Category: Train Wrecks in Public Deliberation

When James Hodgkinson engaged in both eliminationist and terroristic violence against Republicans, factionalized media outlets blamed his radicalizing on their outgroup (“liberals”). In 2008, when James Adkisson committed eliminationist and terroristic violence against liberals, actually citing in his manifesto things said by “conservative” talk show hosts (namechecking some of the ones who blamed liberals for Hodgkinson), those media outlets and pundits neither acknowledged responsibility nor altered their rhetoric.[1]

That’s fairly typical of rabidly factional media: if the violence is on the part of someone who can be characterized as them (the outgroup), then outgroup rhetoric obviously and necessarily led to that violence. That individual can be taken as typical of them. If, however, the assailant was ingroup, then factionalized media either simply claimed that the person was outgroup (as when various media tried to claim that a neo-Nazi was a socialist and therefore lefty), or they insisted this person be treated as an exception.

That’s how ingroup/outgroup thinking works. The example I always use with my classes is what happens if you get cut off by a car with bumper stickers on a particularly nasty highway in Austin (you can’t drive it without getting cut off by someone). If the bumper stickers show ingroup membership, you might think to yourself that the driver didn’t see you, or was in a rush, or is new to driving. If the bumper stickers show outgroup membership, you’ll think, “Typical.” Bad behavior is proof of the essentially bad nature of the outgroup, and bad behavior on the part of ingroup membership is not. That’s how factionalized media works.

So, it’s the same thing with ingroup/outgroup violence and factionalized media (and not all media is factionalized). For highly factionalized right-wing media, Hodgkinson’s actions were caused by and the responsibility of “liberal” rhetoric, but Adkisson’s were not the responsibility of “conservative” rhetoric. For highly factionalized lefty media, it was reversed.

That factionalizing of responsibility is an unhappy characteristic of our public discourse; it’s part of our culture of demagoguery in which the same actions are praised or condemned not on the basis of the actions, but on whether it’s the ingroup or outgroup that does it. If a white male conservative Christian commits an of terrorism, the conservative media won’t call it terrorism, never mentions his religion or politics, and generally talks about mental illness; if a someone even nominally Muslim does the same act, they call it terrorism and blame Islam. In some media enclaves, the narrative is flipped, and only conservatives are acting on political beliefs. In all factional media outlets, they will condemn the other for “politicizing” the incident.

While I agree that violent rhetoric makes violence more likely, the cause and effect is complicated, and the current calls for a more civil tone in our public discourse is precisely the wrong solution. We are in a situation when public discourse is entirely oriented toward strengthened our ingroup loyalty and our loathing of the outgroup. And that is why there is so much violence now. It isn’t because of tone. It isn’t because of how people are arguing; it’s because of what people are arguing.

To make our world less violent, we need to make different kinds of arguments, not make those arguments in different ways.

Our world is so factionalized that I can’t even make this argument with a real-world example, so I’ll make it with a hypothetical one. Imagine that we are in a world in which some media that insist all of our problems are caused by squirrels. Let’s call them the Anti-Squirrel Propaganda Machine (ASPM).They persistently connect the threat of squirrels to end-times prophecies in religious texts, and both kinds of media relentlessly connect squirrels to every bad thing that happens. Any time a squirrel (or anything that kind of looks like a squirrel to some people, like chipmunks) does something harmful it’s reported in these media, any good action is met with silence. These media never report any time that an anti-squirrel person does anything bad. They declare that the squirrels are engaged in a war on every aspect of their group’s identity. They regularly talk about the squirrels’ war on THIS! and THAT! Trivial incidents (some of which never happened) are piled up so that consumers of that media have the vague impression of being relentlessly victimized by a mass conspiracy of squirrels.

Any anti-squirrel political figure is praised; every political or cultural figure who criticizes the attack on squirrels is characterized as pro-squirrel. After a while, even simply refusing to say that squirrels are the most evil thing in the world and that we must engage in the most extreme policies to cleanse ourselves of them is showing that you are really a pro-squirrel person. So, in these media, there is anti-squirrel (which means the group that endorses the most extreme policies) and pro-squirrel. This situation isn’t just ingroup versus outgroup, because the ingroup must be fanatically ingroup, so the ingroup rhetoric demands constant performance of fanatical commitment to ingroup policy agendas and political candidates.

If you firmly believe that squirrels are evil (and chipmunks are probably part of it too0, but you doubt whether this policy being promoted by the ASPM is really the most effective policy, you will get demonized as someone trying to slow things down, not sufficiently loyal, and basically pro-squirrel. Even trying to question whether the most extreme measures are reasonable gets you marked as pro-squirrel. Trying to engage in policy deliberation makes you pro-squirrel.

We cannot have a reasonable argument about what policy we should adopt in regard to squirrels because even asking for an argument about policy means that you are pro-squirrel. That is profoundly anti-democratic. It is un-American insofar as the very principles of how the constitution is supposed to work show a valuing of disagreement and difference of opinion.

(It’s also easy to show that it’s a disaster, but that’s a different post.)

ASPM media will, in addition, insist on the victimization narrative, and also the “massive conspiracy against us” argument, but that isn’t really all that motivating. As George Orwell noted in 1984, hatred is more motivating when it’s against an individual, and so these narratives end up fixating on a scapegoat. (Right now, for the right it’s George Soros, and for the left it’s Trump.) There can be institutional scapegoats—Adkisson tried to kill everyone in a Unitarian Church because he’d believed demagoguery that said Unitarianism is evil.

Inevitably, the more that someone lives in an informational world in which they are presented as in a war of extermination against us, the more that person will feel justified in using violence against them. If it’s someone who typically uses violence to settle disagreement, and there is easy access to weapons, it will end in violence against whatever institution, group, or individual that person has been persuaded is the evil incubus behind all of our problems.

At this point, I’m sure most readers are thinking that my squirrel example was unnecessarily coy, and that it’s painfully clear that I’m not talking about some hypothetical example about squirrels but the very real examples of the antebellum argument for slavery and the Stalinist defenses of mass killings of kulaks, most of the military officer class, and people who got on the wrong side of someone slightly more powerful.

And, yes, I am.

The extraordinary level of violence used to protect slavery as an institution (or that Stalin used, or Pol Pot, or various other authoritarians) was made to seem ordinary through rhetoric. People were persuaded that violence was not only justified, but necessary, and so this is a question of rhetoric—how people were persuaded. But, notice that none of these defenses of violence have to do with tone. James Henry Hammond, who managed to enact the “gag rule” (that prohibited criticism of slavery in Congress) didn’t have a different “tone” from John Quincy Adams, who resisted slavery. They had different arguments.

Demagoguery—rhetoric that says that all questions should be reduced to us (good) versus them (evil)—if given time, necessarily ends up in purifying this community of them. How else could it end? And it doesn’t end there because of the tone of dominant rhetoric. It ends there because of the logic of the argument. If they are at war with us, and trying to exterminate us, then we shouldn’t reason with them.

It isn’t a tone problem. It’s an argument problem. It doesn’t matter if the argument for exterminating the outgroup is done with compliments toward them (Frank L. Baum’s arguments for exterminating Native Americans), bad numbers and the stance of a scientist (Harry Laughlin’s arguments for racist immigration quotas), or religious bigotry masked as rational argument (Samuel Huntington’s appalling argument that Mexicans don’t get democracy).

In fact, the most effective calls for violence allow the caller plausible deniability—will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?

Lots of rhetors call for violence in a way that enables them to claim they weren’t literally calling for violence, and I think the question of whether they really mean to call for violence isn’t interesting. People who rise to power are often really good at compartmentalizing their own intentions, or saying things when they have no particular intention other than garnering attention, deflecting criticism, or saying something clever. Sociopaths are very skilled at perfectly authentically saying something they cannot remember having said the next day. Major public figures get a limited number of “that wasn’t my intention” cards for the same kind of rhetoric—after that, it’s the consequences and not the intentions that matter.

What matters is that whether it’s individual or group violence, the people engaged in it feel justified, not because of tone, but because they have been living in a world in which every argument says that they are responsible for all our problems, that we are on the edge of extermination, that they are completely evil, and therefore any compromise with them is evil, that disagreement weakens a community, and that we would be a better and stronger group were we to purify ourselves of them.

It’s about the argument, not the tone.

[A note about the image at the beginning: this is one of the stained glass windows in a major church in Brussels celebrating the massacre of Jews. The entire incident was enabled by deliberately inflammatory us/them rhetoric, but was celebrated until the 1960s as a wonderful event.]

[1] For more on Adkisson’s rhetoric, and its sources, see Neiwert’s Eliminationists (https://www.amazon.com/Eliminationists-Hate-Radicalized-American-Right/dp/0981576982)

For more about demagoguery: https://theexperimentpublishing.com/catalogs/fall-2017/demagoguery-and-democracy/

I am hopeful about the last week, and that might seem odd.

Train wrecks in public deliberation happen when political issues become factional ones, so that decisions are weighed entirely in terms of whether the ingroup or outgroup wins. And decisions that hurt the outgroup, even if they hurt the ingroup more, are seen as wins. In those moments, it’s common for some narcissist to arise and become the object of a charismatic leadership relationship.

Under those circumstances, the leader’s claims about policies are irrelevant—all that matters are his (almost always) performances of decisive leadership. It doesn’t matter whether his decisions turn out to be right—what matters is that they were decisive. In these circumstances, rejecting expert advice, refusing to take time to come to a decision, refusing to listen to anyone who disagrees, turning away from disconfirming evidence—all those things contribute to the sense that the leader is decisive, and therefore good.

Of course, as far as actual evidence about that kind of leadership, it’s a disaster. (https://hbr.org/2012/11/the-dark-side-of-charisma) Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mussolini—all got their power from charismatic leadership. Not all people who draw power from the charismatic leadership are disasters for their countries (or regions) but everyone who only draws power from charismatic leadership is.

Here’s the difference. Every effective leader in the media-dominated world must be charismatic. But having charisma, and drawing power exclusively from charismatic leadership are not points on a continuum—they are orthogonal (despite what writing on leadership says). A charismatic leader is one who’s power comes entirely from his (again, almost always his) presenting himself as supernaturally wise and powerful and therefore above the normal standards of fairness, consistency, or reason. The charismatic leader being inconsistent, being unable to give reasons, violating all promises—all those things increase his power.

So, how do you know if a charismatic leader is following bad policies? You don’t. You can’t. That he appears to be following risky and unwise policies enhances his positions as a charismatic leader, and calls on you to demonstrate your commitment to him by continuing to believe him despite his engaging in policies all the experts say is wrong, that contradict what he said he’d do, and that might seem ill-considered. You must like that he is playing from the gut.

Once someone has entered in the charismatic leadership relationship, there is no way to admit that he is a shitty leader without your admitting that you’re a shitty judge of character. Charismatic leadership is inherently toxic in that it connects the followers sense of self-worth to the possibly arbitrary policy agenda of the person they have decided really represents them.

In really nasty situations—ones in which demagoguery has become the norm for political discourse–, than all the ambitious political figures try to enact charismatic leadership. Anyone who doesn’t is seen as not “Presidential” (aka, media coverage of the 2016 Presidential election). One problem we have to admit is that the dominant media love themselves some charismatic leadership—it’s great for ratings.

Communities in which charismatic leadership is the dominant relationship between voters and a leader don’t generally end well. They usually end up in an unnecessary war (the Sicilian Expedition, Napoleonic wars, or WWII) if there is a single leader who is mastering all the available energy. If it’s a situation with a lot of rhetors drawing power from the charismatic leadership relationship you might have tremendous cultural commitment to an obviously unwise policy (the US commitment to slavery and, later, segregation, or current homophobic policies).

Trump is in the former category. He is not a person to give up power, and he doesn’t play well with others (and that’s what his base likes about him). He has already shown that he will enact policies that harm his base, and they have shown they don’t care. This isn’t about some kind of rational commitment on their part to his policy agenda. You can tell that because, if you ask them, they say, BUT THE DEMS DID SOMETHING. This isn’t about policies—this is about being on the winning side.

That’s an interestingly irrational argument. Let’s say that the question is whether Trump fired Comey because Comey was pursuing Trump’s reliance on Russia’s having interfered with the election. True believers will say, THIS DEM FIRED SOMEONE. That’s completely irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if Clinton or Obama engaged in human sacrifice at every full moon and therefore fired someone. For Trump true believers, the question (every question) is an opportunity to prove that Trump is better than others, and so any bad (even if irrelevant) action on the part of THEM is proof that he is good.

And so they don’t see that doesn’t answer the question at all. Clinton might have kicked puppies and fired someone, and that’s actually irrelevant to whether Trump fired Comey because Comey was going to expose Trump’s reliance on Russia having interfered with the election. Both could be true.

In a charismatic leadership relationship, the followers don’t care if their leader did something bad; they only care whether (in some weird calculus in their minds) their leader can be positioned as better than the other.

And that’s how charismatic leaders screw over their followers. And they always do. Trump has done it faster than most, and his followers have shown themselves to be the most charismatic followers ever since they haven’t balked. He said he would release his returns, and didn’t. He said he would jail Hillary, and he didn’t. He said Obama’s birth certificate was an issue, and then he said it wasn’t. He said he would rid the government of lobbyists, and he filled his administration with them. He said he would end corruption, and he and his family are explicitly using his position to profit them more. He said he didn’t fire Comey because of Russia, and he said he did.

And his base stands by him.

They were thrown under the bus long ago, and there is no circumstance under which they will admit that. And you know that because, those of you with them in your FB feed know that they don’t even try to defend him. They say, BUT THE DEMS….

And they can’t defend what he’s done in terms of what he said he’d do, or what they said he’d do. They can’t only say his team is better than that team.

So, how do we get out of it?

Unhappily, one way is war. The charismatic leader (again, not the leader who is charismatic, but the leader whose power comes entirely from the charismatic relationship) leads people into a stupid war (and, given enough power, they always do) and it’s a disaster (because leaders who depend entirely on charismatic leadership are disastrous in war). The war is a disaster, and many people (not all) decide that was bad. Unfortunately, they generally either say the leader wasn’t wrong, or they pretend they never supported the guy in the first place.

Another is that the leader is representing a minority group, and gets shut down by the legal or traditional authorities (the other two sources of power that Weber identified). That’s what happened with the various rhetors who tried to play charistmatic leadership on behalf of white supremacy in the US South. The Supreme Court shut them down.

We have a Supreme Court that has a majority that is fine with authoritarianism, so that will not play well for democracy.

One of the premises of charismatic leadership is that normal rules of fairness don’t apply. The narrative is that the ingroup has been SO victimized by all these fairness rules, or innovation has been SO hampered by all these rules about how to treat labor, not being able to destroy the environment, you can’t scam investors, and “political correctness” that means you can’t just buy your way into the policies you want! The whole notion that balancing innovation and fairness might involve complicated compromises can be rejected in favor of all the decisions being thrown into the lap of the charismatic leader whose judgment will instantly solve the dilemma. In other words, decisions are complicated—a good leader sees the instantly obvious answer. (Notice that Trump has backtracked even on this, without any fallout from his base.)

Short of a disastrous war that shows the leader wrong (and even that doesn’t always workd), the best way to undercut charismatic leadership is for ingroup rhetors to condemn the leader on procedural or policy grounds. That is, while outgroup rhetors should condemn the leader, it won’t work for too long because one of the first acts of the charismatic leader is to shut down or marginalize that criticism—ingroup members never hear it.

Trump has Fox and the GOP Noise Machine on his side. And the major argument that those sources make is that their listeners shouldn’t listen to any potentially disconfirming information. And you know how well it works. You all have friends or family members who repeat talking points from biased sources but who won’t look at anything that might disagree with them on the grounds that those sources must be biased.

They don’t care about biased sources—that’s all they listen to, read, or watch. The like biased sources.

They only object to sources that might complicate their biases. That’s important to note, as people can start to flip when they realize that they’re being suckered. And Fox suckers them. If Fox really were telling them the truth, then there’d be no harm in looking at other information. The more that Fox tries to tell people not to look at other sources, the more it’s acknowledging its version of the “truth” can’t withstand actual analysis of evidence.

Fox isn’t conservative. It has no coherent political philosophy other than being GOP (which, like the Dems, has flopped all over the place on policy). There are conservatives, and they’re beginning to fall away from Trump, and that gives me hope.

Oddly enough, what also gives me hope is that Trump is overplaying his hand. What sometimes undoes a charismatic leader is that his own belief in himself means that he doesn’t really believe he can permanently alienate any group, and so he just does whatever he wants thinking he can charm or bluff people back into his entourage regardless of his having screwed them over.

So, there are two hopeful signs in the last week. First, Trump has a problem is that many of the people on whom he relies hate him, and feel used by him. (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/us/politics/trump-sean-spicer-sarah-huckabee-sanders.html?smid=pl-share)
And that number seems to be increasing. Trump, for all his ability to generate extraordinary public loyalty, doesn’t seem to have much ability to generate personal loyalty, and he never has.

That makes the actively bizarre relationship of him and his First Lady interesting. There has never been a First Lady who has signalled so much animosity toward her husband, and he has only one daughter who can manage to show public affection to him. It doesn’t matter because it shows he’s a bad person or blah blah blah. It matters because it shows that Trump, who will thrown anyone under the bus, has managed to gather around him people with his same ethics. That’s a good thing for democracy. When the time comes that it looks as though spilling the beans on him is a good choice, there will be many people willing to do it.

The second hopeful sign is that outlets like The Economist, Forbes, and Wall Street Journal are publishing scathing articles about his incompetence. Neoliberal free-market fetishists will put up with anything other than random incompetence. (They’ll even tolerate strategic incompetence, such as the Bush Administration.)

But here is one more unhappy point. What does in people like Trump is overreach. And so, at best, we have months of his continuing to behave badly, the GOP Propaganda Machine spinning it as fine, and the most of the GOP political figures selling their soul to Trump penny by penny. And they will try to consolidate their power (as every authoritarian government does) through voter suppression.

So, this is all about 2018, and every reasonable person voting against any figure who has supported Trump.

There is an odd moment in the description of the dinner that fired-FBI Director James Comey and Donald Trump had at the White House in January: “As they ate, the president and Mr. Comey made small talk about the election and the crowd sizes at Mr. Trump’s rallies.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/11/us/politics/trump-comey-firing.html?_r=0)

Or, in other words, Trump wanted Comey to talk about how wonderful and popular Trump is. And I want to know which rallies.

That last point matters because some of the rallies weren’t all that well-attended, including the most famous: the inauguration. Did they talk about the crowd at the inauguration? Trump has had a lot of trouble letting go of his lie about the crowd size, and he was, by all accounts, testing the loyalty of Comey that evening. Comey apparently thinks he failed the loyalty test because he wouldn’t explicitly pledge his loyalty to Trump, but I think the explicit request for a loyalty pledge came about because Comey had already failed the first loyalty test. And it’s a test most GOP political figures and all of his supporters are passing with ease, and that should worry us: it’s whether they will take Trump’s lies, and make them what are called “blue lies.”

“Blue lies” is the term some social psychologists use for what they call “pro-social lies”—that is, lies that help maintain a flattering narrative or sense of identity about the ingroup. They’re the group equivalent of “white” lies (“Of course you don’t look fat in that dress!”) And, like a lot of “white” lies, they can be inconsequential—we might decide to tell a person she gave a great speech even if she didn’t simply because the speech is over and there’s nothing she can do about it anyway. Or we might tell a friend that the ex who dumped him was a total jerk anyway, and a complete fool, and our friend is completely in the right. A “blue” lie is a kid on a team saying that they lost just because the ref was out to get them, or that they actually played really well, or it’s members of a choir telling one another they did a great job even though no one got within a yard of the same key.

The inauguration had the best attendance of any inauguration; Trump didn’t (and did) fire Comey over the Russian investigation; Comey promised Trump three times he wasn’t under investigation; there were huge numbers of votes illegally cast by non-citizens; Trump hasn’t had (and has had) financial dealings with Russia—all of those are being handled as blue lies by politicians and media figures who propagate GOP talking points. And that’s troubling, because it means that lies that function almost exclusively to satisfy Trump’s ego are being given the powerful social force typically given to blue lies.

Social psychologists call these lies “pro-social” because, supposedly, they benefit the social group. But, as is clear from the white and blue lies mentioned above, that isn’t necessarily their consequence. We don’t necessarily tell a white lie because we don’t want to hurt someone—sometimes the lie will hurt them a lot in the long run, and we know it—but because we don’t want to hurt their ego right now, largely because we don’t want the conflict or drama that might ensue.

For instance, if a dress really is unflattering, and the person has a chance to change it, then the kind thing to do is to tell them—ideally, in an affirming way. If the person is going to give the speech again, or might need to give other speeches, then it might be helpful for someone to pass along some constructive criticism. If our friend keeps getting dumped because he’s doing something toxic or destructive in a relationship, such as always feeling like a victim, then lying about the situation and encouraging him to feel even more victimized is not helping. That isn’t to say that people have to tell the truth right here and now, or that everyone has to. The most helpful strategy might be to be comforting in the moment, and later having a more honest conversation. But it is saying that white lies prevent deliberation about an incident. It might be fine to prevent deliberation at that moment because it will happen elsewhere, or it might be that deliberation isn’t really necessary (the dress is a bridesmaid dress your friend must wear, and there’s no way to make it more flattering).

A parent might lie to a child about how well a game went, knowing that the coach will be more honest, and team members might similarly lie to one another without any particular harm for similar reasons. But, if there is no one to tell the truth, and if the lying will ensure that the friend will continue to get dumped, the team will continue to lose, the person will continue to make bad speeches that are bad in the same way, then the lies are harmful. If all or most of our information about something is blue or white lies, then we can’t deliberate effectively enough to make different choices in the future.

One of the characteristics I noticed in train wrecks in public deliberation was the prevalence of blue lies. It seems to me that these lies functioned in three ways (sometimes all three at once).

First, and most obviously, the lies that people told and shared helped them feel better about their group, often by reconciling some kind of cognitive dissonance, rationalizing a poor choice in the past, or excusing a decision to which they were already committed (e.g,. the Civil War was not about slavery, Germany lost WWI because of a Jewish stab in the back when it was just about to win). And, after a while, people forget that these are group-affirming polite fictions, and only pay attention to their power to affirm the group.

Second, these lies came to constitute group identity, so that being willing to commit to them in public came to serve as a signal of group identity and loyalty. You show that you are a true Chesterian by insisting that bunnies are never fluffy. If you reject that belief, then your identity as a Chesterian is suspect—these lies are constitutive of group identity.

In the antebellum slave states, you weren’t a “Southerner” unless you supported slavery (which explains the bizarre usage still sometimes in action, when people use “Southerner” and “supporter of slavery” synonymously, as though the millions of people living in the south who objected to slavery didn’t exist). For the purpose of showing ingroup membership and loyalty, it’s actively helpful for the statements to be obviously untrue or easily falsifiable. For instance, in the antebellum era, one blue lie was that slaveholders didn’t rape slaves—that was not just false, but obviously so, and yet it was a falsehood supported through threats of violence; you simply did not mention it. Now, it’s a point of loyalty in some circles to insist on the blue lie that the Civil War was not about slavery. That’s an easily falsified claim (simply looking at pro-secession rhetoric or statements causes shows that the CSA repeatedly identified their main motive as preserving slavery) and I have often found that people who make the statement refuse to look at the pro-secession rhetoric. Their insistence on the “true” causes isn’t something they’re willing to reconsider, and they know they’d have to if they looked at the evidence. They are more concerned with demonstrating loyalty to their group than thinking about whether the group might have screwed up.

And that brings up the third function of these lies. As time goes on, people often forget that the blue lies were lies (although, as mentioned above about the pro-secession rhetoric, their aversion to looking at possibly disconfirming evidence suggests to me that they know it deep in their heart of hearts). The ability of the ingroup to get its lies to become the truth for a larger group becomes an important demonstration of power. It is pleasurable simply because it is simultaneously a demonstration of power and an effective threat. “The Civil War was not about slavery” was one of those lies that, told initially by people who had, until after they lost, insisted it was about slavery; their ability to get that lie into the official histories of the event showed their power. Kenneth Greenberg (Honor and Slavery) tells an amazing story of a slaveholder who knowingly falsely accused a slave of having stolen something. He whipped the slave till the slave confessed. Then whipped the slave back into denial, and back into confession. It never anything to do with the theft—it had to do with the slaveholder’s demonstration that he controlled what could and couldn’t be said. Like the villain O’Brien’s forcing Winston Smith into saying that two plus two is five, this ability to force others into acquiescing on a blue lie is a consequence and demonstration of power.

(For some people, and this is an important point: it is the pleasure in having power.)

For the first function—making a group feel better about their past poor decisions or mistakes—the content of the lie matters, but it doesn’t for the other two. The lies don’t have to be useful lies, or, more accurately, may be most useful when the content of them is pretty nearly arbitrary. In fact, they function better as demonstrations of loyalty and power when the lies flip back and forth.

Of course, under those circumstances, they don’t function at all as useful bases for policy decisions. For instance, one of the blue lies during the buildup to the Iraq invasion was that the invasion was supported by the majority of the world’s powers and another was that only the US and UK had the balls to take on the invasion. Both of those were blue lines insofar as they were pro-Bush Administration and the GOP, and they were put forward by the same people, and they prevented even an intra-GOP debate over the need and solvency of the invasion plan. If everyone agreed we were justified, then we didn’t need to worry about whether the invasion would further alienate various Middle Eastern countries (or countries in general). We didn’t need to have a foreign policy oriented toward regaining goodwill. If, however, we were relatively isolated in our sense that the war was justified and necessary, then regaining goodwill was crucial to be able to benefit from even a successful deposing of Saddam Hussein. Those two different lies implied two different policy directions. Since the pro-invasion rhetors wouldn’t consistently hold to one or the other, there was no possibility of developing a plan that would respond to either contingency.

Similarly, it was common for proslavery rhetors to insist (sometimes in the same document) that slavery was eternal, and slavery would die out on its own. Both of those were dicta in the proslavery statement of creed, and each of those implied different policies for slave states as far as the long term. And neither could be debated, and therefore there couldn’t be a plan that would manage either contingency.

Thus, blue lies prohibit deliberation, and that’s probably why they’re associated with train wrecks. Blue lies rationalize precisely the decisions that got communities into bad situations in the first place (slaves love slavery! segregation is required by Christianity! everyone looks on the US as a liberator!).  In the case of the contradictory blue lies (slaves love slavery, slaves are always about to engage in race war) they prevent a community from looking carefully at those contradictory premises, and so they enable the community to recommit to a bad policy (e.g., the war on drugs).  The blue lie that we could have won in Vietnam if the liberal press hadn’t weakened our will was particularly promoted in the same group that agitated for invading Iraq—because they believed the US could have succeeded, the most important disconfirming example for their policy was simply renarrated.

So, blue lines increase ingroup loyalty, and they enable ingroup ideological policing, and they tank deliberation. That’s bad enough. But what’s happening with Trump’s lies is even worse than that. It’s the way that Trump’s lies are becoming blue lies for the GOP and its propagandists.

The blue lies mentioned above made a large group feel better, as in the lie that we were about to win Vietnam, which is often a sincere gesture to avoid dishonoring those who died or were severely wounded in the conflict; it functions to remove a stain from America and America’s military. The blue lies about slaves loving slavery functioned to make the entire class of supporters of slavery feel better about themselves and to demonstrate their informational power. That Germany could have won were it not for the Jewish press was comforting for the large number of Germans who felt shamed by its loss in WWI.

Trump’s lies don’t help a group. They are entirely about his ego, his achievements, and his ability to whip people to confession and denial and back. They are tests of his power over others, and their willingness to submit to whatever he wants to say at the moment. Loyalty to him is loyalty to the lies he tells himself. They don’t benefit others, except to the extent that those others see themselves as entirely dependent and submissive to him and his truth.

Trump’s lies demonstrate his ability to get anyone, even the GOP and media outlets that previously condemned him, to change their version of events at his whim. And it’s working. Republicans continue to support him, despite his having broken so many promises that he has resorted to scrubbing away evidence he ever made them.

I don’t know whether he’s conscious of that, and I don’t care. What matters is that that lies that have become blue lies for the GOP and major media are lies that function primarily (perhaps only) to make him feel better about himself, to get others to demonstrate loyalty to him, and to demonstrate his own power.

What matters is that, for whatever reason, the GOP and its propagandists have stopped flirting with authoritarianism. This is authoritarianism.

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. 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. 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.