Category: Train Wrecks in Public Deliberation

From Trump’s interview with Wall Street Journal

[The short version is that he’s rambling, incoherent, and counter-factual. You should read the whole thing, but you have to have access.]

President Trump: We have money that is pouring into our treasury right now, and on January 1 it’ll become much more so. And here’s the story: If we don’t make a deal, then I’m going to put the $200 — and it’s really $67 — billion additional on at an interest rate between 10 and 25 depending.

Mr. Davis: Including even iPhones and laptops and things that people would know?

President Trump: Maybe. Maybe. Depends on what the rate is. I mean, I can make it 10 percent and people could stand that very easily. But if you read that recent poll that came out, we’re only being – most of this is being – the brunt of it is being paid by China. You saw that.

Mr. Davis: Right. Right. I mean, well, you know –

President Trump: On the tariffs.

Mr. Davis: It depends, like, who –

President Trump: Look, I happen to be a tariff person.

Mr. Davis: Yeah.

President Trump: I happen to be a tariff person because I’m a smart person, OK? We have been ripped off so badly by people coming in and stealing our wealth. The steel industry has been rebuilt in a period of a year because of what I’ve done. We have a vibrant steel industry again, and soon it’ll be very vibrant. You know, they’re building plants all over the country because I put steel – because I put tariffs, 25 percent tariffs, on dumping steel.

Propaganda works by not looking like propaganda

You don’t get your information from propaganda. Your sources are good and objective and unbiased. You have a good and unbiased view of the overall political situation because you know what both sides think, and you’re clear that your side is more sensible.

So, let’s talk about why they are such sheeple and believe propaganda.

First, effective propaganda inoculates its viewers against criticism of the in-group, and it does so in two ways. Inoculation is the rhetorical tactic of presenting your audience with weak versions of out-group arguments—straw men, really—and persuading your audience that they shouldn’t even listen to the other side because their arguments are so bad.

Imagine that you believe that people should be able to have guns in easy access in case there are break-ins, and you can cite statistics about people who have protected their home that way. A medium opposed to gun ownership of any kind engaged in inoculation wouldn’t mention any statistics about people protecting themselves, and would say that, anyone who wants to have guns in their home for personal protection wants to take guns everywhere, including airplanes, and that would be incredibly dangerous, so it’s clearly a stupid argument. But they wouldn’t just say that—they would have a “debate” between people who want to ban all guns and some dumb jerk who says people should be able to take guns on airplanes.

So, viewers of that program would sincerely believe that they’d seen “both sides” of the debate when, actually, they’d watched propaganda. Really effective propaganda appears to present “both sides” by having stooges who argue for really dumb counter-arguments and actually confirm stereotypes about “those people.”

Second, propaganda spends a lot of time telling you how awful the other side is and (and this is the important point), saying they are so awful that you shouldn’t even look at them.

Vehement political criticism, as opposed to propaganda, spends a lot of time telling you how awful the other side is and (and this is the important point) providing links so you can see for yourself. What makes propaganda different from vehement political criticism is that propaganda says, “Rely on us for understanding what they believe” and vehement political criticism insists you read the primary material.

If you are watching media that spends a lot of time telling you how awful the other side is, and that has spokespeople who claim to represent that other side—instead of linking to the other side—you’re watching propaganda.

As Aristotle said, all things being equal, the truth will tend to emerge. And, oddly enough, one of the ways you can tell if a source is propaganda is by Aristotle’s rule—they make sure all things aren’t equal. They know that they have very fragile arguments that will crinkle up and die if exposed to the light of counter-arguments with data, and that’s why they spend so much time in inoculation. They don’t say, “Those people are idiots—go and look at what they’re saying.” They say, “Don’t go look at those sites or listen to those arguments because we will tell you what they are and they’re dumb.”

Any medium that says there is an out-group that is evil, and you should never listen to them, and doesn’t link to their arguments is propaganda.[1]

But, by refusing to link to their opposition, they’re making an admission too–that their claims can’t withstand scrutiny. Propaganda always throws around the term “objective” (it would be interesting to see whether Hitler or Stalin used that term more–it might be a dead heat). Claiming to be objective doesn’t mean you are. Having a good argument means that it can withstand argument–good arguments don’t need inoculation.

I’ve crawled around dark corners of social media, and the worst arguments in all sorts of enclaves have links to claims that support them, but never links to the opposition. They can support what they claim. Anyone can support any claim.

People think that propaganda is rhetoric that is obviously wrong and that has no evidence. But, were that propaganda, it would never work. Propaganda always has evidence and citations. What it doesn’t have is links to opposition sources; it doesn’t have fair representations of the opposition. It doesn’t make falsifiable claims.

The whole point of propaganda is not just to persuade people of your particular claims (since a lot of those claims change for political purposes), but that some media are reliable, and others are too toxic to touch. Propaganda isn’t about “believe this” as much as it is about “never listen to anyone who isn’t in-group.”

If you are relying on your source for what “they” believe, you are drinking deep at the well of propaganda. I hope that Flavor-Aid doesn’t stain your teeth.

[In case you’re wondering why I don’t have links in this post, it’s because my claim is that propaganda misrepresents the opposition and doesn’t link to them. I found, when I started making links, that I was still enforcing the notion that there are two sides, or that propaganda is an either/or rather than a continuum–that I had an opposition whom I should represent fairly. Since I really don’t want to endorse one “side” or another, as much as make a general point about argumentation, I thought that it would make more sense to strip off the links.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If Dems are elected, they’ll do what we’ve been doing!

In the last few days, a common claim (what scholars of rhetoric would call a topos) has emerged among Trump and GOP loyalists, and it’s that, if Democrats gain the House and Senate, they will force their political agenda on the country, block Trump at every point, and be vindictive toward Republicans. And, because they will be so awful to us, we are justified in amping up the aggression of rhetoric and actions against them. In other words, Democrats will treat Republicans as Republicans have treated Democrats, and therefore you must act aggressively toward them as a kind of self-defense.

This argument will work. It generally does. It worked when Democrats used it (and Democrats have used it several times). It also worked when Athenians, proslavery rhetors, and Germans did it.

To people good at logic, it seems like an incoherent argument, but to people who think entirely in terms of in-group/out-group domination, it looks good. It’s also appealing to abusers, but that’s a different point. It’s a kind of pre-emptive self-defense.

And it works because it’s a way of resolving the cognitive dissonance created by the wobbling of a previous argument—that God wants us to triumph over our enemies, and anyone not fanatically committed to the political agenda currently determined to be the in-group desiderata is an enemy. Because we are engaged in God’s will, normal ethical conditions don’t apply—we can do to others things we would be outraged were they done to us.

An ethics of in-group domination is, so it is claimed, God’s will. And God will reward us for our destroying our enemies. Giorgio Agamben calls it a “state of exception” in which we are excepted from normal rules about behavior—we honor the law by not obeying the specifics of the law. We are open that the powers of government will be used to favor one political party, but, while doing that, we’ll claim that that party is really the only legitimate one—all real Athenians, Germans, Americans vote this one way.

Members of that party believes themselves entirely entitled to something (such as political domination of various other countries, enslaving other people, exterminating various groups, political domination within a state or country). So, while that party is in power, it is shameless in its harnessing as much of the governmental power as it can to further its interests and crush any other parties. And, this is the important part: it is a party that believes there are no restrictions on what it is entitled to do in order to get its way. That’s why it has no shame—because it thinks of the world in zero-sum terms (we either eliminate or are eliminated).

And, when its power begins to wobble, it begins to reckon with how the groups it has oppressed might feel about their oppression. And it projects onto other groups how it thinks of the world—you either eliminate or are eliminated. Because it can’t imagine a world in which disparate groups coexist, it assumes everyone else behaves the same way. Because it is a group with an inchoate reptilian brain way of responding to situations that makes everything zero-sum (if something benefits the other group it must hurt you), it assumes that the “other” group getting any power will mean that group will respond in just as eliminationist as they have.

If you have a propaganda machine that has been cranking up in-group fanaticism by reducing all issues to in-group/out-group, and presenting politics as a zero-sum (any gain on their part must be a loss for us)—in other words, Fox, Limbaugh, Savage, and all sorts of other media and pundits (Mother Jones, Keith Olbermann, Michael Moore)—and your claim of eschatological determinism means that you have been excepted from normal rules of ethics, then you are rhetorically boxed in. You can’t just say “We were wrong about this policy.”

You either have to say that you were wrong, not about your claims about policies, but your claims about how politics and thinking about politics works. If your audience thinks about how, you lose them, since how you’ve argued is obviously wrong.

So, what you do is persuade them that the Other is just as awful as you are, and will behave just as badly as you have. That’s the argument Cleon used to persuade people to endorse genocide (he lost on the second vote), it’s how proslavery rhetors argued for violating the property rights of slaveholders (by prohibiting the manumission of slave contracts), and it’s how Nazis argued for continuing the war when it had obviously been lost.

It should, therefore, be troubling that McConnell is now using this argument, and that it’s become a right-wing talking point.
One of the logical problems with it is that the only way that the audience can be fearful or outraged at the possibility of Democrats’ forcing their political agenda on the country, blocking the sitting President at every point, and being vindictive toward Republicans is if they don’t object to that kind of behavior in principle. They think it’s fine to do that to the other party, but they would never stand for being treated that way. They are thereby admitting it’s bad behavior.

But, they say, it isn’t bad because their group is good and the other is bad. Or, in other words, they think they should treat others as they would not want to be treated. They are, quite explicitly, rejecting any ethics (or anyone who would promote an ethics) that says you should do unto others as you would have done unto you.

The people who argue that democracy is based in Judeo-Christian ethics are, as any history of the Enlightenment makes clear, right in that the notion of universal human rights and fairness across groups was grounded in the notion (not particular to Christians or Jews, but supposedly a foundational value of both) that a deeply religious ethical system treats all groups the same, regardless of their religious (or political) affiliation.

They’re wrong about most other things, but they’re right about that. So, it’s interesting that that is the rule they’re so unwilling to follow.

The current GOP/support Trump talking point is that the Democrats will behave as badly as the GOP has. And that’s taken as a reason to vote GOP. Isn’t it actually a reason to condemn the current GOP? It’s actually an admission that the current GOP is shameless, unethical, and an open rejection of what Christ calls us to do. The GOP has officially rejected Christ. Since they claim the moral highground, that’s more than a little problematic.

Right-wing rhetoric as pre-emptive self-defense

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

This never ends well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right-wing propaganda and being clever about resentment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

What’s wrong with the “women should be afraid that their sons will be accused of rape” meme

[Edited to include the meme I’d seen elsewhere that I couldn’t find at the time I wrote this.]

The meme circulating is almost everything wrong with current GOP rhetoric (GOP rhetoric wasn’t always this bad, and being conservative does not mean you have to be stupid). It’s engaging in a false binary, shifting the stasis, asserting empirically indefensible claims, reducing  women to mothers (and, in some versions, wives), and fear-mongering. It’s also weirdly entangled in racist experiences of the justice system. And there is the really bizarre argument that Ford’s accusations can be dismissed because they’re politically motivated, which is a subset of the rape culture topos that rape accusers have bad motives.

Sometimes this meme is explicitly connected to Kavanaugh, and the accusation against him. And it’s sometimes asserted that a male can be convicted on the basis of a single woman’s word. While there are people arguing that Kavanaugh shouldn’t be confirmed because of this accusation, far more are arguing that his confirmation shouldn’t be, as the GOP is doing, rushed. They are calling for an investigation, perhaps by the FBI. Some are simply asking that Kavanaugh testify under oath about this incident. Some are saying that, in addition to his stance on Roe v Wade, he shouldn’t be confirmed. The reactions to the accusations about Kavanaugh don’t neatly split into two.

The dominant argument is that the charges should be investigated, exactly the opposite claim of the meme. So, this meme shifts the stasis from “we should slow down in this confirmation process” to “women are slutty mcslutfaces who love accusing men of rape because men go to jail over one slutty mcslutface’s word.”

[Edited to add: just to be clear, the argument that most critics of the process are making is that we should slow down this process, and investigate the claims. So, it isn’t critics of Kavanaugh who are cutting short an investigation–it’s his defenders.]

Obviously, women who make accusations of rape are more likely to have their lives destroyed than the men, but there are cases of men being charged who have been falsely accused of rape. And it’s true that major figures will weigh in and insist on punishment even before the trial, such as Trump’s false accusation against the Central Park rapists (which he’s never retracted). So, if you want to worry about someone in power who will make and refuse to retract irresponsible accusations of rape, you might look at Trump. It’s interesting that the cases that get so much media attention tend to be white men (Rolling Stone grovelled, but Trump never has, for instance). The media is very worried about the lives of white males whose lives might be ruined by rape accusations, less worried about how the lives of accusers are always in ruins, and meanwhile almost entirely ignoring that the real crime is convictions on the basis of false accusations. And, to be blunt, suburban GOP white women don’t need to worry that their sons will be convicted of rape on the grounds of the word of a single woman who has no supporting evidence.

There are mothers who need to worry about that, though–the mothers of the Scottsboro Boys, of course, the Central Park Five (whom Trump wanted executed). There are false accusations of rape, and, yes, men have spent a lot of time in prison over those false accusations. Men have been indisputably exonerated.

But the Kavanaugh confirmation has nothing to do with whether white men are falsely accused of rape. That’s the most cunning and wicked stasis-shift of all. Hearings are supposed to be about getting to the truth. As I crawl around the internet, I’m finding that one of the most common defenses of Kavanaugh is that Ford and her supporters have bad motives for their claims. For instance, they claim it’s suspicious that Feinstein delayed releasing the letter, although that’s clearly explained in the initial letter–she requested confidentiality until they could speak. (They don’t know that–they’re drinking the flavor-aid, and dutifully repeating the talking points they’ve been given, not realizing they’re uncritically repeating stupid arguments.)

But, here’s what matters: people who care about the truth don’t care about the motives of people. It doesn’t matter whether Ford has good or bad motives; what matters is whether what she says is true. (Or not, what matters is that the GOP and Kavanaugh’s response is they’re deep in rape culture.) When someone argues that Ford doesn’t get her claims to be investigated, they are openly saying that they favor rabid political factionalism over the truth.

And that’s where the GOP is these days. And it’s tragic. A healthy democracy has people of good will and intelligence reasonably arguing for various policies from various perspectives. The GOP is openly opposed to democratic deliberation.

Kavanaugh and the GOP and bungling apologia

Rhetoric is an old art, with what amount to textbooks going back, just in the western tradition, to the 4th century BCE. And, one of the very old concepts in rhetoric is the apologia, or defense speech: the genre of speech in which someone is responding to an accusation. It’s an old concept, and there’s a lot of advice out there as to good and bad practices in apologia. More recently, businesses got interested in the topic, and the field of “crisis communication” was born (with the sub-field of reputation repair). And there are people who work with public figures who can advise people facing accusations as to the best ways to respond.

And they all say the same thing: be clear, take responsibility, be honest.

Kavanaugh, the GOP, and the pundits trying to support him have blown this about as badly as it’s possible. They are clearly not talking to anyone who knows anything about how to handle this kind of situation, and that’s concerning.

There are complicated situations in which no apologia is going to work, or in which it might take months or years. And apologia is a rhetorical strategy–in public rhetoric, it might be purely Machiavellian (the person might not really be very sorry at all). But, there are some principles that are so straightforward they can be taught in a first-year college course in rhetoric. (In fact, they were laid out in a 1973 article.)

So, setting aside the question of ethics or sincerity, the savvy move for Kavanaugh and his handlers to have made was to get advice from at least a first-year rhetoric student, if not an actual expert. Kavanaugh had, from the Machiavellian perspective, an easy case.

The accusation, to be clear, is that, as a drunk teen he tried to rape another teen. No one is claiming that he could not have done it–there is plenty of evidence that Kavanaugh and friends were living a kind of life in which it could have happened. They’re claiming it hasn’t been proven to have happened, and they’re pulling out all the standard misogynist rape culture strategies.

And someone who knew apologia 101 would have told them DO NOT DO THAT. The right response would have been an apologia that  engaged in  denial of intent, bolstering, and differentiation. That would have been something like, “I am tremendously sorry for anything I did in those days–I never had any intent to rape anyone, but I was young, stupid, irresponsible, and drinking too much. I don’t know what I did, but I’m sure I hurt people, and I have put those days behind me” [and then a move to bolstering].

Regardless of whether it was sincere or not, it would have been rhetorically savvy–it would have put opponents of Kavanaugh in the position of trying to attack him for something he might have done a long time ago, for which he has apologized, and which he can plausibly say is not a reflection of who he is now. Opponents would have been trying to deny someone a SCOTUS seat on the basis of the character he had at 17.

But, because they went both barrels of rape culture defenses, Kavanaugh and his supporters have made it clear that he probably still is that entitled and irresponsible person, he doesn’t take responsibility, and they still basically endorse the premises of rape culture. They have made it a question of his character now.

And it’s also now a question of his judgment. And theirs. What is striking to me about the current GOP leadership–and this is a new phenomenon–is the extent to which they reject expertise. There are experts out there who could have helped them with this problem, experts whom they either didn’t consult or whose advice they ignored. And that’s the new GOP in a nutshell. It’s all about each of these guys being all the expert he needs.

Sensible crisis communication is a basic concept in business, and it’s one that’s news to the GOP leadership.

They do it too!

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

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

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

Imagine this exchange:

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

H: Clinton supporters are tribalist too.

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

Imagine this one:

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

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

H: Clinton supporters are tribalist too.

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

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

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

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

 

Rough draft of the intro for the Hitler and Rhetoric book

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

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

After the war, Niemoller famously said about his experience:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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