Category: trump enablers

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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