefit more from approaches to decision-making that are toward the deliberative rather than toward the strategic action side.

And by “toward deliberative side” I don’t mean anything particularly high-minded or complicated – in fact, I have fairly low standards about what constitutes deliberative discourse. I’m not necessarily talking about a community in which people are nice to each other, or unemotional, or in which no one is offended, or everyone feels safe — I just mean one in which it’s considered necessary to listen to, and therefore fairly represent, the other side.

The notion that you should listen to your opposition seems to me to be a no-brainer–you can’t even be sure that you actually disagree unless you’ve listened enough to know what your interlocutor is arguing. And, if you and that person aren’t just vehemently agreeing, and you want to change the mind of the person with whom you’re disagreeing, it’s going to be very hard to persuade them to change their mind unless they feel you’re engaging the arguments they’re really making. Yet early on in my teaching I discovered that a fair number of my students thought it was actively dangerous to listen to the opposition, let alone restate their argument in a way the opposition would consider fair.

So I became interested in how to try to persuade people to listen to the opposition, and that task necessarily led me to think about two questions: first, what makes listening to the opposition dangerous; second, what makes living in a world of demonizing, dehumanizing, and irrationalizing the opposition attractive, even pleasurable.

Once you’ve posed that second question you may well find yourself, as I have, studying what I’ve ended up thinking of as train wrecks in public deliberation– times that communities took a lot of time and a lot of talk to come to a decision they later regretted, and concerning which they had all the evidence they needed in the moment to come to different conclusions.

Thus, I’m not talking about times when communities had no choice, or inadequate information, or when they made decisions I think they shouldn’t have made. I mean things like the Sicilian expedition of 415 BCE, the Salem witch trials, the US commitment to slavery and then segregation, anti-immigration fear mongering of the 1920s and the related forced sterilization of around 65,000 people in the United States, the Holocaust, Japanese internment, LBJ’s decision to escalate in Vietnam, the Iraq invasion, and other more specific incidents, such as Hitler’s refusal to order a retreat from Stalingrad or Haig’s insistence on the direct approach in various World War I battles.

And there are a few common characteristics about these incidents, in terms of what had become “normal” political discourse—specifically, heightened factionalism, so that politics became a performance of ingroup loyalty, and the ethos of the nation was reduced to one faction—that is, pluralism is demonized–and thwarting the opposition is just as much a laudable goal as enacting policies, because there is no sense that multiple factions might be legitimate or that the community benefits from disagreement. The nation is the party, and failure to support the party is treason. Obviously, in such a world, compromise and bargaining, let alone inclusive and pluralist deliberation, are disloyal, cowardly, and evil.

So it began to look to me as though there was a strong correlation between bad decisions and bad decision-making processes — not that they are necessarily and inevitably related, but that they often are, and so I started trying to identify the specific characteristics of those bad decision-making processes.

Largely because I don’t like neologisms, I started using the term demagoguery for that approach to public discourse. That may have been a mistake. Often people engaged in this kind of work do come up with a new term. Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyon use the term right-wing populism; David Neiwert calls it eliminationist; Kenneth Burke describes the same phenomenon in regard to Hitler, doesn’t use any term in particular. That’s something worth discussing—whether I should simply use a different term, rather than try to salvage a deeply troubled one.

Early in this project I, like most other scholars of this kind of rhetoric, focused on individual rhetors, on demagogues; I’m now certain that was a mistake.

Scholarship on demagogues went out of fashion in rhetoric in the seventies, largely because that scholarship consistently appealed to premises that were rationalist, elitist, and anti-democratic. Most definitions of “demagogues” emphasized the emotionalism of their arguments, the populism of their policies, and the selfishness of their motives. The conventional criticism of such scholarship was four-part:

    1. The criticism looked rhetorical, but it was really political—”demagogue” was simply a term for an effective rhetor in service of a political agenda that the scholar didn’t like;
    2. By condemning demagogues for emotionalism, scholars were idealizing a public sphere of technocratic and instrumental argument, and necessarily banishing individuals and groups who were passionate about their cause—since victims of injustice tend to feel pretty strongly about their situation, prohibiting demagogues would have a disproportionate impact on marginalized and oppressed groups;
    3. Demagogues are always “men of the people,” so the scholarship on demagogues is anti-populist—why assume that only the masses are misled?
    4. Scholarship condemning demagogues is demophobic—the (false) assumption is often that the rise of a demagogue is the consequence of “too much democracy,” once again implying that the elite don’t make mistakes.

I agree with all of those criticisms—I do think that much existing scholarship on demagogues is not particularly helpful for doing much other than saying, “I don’t like that rhetor.” But I don’t think that makes the project hopeless—I think the problem comes from focusing on demagogues, rather than demagoguery.

Take, for instance, Kenneth Burke’s 1939 brilliant analysis of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and the odd logical problem it falls into by trying to explain Nazism through Hitler’s individual psychology. According to Burke, Hitler became obsessed with the Jews because he lost arguments to them in Vienna (to be honest, I think that might have been a factor, but his own anxiety that he might be Jewish was probably more important), but, if that’s what made him anti-Semitic, why did his anti-Semitic rhetoric work? Did every member of his audience go to Vienna and lose an argument to a Jew? Of course not. Whatever Hitler’s personal motivations were—he was anxious about his heredity, he was out-argued by Jews–, they don’t explain why he was effective with people who didn’t have those anxieties or experiences.

Burke set out to analyze Hitler’s rhetoric because of Hitler’s political power—the scholarly method was to select the rhetor and then look a the rhetoric. Similarly, scholars of demagogues, ranging from James Fennimore Cooper to Michael Signer, generally use the process of beginning with political figures they considered demagogues, and then looking to see what those figures had in common.

That method guarantees that what they will have in common is that the scholar doesn’t like them. The “demagogues” are always in the scholars’ outgroup, and that may be why there is so much motivism. Scholarship on demagogues generally focuses on the motives of the demagogue—demagogues, unlilke statesmen (thank Plutarch for that fallacious distinction), look out for themselves. They want power, but statesmen (and I use the gendered term deliberately) want what’s best for the country or community.

Since people attribute bad motives to members of the outgroup and good motives to members of the ingroup for exactly the same behavior—an ingroup member who makes a lot of money is a hard worker, and an outgroup member who makes a lot of money is greedy–, this criterion of motive means that it will never help us identify ingroup demagogues. After all, the basic premise of this approach to finding demagogues is that they are bad people—if we admire someone, we won’t admit they’re bad, so they can’t be demagogues.

In addition to the problem that it prevents us from seeing when we’re being persuaded by demagoguery, this criterion doesn’t even capture the most notorious demagogues, who almost certainly sincerely believed that they were doing the right thing for their communities and countries. Hitler thought the Holocaust was necessary and justified and right. He meant well.

So focusing on identity and “bad motives” doesn’t help us identify the kind of rhetoric we want to.

The emphasis on demagogues presumes that, as Burke said of Hitler, they can lead a great country in their wake—they are masters in control of the masses. But, if you look at the leadup to the train wrecks, that isn’t what you see at all. You don’t see an individual who magically changed what the masses thought—Hitler would never have succeeded without considerable help from the elite, and, famously, Hitler wasn’t saying anything new. People moved to support Nazism weren’t all moved by Hitler (Adolf Eichmann doesn’t mention Hitler’s rhetoric), and Hitler’s rhetoric wouldn’t have been effective if it had been entirely new. It was commonplace.

Demagogues don’t create a wake—they ride a wave.

Probably more important, if you go about it by looking at the leadup to train wrecks, you sometimes don’t see a demagogue at all, but you do see demagoguery. Proslavery forces didn’t have a single rhetor who led everyone along—the antiabolitionist alarmism, scapegoating, and general demagoguery wasn’t emanating from one rhetor, but was almost ubiquitous. It was in newspapers—even of opposing parties—speeches in Congress on all sorts of topics (including the question of the Sunday mails), novels, poetry, plays; it was used by major figures, minor figures. Prosegregation rhetoric was similarly demagogic, ubiquitous, and headless—there wasn’t a figure from whom it emanated. There wasn’t an individual who led the US in his wake; there were a lot of figures who decided to ride a wave.

If we look at decision-making processes rather than demagogues, I think we’d end up with a definition like this:

Demagoguery is a discourse that promises stability, certainty, and escape from the responsibilities of rhetoric through framing public policy in terms of the degree to which and means by which (not whether) the outgroup should be punished for the current problems of the ingroup. Public debate largely concerns three stases: group identity (who is in the ingroup, what signifies outgroup membership, and how loyal rhetors are to the ingroup); need (usually framed in terms of how evil the outgroup is); what level of punishment to enact against the outgroup (restriction of rights to extermination).

There are certain recurrent characteristics. It

    • reduces all policy discussions to questions of identity and motive, so there is never any need to argue policies qua policies;
    • polarizes a complicated political situation into us (good) and them (some of whom are deliberately evil and the rest of whom are dupes);
    • insists that the Truth is easy to perceive and convey, so that complexity, nuance, uncertainty, and deliberation are cowardice, dithering, or deliberate moves to prevent action (naïve realism);
    • is heavily fallacious, relying particularly on straw man, projection, appeal to inconsistent premises, and argument from conviction;
    • is not necessarily emotional or vehement, but there is considerable emphasis on the “need” portion of policy argumentation (which is generally an “ill” caused by the presence or actions of “them”) often with implicit or explicit threats that “we” (the ingroup) are faced with extermination, emasculation, and/or rape;
    • draws on certain “motivational passions” (in Robert Paxton’s terms) shared with fascism, although it can be used in favor of non-fascist political agenda, and even in non-political circumstances.

One of the advantages of this approach—demagoguery rather than demagogues, or rhetoric rather than identity—is that it can enable us to see ingroup demagoguery.

For instance, take two people who a personal hero of mine: Earl Warren.

In the spring of 1942, California Attorney General Earl Warren testified before the Tolan Commission regarding the mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans. A typical passage of his testimony concerns a map he gave the Committee showing Japanese land ownership. He explains what the map shows:

Notwithstanding the fact that the county maps showing the location of Japanese lands have omitted most coastal defenses and war industries, still it is plain from them that in our coastal counties, from Point Reyes south, virtually every feasible landing beach, air field, railroad, highway, powerhouse, power line, gas storage tank, gas pipe line, oil field, water reservoir or pumping plant, water conduit, telephone transmission line, radio station, and other points of strategic importance have several — and usually a considerable number — of Japanese in their immediate vicinity. The same situation prevails in all of the interior counties that have any considerable Japanese population.

I do not mean to suggest that it should be thought that all of these Japanese who are adjacent to strategic points are knowing parties to some vast conspiracy to destroy our State by sudden and mass sabotage. Undoubtedly, the presence of many of these persons in their present locations is mere coincidence, but it would seem equally beyond doubt that the presence of others is not coincidence. It would seem difficult, for example, to explain the situation in Santa Barbara County by coincidence alone. (National defense migration. Hearings before the Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration, House of Representatives, Seventy-seventh Congress, first[-second] session, pursuant to H. Res. 113, a resolution to inquire further into the interstate migration of citizens, emphasizing the present and potential consequences of the migration caused by the national defense program. pt. 11; 10974)

Notice that this argument, in favor of mass race-based imprisonment without trial, is neither emotional nor populist. And Warren was not motivated by political or personal gain—he sincerely believed that he was doing the right thing. He doesn’t fit common, or even many scholarly, definitions of a demagogue.

And, too, notice all the hedging—”Notwithstanding” and “It would seem difficult.” And notice his adopting the posture of a reasonable person—he isn’t saying all Japanese are knowingly part of the conspiracy. He isn’t unreasonable; he acknowledges some coincidence. So, his assertion that this can’t be coincidence seems more reasonable because of his having established himself as a person not prone to conspiracy theories.

In this passage, as throughout his testimony, there is a rhetoric of realism, factity, and submission to the data. Warren’s motives were good, in that he sincerely believed California was in danger—he didn’t gain any political power from taking this stance. It isn’t very emotional—as I said, there’s a matter of fact tone, with really only one brief exhortation—and it isn’t populist. He doesn’t fit the common definitions of demagogue.

But it is sheer demagoguery.

Warren is redirecting the complicated policy question—what, if anything, should we do about enemy nationals—into an identity question about “the Japanese.” Even the need question (should we fear sabotage) is reframed as an identity question: the Japanese can’t be trusted. His evidence, such as the maps, assume what’s at stake—it’s a circular argument.

The question he’s answering is whether the Japanese are trustworthy, and he’s answering that question with an enthymeme that has the major premise that the “the Japanese” are nefarious: The Japanese are nefarious because they own land near important war resources. This isn’t an argument he makes about Germans, Austrians, Italians, or French—he didn’t even bother to look into their land-owning patterns. And, of course, there are much more obvious and innocent explanations for those land owning practices—areas with a “considerable” Japanese population would have people engaged in fishing, farming, canning, and other activities that would make owning land near beaches, water, and power quite desirable.

Warren’s argument is unanswerable because it’s unfalsifiable.

But, Warren wasn’t a magician with a word-wand who swept citizens of the western states into a panic. There isn’t really even any good evidence that his testimony was widely reported—it probably had little impact on the juggernaut of mass imprisonment. It probably legitimated the racist panic of other people listening to him, by making them feel that their perceptions were reasonable and fact-based, but I doubt it changed anyone. He was appealing to perceptions about “the Japanese” that had been promoted by thousands of rhetors in the previous forty years—especially the Hearst papers, but also the Japanese Exclusion League, the FBI, the Los Angeles Times, major and minor politicians, and scholars of race. He was repeating what “everyone” knew.

Warren was refuted during the hearings—an expert on Norway pointed out that the notion of sabotage having had any impact on Nazi success was a myth, others noted that there hadn’t been sabotage at Pearl Harbor, and one person said about Warren’s argument that the lack of sabotage was proof that sabotage was planned, “I don’t think that’s real logic.” But he didn’t stick around to listen.

Warren later regretted his involvement in the mass imprisonment. He said, “Whenever I thought of the innocent little children who were torn from home, school friends, and congenial surroundings, I was conscious-stricken” (The Memoirs 149). But why didn’t he think of that in the first place? Because he didn’t imagine what his plan would really look like. He imagined the need—he had a great imagination when it came to the horrors of Japanese sabotage—but he didn’t imagine what his plan would actually look like.

Nor did he listen enough. He listened to police officers, sheriffs, and other law enforcement, but he didn’t listen to any of the people who testified against imprisonment. He didn’t listen to the opposition.

Warren was a good man, a progressive who helped clean up California politics, a compassionate man, whose leadership of the US Supreme Court gave us Brown v. Board, but a man drinking deep from demagoguery.

It isn’t clear that his demagoguery had much impact—the juggernaut was already started, and the really important demagoguery was all the anti-Japanese fear-mongering of various California media (especially the Hearst papers), organizations like the very powerful Japanese Exclusion League, even thrillers and their conventional representation of Japanese. Had Warren been the only one making the kind of argument he did, it wouldn’t have matter. He didn’t matter—his demagoguery did.

And that raises a point that is important. Demagoguery isn’t necessarily harmful. I mentioned it’s not always political—there is demagoguery in movie or music criticism that is actually pretty hilarious. As long as it’s a small amount, it’s fine. I generally say it’s like eating chocolate-covered caramels or sitting on the couch watching a bad movie. If that’s all you ate, or all you did, you’d get sick, but it isn’t always harmful.

So our problem now isn’t whether this or that political figure is a demagogue—that is itself accepting the major premise of demagoguery: that we can and should decide all political questions in terms of identity. We shouldn’t, as scholars, teachers, or citizens, be worrying about who is or is not a demagogue: we should be worrying about whether we are encouraging, rewarding, and deciding on the basis of demagoguery.

“Political Eschatology, Imparted Justification, and Sloppy Calvinism: The Religious Basis of Neoliberalism”

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This is a complicated argument, so I’ll do something I don’t normally do: I’ll start with my thesis. What I’m saying is that the problems with our polity right now—our difficulties arguing politics—isn’t just because of the hegemonic dominance of neoliberalism (Wendy Brown’s argument) but because of the resonance between neoliberalism and a particular religious culture—one that premises an ontological shift at the moment of belief, a shift that turns a person into a warrior in the inevitable war between Good and Evil.

Neoliberalism has been described as hegemonic discourse and a political rationality. As Wendy Brown points out, the political rationality of neoliberalism pervades educational policy, Supreme Court decisions, and what we think of as conventionally political discourse, and she (and others) have persuasively argued that one of the consequences is to depoliticize political deliberation insofar as it turns all interactions into market interactions. I’m interested in why it has such power as a cultural rationality.

I’ve been intrigued with this phenomenon in the relationship between religion and politics, since, oddly enough, the pervasion of neoliberalism (a profoundly nonreligious ethos) coincides with the sacralization of politics. Thus, religion has become monetized and politics sacralized at precisely the same time. That’s kind of weird.

The relationship between religion and politics has long been vexed in American public discourse. For instance, in postbellum areas that promoted segregation, religious discourse that supported segregation was considered “normal” and was therefore both common and allowed. It appeared unpolitical. Religious entities that criticized segregation were considered “political” (because “political” and “nonhegemonic” are pretty much synonymous for a lot of people), so major religious organizations were silent about segregation either because they thought it was bad or because they thought it was good. Segregation was explicitly a religious issue, and, because of various religious entities’ agreement to silence their criticism, dominant white religious defenses of segregation were normalized and therefore considered neutral.

That’s a mouthful. To be more clear: in areas with segregation (not just “the south”) white churches either never mentioned segregation or actively promoted it. And it’s hard for people now to understand the extent to which the major southern protestant religions actively supported segregation as Christian. It was central—that’s important to understand. And, because it was central, it was normal.

In other words, American fundagelical Christianity was always already (as they say) deeply implicated in segregation. But, in a weird way: segregation was so religiously normalized that to support it was seen as nonpolitical, and to oppose it was political. (This is a not uncommon misperception about what it means to “politicize” something—people use it when they’re talking about something political being brought into the realm of argument. In this model, “normal” behavior, even oppressive policies, isn’t “political” until there is an argument about it, so the people who object to “normal” policies are the ones seen as “politicizing” an issue. It’s a bad model.)

Thus, and this is important, American religious institutions that decided not to be “political” were, in fact, heavily and thoroughly politicized in regard to segregation to their core, whether they were supporting it or (in theory) opposed.

Paradoxically, then, segregation was protected by the notion that religious organizations should stay out of politics (since supporting segregation wasn’t “political”).

The shit hit the fan with Brown v. Board for southern Protestantism, since segregation was at the core of “southern culture” and southern religion. When Brown v. Board happened, there were multiple pro-segregation responses.

    • Resort to terror. This wasn’t a surprising response, since it had worked for almost 100 years—just lynch, or threaten to lynch, anyone who criticized white supremacy. North Carolina, for instance, had over 100 reported lynchings, meaning ones that made it into the news. Who knows how many black males (a few Jews might have been in there too) were lynched for being disrespectful or successful that didn’t make it into that tally? Every scholar of southern history notes the reliance on state-sponsored terrorism—that the black population would be kept in control by the government allowing terrorism against them. That isn’t to say that every southerner was actively bad, but every white southerner allowed that terrorism to happen.

Everyone knows about this response, and everyone (now) condemns it. But it wasn’t the most common pro-segregation response.

    • Support segregation but not through terror. The idea was that Brown v. Board was the consequence of Marxist infiltration of SCOTUS (you think I’m kidding, but I’m not). So, if we could get a non-Marxist SCOTUS, we’d be good. Let’s just delay as much as we can till we get that SCOTUS. This was considered a respectable and moderate position, and supported by people like Boutwell (who managed a discourse of “civility”).

Since segregation was not a winning argument (Wallace’s bid showed that), fundagelicals decided they couldn’t win on segregation, so they’d go for something else. They went for abortion. The hope was that “abortion” could be used to motivate people to get religiously conservative justices who would then under mind the decisions regarding segregation.

If you think I’m wrong, go the google, and find a fundagelical prior to Roe v. Wade up in arms about abortion. You might actually find a surprising number of fundagelicals advocating abortion (email me, and I’ll send some refs). Short version: every single scholar of birth control issues says this is true. Fundagelicals were not opposed to abortion till after Roe v. Wade.

There was also creationism, and I think that the two forces happened to converge—a desire to maintain creationism, and a desire to maintain segregation by getting “conservative” SCOTUS. That’s how to understand Reagan’s dog whistles about states rights, and Nixon’s Southern Strategy. (It’s important to note that “preventing abortions” did not become a political issue; instead, “outlawing abortions” was the issue.)

In any case, it’s simply clear that, after Roe, fundagelicals became more active at the local level, particularly School Boards. American political discourse has long had an evangelical flavor—think of the controversies about a Catholic president, and the evangelizing narrative behind Wilsonian foreign policy—but it has seemed to me that there has been something different about the kind of religion we’re seeing in two ways: first, the insistence, on the part of a large number of voters, that all candidates be fundagelical (not just Christian); second, open embrace of apocalyptic visions among major political figures and policies.

I think both are explained by some late nineteenth and early twentieth century shifts in American religion. Part of it has to do with seeing American foreign policy in triumphalist and missionary terms. There is a triumphalist narrative about American imperialism: they engage in imperialism in order to oppress others, but we are benevolent.

Oddly enough, instead of the triumphalist narrative of Wilsonian imperialism—we come as missionaries of democratic liberalism, who will free the oppressed from the chains of superstition and bad colonialism—there is now a narrative I find even more troubling, namely that America is taking its place in the world-ending battle between good and evil. When policy debates are framed in that context, then pragmatic discussions of long-term consequences become moot, as do questions of fairness or ethics across ingroup/outgroup boundaries.

For instance, if you look at fundagelical discussions of US Middle East policies, you can see an open rejection of such pragmatic discussions in favor of unalloyed support for whatever policy current Israeli leaders pursue. And such support is framed, not as savvy or pragmatic, but most in line with a belief in Armageddon.

That some people would feel that way doesn’t interest me; that it’s a compelling way for a large number of people to think is interesting.

The evasion of politics, and the reframing of politics as Good v. Evil, doesn’t just trouble Middle East policy. You can see it elsewhere as well—look at how much this election is a question of identity and not policies. Is Hillary a crook? Is Trump a liar? (And notice the first v. last name.) For years I’ve been wondering why we’re so averse to arguing policy. And why all policy arguments end up as identity ones. Why do we think identity is enough?

I want to toss out an explanation: that neoliberalism is a return to the prereformation religious formulation of the relationship of “good” (aka, “justified”) coupled with the reformation model of individualism and political action. Basically, we are now in a world in which many people assume that people who are saved have been ontologically changed. That ontological change guarantees that their works are justified, and that they are part of the elect who will lead the chosen people to salvation. My argument is that that version, a kind of sloppy Calvinism, displaces political deliberation with expression of identity.

It’s not uncommon to argue that liberalism has its roots in reformation notions of justification. Instead of imparted justification—Christ’s righteousness is given to believers—reformers like Luther and Calvin argued for imputed justification—we will act as though it has been given. There is not an ontological shift at the moment of justification; the person, even a believer, remains a sinner.

It’s often argued that this formulation of justification was connected to (caused? was caused by?) Enlightenment and/or humanist notions about the falliability of human perception and belief. You can’t know that you’re saved, nor that anyone else is, but you will act as though good standing members of your church are. Similarly, participation in the civic doesn’t require an ontological shift, and decision-making power can be given to people as though they have the abilities necessary to make good political decisions.

In such a moment, policy arguments would have to be about policy, and not identity (something you see, interestingly enough, in the Putney Debates, where Cromwell of all people argues that everyone has good motives, even though they disagree, and that the true course of action is hard to perceive). After all, that someone is a believer does NOT guarantee that what she is saying is true.

The Reformation didn’t question eschatology—the study of Christ’s church on earth, and the sense that human history is intensely teleological. If anything, it heightened the notion that we can interpret all human history in eschatological term. Hence, at the same moment that there is an introduction of skepticism about goodness and identity, there is the sacralizing of political history—the creation of a community of believers, of the refounding of the state of Israel, is part of the history of Christianity itself, headed toward Christ’s Second Coming. Eschatology—the history of “the church” on earth—is universalized and politicized; and political history becomes eschatology. The troubling consequence of this humanizing of eschatology is that politics is taken out of the realm of argument, compromise, and deliberation, and into a battle of good and evil.

It can be argued that this formulation of identity—imputed justification—implies a certain amount of skepticism; we don’t know who is saved, and being justified and being sanctified aren’t the same thing. Thus, we might be wrong to think we’re saved, or that someone else is. I think it’s harder to maintain a culture of skepticism within a political eschatology. If we’re inevitably headed toward a battle between good and evil, it’s hard to imagine any culture saying, “Hmmm…. are we good? or evil?” as something about which they would be skeptical and value hearing multiple sides.

In a culture of political eschatology all leaders can be divided into the Good (those who are leading us toward the good side of the inevitable battle) and the Bad (those who are deliberately leading us toward evil and the dupes who don’t realize what they’re doing). So, how do we know that a policy is good in this frame? We can look to see whether the people advocating a policy are good…. or evil. We look to their identity.

In the late nineteenth century, American evangelicalism began to slip back toward imparted justification, conflating the moment of belief with the moment of sanctification—to become a “believer” is to experience an ontological shift from sinner to saint. Imputed justification was no longer a part of American fundagelical religion, and with it any skepticism about whether a person who claimed to be saved would do good or bad things.

Thus, speaking as though one is “saved” (as long as it is coincident with endorsing the political agenda fundagelicals now argue is the necessary consequence of being saved) means an endless stack of “get out of jail” cards.

And there was one more factor, famously described by Weber—the equation of success with salvation. This was a kind of sloppy Calvinism, one that accepts the notion of an absolute ontological divide between saints and sinners, but (and?) with the assumption that saints prosper, and that their saintly identity is known to them and others. And, since the saints are, well, saints, they deserve all the good—there is no point in insisting on fairness in a culture—you don’t treat saints and sinners the same way. You give power to saints and take it away from sinners.

What I’m saying is that the problems with our polity right now—our difficulties arguing politics—isn’t just because of the hegemonic dominance of neoliberalism (Wendy Brown’s argument) but because of the resonance between neoliberalism and a particular religious culture—one that premises an ontological shift at the moment of belief, a shift that turns a person into a warrior in the inevitable war between Good and Evil.

We are all preppers now.

Ingroups, outgroups, groupiness, and bias

 

 

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If you spend as much time as I do crawling around the internet arguing with extremists, you quickly learn the “that source is biased” move. You present a piece of evidence, and the person won’t even look at it because, they say, that source is biased.

Let’s start with that isn’t what you do with a biased source. You don’t reject it; you look at it skeptically–you check its sources. Right now, a lot of people are refusing to look at claims that Trump hasn’t been as successful as he claims because, they say, that argument is from the Hillary camp. That’s called the genetic fallacy–it doesn’t matter where the claim originated; it matters if it’s true. Whether it originated with Hillary camp or not, it’s possible to check whether they are using Trump’s numbers about his own wealth. If they are, it’s a claim to take seriously.

But, for a lot of people, that isn’t how it works. They believe that you can reject anything said by what social psychologists call the “outgroup.” The basic premise is that the “ingroup” is “objective” and the “outgroup” is “biased,” so, to determine if someone is “objective,” you just ask yourself if they’re in the in or outgroup.

Let me explain a little about in and outgroups. An ingroup isn’t necessarily powerful—it’s the group you’re in. So, if someone asked you to talk about yourself, you would describe yourself in terms of various group memberships—you’re a Pastafarian, Sooner, essentialist feminist, neoliberal, knitter. Social psychologists call that group (the one you’re in) the “ingroup” and various groups you’re not in (it’s important to your self of identity that you’re not like Them) “outgroups.”

We all have a lot of ingroups, and we have a lot of outgroups, and the importance of any given one can heighten or lower depending on the situation. We are made aware of those many (even contradictory) group memberships when they’re under threat, unusual, or interesting. If you are an American, and you find yourself in a space where American is an outgroup, you’ll likely bond with other Americans. Sitting in a group of people in a classroom in Tilden, Texas, if asked to say something about yourself, you wouldn’t say, “I’m an American.” Sitting in a group of people in a classroom of mixed national origin in Belgium, you’d be pretty likely to say, “I’m an American.” If, in Tilden, another American said something critical about Americans, you’d be more likely to listen than if a non-American said it in Belgium. If you’re already feeling a little marginalized for your group membership, you’re more likely to be at least a little defensive.

And here is a funny thing about ingroup membership. There is a kind of circular relationship between your sense of your self and your sense of the ingroup—you think of yourself as good partially because you see yourself as a member of a group you think is good, and you think that group is good partially because you think it’s made up of people like you, and you think you’re good. Your group is good because you’re a good person, and you’re a good person because your group is good.

Because you’re good, and because your group is good, then you and other ingroup members necessarily have good motives. Duh.

Thus, we have a tendency to attribute good motives to members of the ingroup, and bad motives to members of the outgroup, for exactly the same behavior. An ingroup member who works long hours in order to make a lot of money is a hard worker; an outgroup member who does that is greedy. An ingroup member who gives a lot of advantages to family members is loyal; an outgroup member who does that is motivated by prejudice against outsiders. An ingroup member who says something untrue is mistaken; an outgroup member is deliberately lying. Politicians we like are motivated by a desire to benefit their community or country; politicians we don’t like are driven by a lust for power.

An example I use in teaching a lot is how we respond to a driver in a car with a lot of bumper stickers who cuts us off on the road. If the bumper stickers suggest the person is a member of an ingroup important to us—we like the politician they endorse, for instance—we’re likely to find excuses for what they’re doing. We might think to ourselves that they’re running late, or didn’t see us, or perhaps (as I once thought to myself) it’s actually an outgroup member who borrowed a car. If the bumper stickers show it’s someone we think of as an outgroup, we’ll think, “Typical.”

In other words, we rationalize or explain away bad behavior on the part of ingroup members as a temporary aberration, an accident, or something caused by external circumstances. But, bad behavior on the part of someone in an outgroup is proof that they are all like that—it’s an example of how they are essentially bad people.

If a member of the ingroup behaves well, then we say it’s the consequence of internal qualities—their essence. If the driver with all those bumper stickers we like does something really nice, we’ll think, “Typical.” It’s proof that ingroup members are essentially good people. If a member of the outgroup behaves well, then we say it was done for bad reasons, or done by accident.

So, if an ingroup political figure kicks a puppy, she was mistaken, or meant well, the puppy deserved it, or we might even try to find ways to say it wasn’t really kicking. If an outgroup political figure kicks a puppy, it’s proof that he is evil and hateful and that’s what they’re all like.

If an outgroup political figure saves a drowning puppy, she just did it get votes. If an ingroup political figure does it, that incident is proof that people like us are just plain better.

We are more likely to empathize (or, in rhetorical terms, identify) with people who persuade us they’re members of an ingroup important to us. We’re more likely to be persuaded by them—that’s why salespeople immediately try to find some point of shared identification. They’ll also often try to bond by claiming to share an outgroup—rhetoricians call this “identification through division.” That is, the salesperson tries to get you to identify with her by sharing your dislike of “them.”

In Texas, where I live, there is a notorious rivalry between Texas A&M (the “Aggies”) and University of Texas (the “Longhorns”). My husband went to A&M, and wears an “Aggie” ring. When we go shopping for big-ticket items, the salespeople will often notice his ring and start talking trash about Longhorns, and how awful the University of Texas is. They’re trying to bond with us by showing that they share the Longhorns as an outgroup. Since I’m a professor at UT, it doesn’t generally go over very well.

If I get you to identify with me, to see yourself as like me in some important way, I’ve persuaded you that you and I are in the same ingroup. If I’m really successful, I get you to identify with me so much that you will perceive an attack on me as an attack on you. I now have your ego attached to my success. That’s an important part of demagoguery (but not every time someone does that is demagoguery—it’s a part, but not the whole).

One of the main goals of demagoguery is to persuade people not to listen to the outgroup (basically because the claims of the ingroup would fall apart if people looked at them critically). And it does so by saying, “They are biased; we are objective.”

But, again, you don’t reject a biased source; you look at it more carefully. Whether claims about his wife’s immigration status, his wealth, the lawsuits against him, his hiring of illegal immigrants, his screwing over little people, his poor financial record, his lying originated with the Clinton camp doesn’t matter–what matters is whether they’re true. And that can be determined by drilling deep into the sources of those “biased” sources. That is how you assess evidence.