Category: Uncategorized

#notallingroupmembers as sometimes doing useful political work

 

[Image from here]

A crucial concept in political science, sociology, social psychology, neuroscience and various other fields is that we maneuver through our world by identifying every person we meet as in-group or not. In-group doesn’t mean the group in power—it means the group we’re in. That is, as scholars of rhetoric would say, the first move when we meet someone is that we unconsciously try to decide what kind of rhetorical relationship we’re in—is this going to be a friendly, hostile, amorous, commercial, weird interaction? Do we need to be skeptical about this person, or should we assume good faith? And we intuitively answer those questions by categorizing the person as in-group (trustworthy) or out-group (untrustworthy).

In other words, is this someone with whom we identify (in which case we lower our guard) or not (in which case we raise our guard)? That’s a normal initial reaction.

It’s also normal to be in an ethical world in which we are called to treat others as we would want to be treated. Thus, if we’re ethical, we are open to reconsidering our initial impulse to categorize, we know we have it and resist, we don’t treat all non-in-group members as hostile or dangerous, we meet a non-in-group member and find that an inviting and interesting opportunity, we have more reasonable ways of assessing danger than just in- v. out-group. To be ethical means not to rely on our in- v. out-group impulses.

Some people, however, never move past that initial in- v. out-group response. I mentioned this incident in another post, but it’s relevant here too. Many years ago, I was at a wedding shower, and one of the guests was going on about Jewish women being pushy. I said (because I was raised by wolves and don’t know how to behave at wedding showers), that I thought she was being antisemitic. She said, “You’re just saying that because you’re Jewish.” I said I’m not Jewish. She said, “Oh you probably are and don’t know it.”

She believed that only Jews object to antisemitism, so my objection meant she categorized me as Jewish (out-group). Instead of a counter-example causing her to rethink her premise (that only Jews object to antisemitism), she made the counter-example (me, a non-Jew objecting to antisemitism) something that proved her premise (I had been pushy by objecting to her comments). Of course, were I Jewish and didn’t know it, I wouldn’t have objected to her antisemitism, but that was a level of logic beyond her.

A disturbing number of people, all over the political spectrum, enter every political argument the way she thought about Jews. For her, you only object to slurs about your in-group, and no one applies standards of behavior across groups. Everyone is only out for their own group.

For many people our vexed and complicated political world is a zero-sum game between US and THEM, and every political issue or event is not something that challenges us to think inventively about our policy options, but an opportunity to prove that US is better than THEM. Instead of our arguing with people with whom we have a shared future and with whom we face multiple policy options, and, therefore, with whom we should be working together with our various perspectives to find the best policy option for all (which is a policy that hurts everyone in some way), we are people at a football game screaming at each other. If they gain ground, we lose; if they lose ground, we win. It’s as though all public discourse is a football game with refs who have wandered off for a beer.

For people like that, call them rabid factionalists, an in-group member behaving badly is almost an existential threat—it threatens the identity of the in-group as essentially better than the out-group. If being a dog-lover is important to me, I will want to find a way to manage that, by all accounts, Hitler was genuinely a dog lover. I might respond by saying that Hitler wasn’t really in-group (not a true Scotsman—Hitler didn’t really love dogs). Sometimes they respond by saying #notallingroupmembers—by which they mean that this bad behavior on the part of an in-group member shouldn’t be taken as indicative of the goodness or badness of the group (Hitler’s being a dog lover doesn’t mean much about all dog lovers).

That second move, Hitler isn’t indicative, is a much more complicated argumentative move than I think a lot of people realize, and more significant. It’s significant in that it signifies how someone is reasoning.

A passionate vegetarian might argue that Hitler’s vegetarianism shouldn’t be used to condemn vegetarianism, and that Stalin’s being an omnivore shouldn’t be used to condemn not being vegetarian. That’s a principled stance about how to reason. People who demonstrably and openly hold the in- and out-group to the same standards undermine our culture of demagoguery.

#notallingroupmembers can sometimes do important political work in another way. It can say that this person claiming to speak for all Christians/Republicans/vegetarians/Texans/teachers is not actually doing so. That kind of #notallingroupmembers can be important for times when the NRA claims to speak for all gun owners (it doesn’t), bigots claim to speak for all Christians (they don’t), some rando claims to speak for all Americans (no one does). By pointing out that demagogues who claim that all [group] support [policy] are lying, this argument can undermine our culture of demagoguery. 

But #notallingroupmembers can also just be another instance of our culture of demagoguery. A passionate vegetarian might argue that Hitler’s vegetarianism shouldn’t be used to condemn vegetarianism, but Stalin’s being an omnivore (or not vegetarian) is a relevant example for arguing that non-vegetarians are bad.

That’s motivated reasoning, and an irrational stance. That’s how people argue in a culture of demagoguery.

If you are willing to take a single example of bad behavior on the part of an out-group individual as indicative of the moral status/intelligence of the out-group as a whole, but don’t take a single example of bad behavior on the part of an in-group individual as indicative of the moral status/intelligence of the in-group as a whole, then you are not thinking about politics rationally. If Stalin proves that non-vegetarians are bad, then Hitler proves that vegetarians are bad.

Or, perhaps, arguing from single examples is a bad way to argue in general. Perhaps, even, treating politics as a zero-sum argument as to which group is better is a bad way to think about politics.

If you make the argument that this one guy proves that the out-group is bad, and yet you reject single examples of in-group behavior as irrelevant, then you aren’t engaged in policy argumentation. You are just some irrational fanatic in the stands cheering wildly for your team with no internal or external ref.

Be nicer to Hitler, and he’ll stop being Hitler: The Marquess of Londonderry’s Ourselves and Germany (1938)

In March of 1938, The Marquess of Londonderry published an argument that Britain had failed to respond to Germany’s often (and still) outstretched hand for peace, that Germany wanted nothing but that to which it was due, and that Hitler was a leader with reasonable goals that could be met (although Londonberry also mentions that he frequently asked German leaders to list their policy goals explicitly and clearly, and it never happened). Londonderry’s argument was that British foreign policy had caused Germans to be extremist because the British hadn’t been accommodating enough to the Germans who only wanted [keep in mind he’d never gotten German leaders to say what they wanted].

Londonderry published two versions of this book. One after the “Anschluss,” when Hitler forcibly annexed Austria (something Londonderry blames on Kurt von Schuschnigg, basically for resisting). While the annexation appears to have been popular in both Germany and Austria, the celebration consisted of extraordinary brutality toward the Jews. That violence was very public.

March 1938 was also long after the Nuremburg Laws (1935), after Hitler’s violations of various treaties and agreements and his going back on multiple promises, and over ten years after he published Mein Kampf, which clearly lays out his eliminationist, militaristic, and hegemonic goals. That agreement is generally considered a disaster, that emboldened Hitler, betrayed Czechoslavkia, and cemented his popularity with Germans.

Penguin published the book in October of 1938, with a new preface. On September 30, 1938, Chamberlain had signed the “Munich Agreement,” which gave Hitler a large chunk of Czechoslovakia because Hitler promised, for realz this time, that he wouldn’t try to get any more territory and wanted peace.

Londonderry says, in that preface to the October 1938 edition, that the disastrous Czechoslovakia agreement represented “the fulfillment of my hopes,” that “the international barometer […] is at ‘Set Fair’,” and “ I can only have a feeling of great happiness at this moment that all I have advocated has been brought about in a moment of time” (xi, xiii). He believed that the events of September proved he had been right all along. He had the outcome he had long wanted, the outcome he thought was success, and so he concluded the process—relentless appeasement on the part of Britain—was a good one.

Londonderry is a great example as to why what might be called “folk pragmatism” (“the proof is in the pudding”) is a disastrous way to think about policy deliberation.

Londonderry’s argument was that the Versailles Treaty dishonored Germany (he wasn’t making an economic argument), and denied Germany the right to be treated as an equal in regard to decisions about Europe. (t’s interesting to think about why Londonderry assumed that Germany was entitled to be treated as an equal to France and Britain.) There are, and have long been, lots of arguments as to why WWI (aka, “The Great War”) happened, and the scholarly consensus is that it wasn’t mono-causal, but the consensus is also that Germany bore a large portion of the responsibility. There is also a consensus that the conditions imposed on Germany were no worse than what Germany had imposed on Russia, in the Brest-Litovsk Treaty,  or on France, after the Franco-Prussian War.

Londonderry wasn’t the only major British political figure who supported the policy of appeasement, and the British policy of appeasement was supported for very complicated reasons (best explained by Benny Morris, Abraham Ascher, Tim Bouverie, and Ian Kershaw). But Londonderry’s argument wasn’t particularly complicated: Londonderry accepts the Nazi victim narrative that Germany being treated as it had treated France is so dishonoring of Germany that its putting Hitler in power is the fault of the British. Londonderry argues that Nazis want to be the friend of Britain. Nazi Germany can be an ally, and that we need to stop engaging in rhetoric that alienates them. Londonderry’s argument is, at its heart, an argument about feelings: the Versailles Treaty made Germans feel bad; Hitler is acting the way he is because he feels bad; if we make him and Germans feel better, they’ll have different policies. We can changes their policies by changing their feelings.

Londonderry postures himself as a reasonable person willing to look at both sides, but notice that France’s position is not one of the “sides” that needs understanding. He doesn’t need to understand the feelings of the French or the people opposed to his policies.

In fact, he argues that Germany and Britain have far more in common than Britain and France because “There are many points of similarities between our two countries [Britain and Germany], and there is a racial connection which in itself establishes a primary friendly feeling between us which cannot be said to exist between us and the French” (19).

Not only is that statement racist, but it’s typical of how incoherent racism is. “Racial” categories are always just politically useful ways of grouping people that racists want to believe are real. Madison Grant—the man who wrote “Hitler’s Bible,” whose arguments about race meant we sent away boats of Jews trying to escape Nazi Germany, and who was still being cited as an expert in the 1960s–was very clear that “race mixing” was bad, by which he meant a “Nordic” and a “Mediterranean.” For Grant, and people like him, Italians, Poles, Czechs, Romanians weren’t really white, so a Pole marrying a Brit would lead to the downfall of civilization just as much as a Brit and an African. I mention this just because I routinely run across people with Polish, Ukrainian, Greek, or Italian last names who claim praise Grant as a credible source.

White supremacists aren’t very good at reading comprehension.

But, back to Londonderry. He has two points to his argument. First, the current problems between Britain and Germany, he says, can “only” be solved “by a sympathetic understanding” of the German position.

As far as the first, Londonderry’s book makes clear something I’m not sure he himself saw—he repeatedly asked Nazis to say exactly what they wanted, and they never did. Yet, he insisted that Germany had continually extended the hand of friendship to Britain, and it had been rejected. In other words, Londonderry thought the world of politics was one in which people need to feel good about each other, and feel respected by one another. And that was his mistake. He thought the problem with Germany was not that its culture had a victim narrative of being entitled and encircled, that powerful political groups (including the Catholic party, communists, monarchists, fascists, and nationalists) wanted to make sure that democracy failed, but that Germans felt bad, and therefore they advocated aggression. If we treated them more honorably, they wouldn’t feel bad, and so they wouldn’t be so aggressive.

I’m all for understanding exactly what the other sides are saying. I believe to my core that effective deliberation—political, personal, professional—requires that people really understand the arguments that other people are making. Understanding those arguments doesn’t necessarily mean that you think they have any legitimacy; understanding how a bad argument works is like understanding how a bridge collapsed. But that isn’t what Londonderry means.

And it’s interesting to think about just what arguments he argued needed understanding. Hitler’s arguments about honor needed understanding. Arguments about Nazi genocidal policies didn’t. Londonderry exemplifies one way that people argue for a dodgy in-group policies. Londonderry argued for “fairness” regarding Nazis because he didn’t really have any problem with their political agenda, as far as he understood it.

He includes in his book, after a long description of how charming his 1936 visit to Germany was, a letter to Ribbentrop he wrote February 21, 1936. In that letter he says,

“As I told you, I have no great affection for the Jews. It is possible to trace their participation in most of those international disturbances which have created so much havoc in different countries, but on the other hand one can find many Jews strongly ranged on the other side who have done their best with the wealth at their disposal, and also by their influence, to counteract those malevolent and mischievous activities of fellow Jews” (97)

This is a perfect example of someone making what appears to a gesture of fairness, but is actually just a tone of fairness, all the while endorsing Nazis. Fairness shouldn’t be a tone, but an ethic.

There are people (and I try to be one of them) who can say, “I disagree completely with this argument, but it is a valid argument.” This is kind of old-school logic: being true and being valid aren’t the same. That appeal to fairness is wildly different from what Londonderry is here doing. He is engaged in the kind of bothsidesism that nurtures genocide. He is saying that, on the whole, the logic of the Nazis genocidal policy is legit, but don’t go overboard.

Londonderry argued for listening to Nazis, not because he was, in principle, committed to listening to all groups, let alone holding all groups to the same ethical or rhetorical standards—he didn’t try to be fair to the French, let alone to Churchill. He didn’t argue for listening to Nazis in order to understand how to argue against them. He argued for sympathizing with Nazis because he didn’t really have a problem with their wanting a country free of Jews.

As it turns out, being nice to Hitler didn’t change Hitler’s policies. It rarely does. Hitler’s rhetoric (public and interpersonal) was all about feelings; he was all about making “Germans” (his supporters) feel that he was looking out for them, and he enacted policies that got his supporters short-term benefits. He was like a con artist who seduces someone by wining and dining them, all the time on the credit cards he’s stolen from the mark. What mattered about Hitler wasn’t how he felt about Germany, whether he made people feel proud to be Germans, or even, really, how he felt about Jews or Poles or Sinti or Slavs—what mattered is that his policies ensured that Germany would find itself in a two-front war, a kind of war it couldn’t win, unsustainable economic policies, serial genocides. As they say, fuck Hitler’s feelings.

When someone says we should be nicer to Nazis as though that will persuade Nazis to be less Nazi, they’re saying they don’t really have a big problem with Nazi policies. What’s wrong with Nazis isn’t how Nazis feel; it’s the policies they support. We should stop arguing about Nazis’ feelings, and just oppose policies that help Nazis. Fuck their feelings.

The SF Resolution, the NRA, and our culture of demagoguery

A really smart friend recently asked me about the SF Board of Supervisors Resolution about the NRA.  Her question was:

While I think this is a really unhelpful designation that just feeds into the persecuted minority identity I think the NRA likes to use, I’m actually also really interested in this idea of what terrorism/inciting violence actually is. By creating a brand/identity/environment that’s welcoming to white right-wing terrorists, are they effectively inciting violence?

Great question. Technically, four great questions–exactly the questions to ask.

The portions of the resolution (pdf) relevant to the NRA are:

• WHEREAS, The National Rifle Association musters its considerable wealth and organizational strength to promote gun ownership and incite gun owners to acts of violence, and
• WHEREAS, The National Rifle Association spreads propaganda that misinforms and aims to deceive the public about the dangers of gun violence, and
• WHEREAS, The leadership of National Rifle Association promotes extremist positions, in defiance of the views of a majority of its membership and the public, and undermine the general welfare, and
• WHEREAS, The National Rifle Association through its advocacy has armed those individuals who would and have committed acts of terrorism
[…]
• WHEREAS, The United States Department of Justice defines terrorist activity, in part, as, “The use of any…explosive, firearm, or other weapon or dangerous device, with intent to endanger, directly or indirectly, the safety of one or more individuals or to cause substantial damage to property;” and
• WHEREAS, The United States Department of Justice further includes any individual or member of an organization commits an act that the actor knows, or reasonably should know, affords material support, including communications, funds, weapons, or training to any individual has committed or plans to commit a terrorist act…

My friend was really asking four questions: 1) whether this designation contributes to the NRA fantasy of being gun owners being a persecuted minority; 2) whether the NRA is a domestic terrorist organization; 3) whether this designation is helpful; 4) whether the NRA incites violence.

As far as the first, a major theme in NRA rhetoric is victimization (if you want to get pedantic, masculine victimhood). Gun owners (who are dog whistled as white males in NRA rhetoric) are victimized by crime, Obama kicking down their doors and taking their guns (in 2008 and 2012), not being able to own all the guns, criticism. Those claims of victimization are disconnected from actual events, so nothing the SF Board of Supervisors could make NRA’s base supporters feel more victimized. They’ve already got that turned up to eleven.

The question of whether the NRA is a domestic terrorist organization because it supports domestic terrorism is interesting because it points to how vague (perhaps strategically) the definitions of terrorism are. Technically, the NRA does fit the definition presented in the resolution. Of course, the resolution hasn’t presented all the characteristics that constitute the DOJ definition, but that’s typical of how arguments work in our culture of demagoguery: if you can find one characteristic of a definition or historical analogy that the out-group fits, then you can declare them that thing. Hitler was a charismatic leader, so the out-group charismatic leader is Hitler (but not our in-group leader).

We could consider more criteria than the SF resolution does. And it’s still plausible to argue that the NRA fits the DOJ definition.

The other criteria are:
(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State;
(B) appear to be intended—
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping;

We are in a world of domestic terrorism, and the NRA is engaged in actions that could argue enable that terrorism, and so, technically, the NRA does fit the DOJ definition, and that’s why the DOJ definition is a bad definition. It’s much too broad, and would mean that, for instance, the truck driver who drove through protestors was a domestic terrorist, and therefore his employer was a supporter of terrorism and could be condemned as such by an over-active prosecutor. What he did was assault (perhaps even attempted murder), and his employers should be subject to civil suits.

This designation of the NRA as a domestic terrorist organization is sheer political theatre (unless it’s in service of arguing that the DOJ definition is too vague), a performance of in-group loyalty that is about looking right rather than being effective. So, as far as the third part of the question, no, this isn’t effective.

People think this kind of political theatre is “effective” because they have weird (and generally false) narratives about political change and how it happens.

This hope that “if we take an irrational stance and commit to it passionately that will have an important impact” appeals to the false narrative that political change happens because an individual or small group stands up and says, “This is wrong.” That makes great theatre, fiction, and movies, but that hope is harder to defend historically. Political theatre, that is, the political power of taking an irrational and anti-pragmatic stance, works very well on behalf of parties in power.

The Birmingham bus boycott didn’t happen because Rosa Parks suddenly one day decided she was done with segregation refused to change her seat. It happened because there was an organization that had made pragmatic plans about how and when to have a boycott. That doesn’t make her individual protest any less brave or important—she risked a tremendous amount, and her actions cost her (and the other protesters) a lot—it makes her protest smart. The Stonewall riots were part of an arc of gay rights political action. Again, they were crucial, and brave and dangerous, but they neither began nor ended the struggle for gay rights.  the beginning of a political movement. Martin Luther may or may not have nailed his theses to a door, but what caused the Reformation wasn’t Luther’s standing tall before the Diet—Jan Huss had done the same thing and been killed for it—but that he had important political support. What Luther did was brave and risky, and it worked because he had a movement behind him, not because he engaged in political theatre. Political theatre is effective when it’s part of an effective political movement.

Henry David Thoreau spent a night in jail protesting the Mexican-American war, rightly recognizing it as being a war fought so that slavery could expand. And he wrote a great essay. And no one else spent a night in jail. And he only spent a night. And most people reading his essay don’t even know it was about slavery. There was very little cost to him for this protest—it wasn’t even that bad a jail. His piece had little or no impact on American history until it was picked up much later, the 1900s.

The SF resolution isn’t a Rosa Parks moment. I don’t even think it’s a Thoreau moment. This resolution has no cost for the SF Board of Supervisors. The resolution is demagoguery.  And while demagoguery isn’t always harmful, this one might be, but not because it could alienate supporters of the NRA.

It does, however, aid the rhetorically cunning strategy of the NRA to try to get “gun owners” and “NRA” equated. The NRA  has a lot of problems, including that it really isn’t a political organization as much as representative of manufacturers. The political base of the NRA is shrinking, so they’re trying to expand it by persuading gun owners that everyone is out to get them—that gun owners face existential threat. The NRA rhetoric is that it represents all gun owners. It doesn’t. It represents a minority of gun owners.  Their claim that the world is divided between gun owners who agree with them and people who want Obama to kick down their doors and take all the guns is sheer demagoguery. The NRA’s extremist policies don’t represent all gun owners, even ones who are very pro-GOP and pro-gun, and gun owners aren’t necessarily supporters of the NRA all guns all the time solution to everything.

This leaves the fourth question of whether the NRA incites violence. And that’s complicated. NRA rhetoric has long involved claims of apocalypses that didn’t happen, demagoguery, fear-mongering. (I was going to link to those claims, but I’m really not comfortable doing that–you can go onto the NRA site and go back in their archives or google Obama take our guns). The NRA can’t support its arguments with rational argumentation, and so it doesn’t even try. The NRA never accurately represents opposition arguments.

The NRA isn’t alone in that move. We’re in a culture of demagoguery and an economy of attention, in which our dominant political imaginary is that every side can be reduced to two sides (good v. bad people, aka us v. them), and, therefore, the best way to get vote, donations, clicks, likes, and shares is to say that there are only two options–us or them.

Trump advocated a second amendment solution in regard to Clinton. Anyone who can get two neurons to fire and is not wrapped in a mummy cocoon of ideology knows he was approving of someone shooting Clinton. But here is what is important about what Trump said: had Clinton said there was a second amendment solution to Trump, Trump supporters would have eaten their own heads off in rage. As would have the NRA talking heads. Did Trump really mean it? That doesn’t matter. What matters is that his supporters would have condemned exactly the same behavior on the part of Clinton.

NRA rhetoric is irresponsible, rabidly demagogic, blazingly tribal, voraciously demagogic, and gleefully evasive of what Christ said we should do. That kind of rhetoric, especially when it’s culturally dominant, fosters violence against the outgroup(s) insofar as it encourages people to believe that violence is an appropriate strategy for dealing with every conflict. But the NRA is hardly alone in its demagoguery, and it’s scapegoating to pretend it is.

That’s what makes the SF resolution political theatre, or virtue signalling, or performance of in-group loyalty, or whatever term you want to use. But the NRA condemning the SF Board for engaging in propaganda and sound-bite (sic) political action is such unprincipled in-group factionalism it could make a cat laugh.

The best evidence is that mass shootings are performances of in-group loyalty on the part of people who live in rhetorical swamps that breed toxic masculinity, the disease of notoriety , our culture of rage.

Does that mean the NRA is off the hook for their demagoguery? Not at all. The NRA might not be directly and explicitly responsible for persuading someone to shoot up a temple , synagogue,  baseball game, places with women but it is doing everything it can to persuade anyone who will listen to them that the people who do want to shoot up places should have access to all the guns.

Whether the NRA incites violence is complicated, especially given how violent our everyday rhetoric is (as it always is in a culture of demagoguery) all over the political spectrum. But the NRA does enable mass shootings insofar as every mass shooting enabled by a weapon the NRA wants to make sure is easily available is additional evidence for how damaging the NRA is. (And the “we just need to have a more Christian nation and should enact policies” is an irrational stance and a great example of bad faith argumentation.)  But that doesn’t make the SF resolution right. We are not in a zero-sum world of politics in which “the other side” being wrong means this side is right.

We are in a world in which we should be arguing policy, not engaging in competitions about who is more loyal to the in-group or arguments about which group is better.

Gun violence in the US is a major problem, and treating this issue as though it’s a zero-sum argument between the two political parties is like the crew of the Titanic making a decision about navigation on the basis of who won the on-board shuffleboard competition.

Defenders of Trump’s China policies are avoiding rational policy argumentation, and his critics aren’t doing much better

I study train wrecks in public deliberation, and they’re all times when the people making decisions lived and breathed a world of demagoguery.  In that world, the media says, “This policy is right because there is a legitimate need, and if you disagree with this policy then you don’t acknowledge the severity of the need.”

At one point in time, my husband and I lived in a part of Kansas City we knew had issues with the water supply. We asked a water filter salesperson to come out and talk to us about their filter. The salesman went on and on about how bad the water was, but was struck dumb when we asked about how and whether his filter would solve the problem better than other filters available to us.

That the water was bad doesn’t mean his company’s product was the right solution.

And, really, that’s what people need to understand about decision making. That there is a legitimate need doesn’t mean that this policy is the solution.

In a culture of demagoguery, we argue about only two points: whether there is a need, and the moral quality of the two groups. So, there is the bizarre (and disastrous) assumption that, once you’ve identified the need, then you decide to hand the problem over to the people who seem trustworthy–in other words, appearing to be authentically in-group.

What I’ve come to believe is that, when you put together those two ways of thinking about political deliberation—we only argue need; we dismiss any criticisms of the in-group policy as “biased—you get train wrecks.

I think Trump’s stance regarding China is just such a train wreck. There is a legitimate need, but neither Trump nor his supporters have put together a good argument as to how his plan solves the problem, is feasible, and doesn’t have unintended consequences worse than the problem he’s solving (which is the major critique of his flopping around), and even his critics aren’t arguing policy.

Trump doesn’t have a coherent plan, so it’s hard to argue why it’s a good one, and it’s hard to argue against it, but his critics could point that out. Instead, most anti-Trump media seem engaged in two-minutes hate about Trump, Republicans, and conservatives.

And that is a culture of demagoguery.

But, it’s important to note that people all over the political spectrum (there aren’t two sides) agree that the need argument is strong. It’s an observable fact China engages in and allows intellectual property theft , and that’s what this trade war is about . The arguments for being tougher with China involve violations of copyright —things that have nothing to do with working class people. There are reasonable arguments that the US needs a different set of policies regarding China.

The water in our part of Kansas City really was bad. That didn’t mean this product was good.

What China is doing is bad, but that doesn’t mean Trump’s policy is right. So, what are the arguments for how what he is doing will solve the problem?

I’ve really tried to find arguments defending his policies, and they’re all need arguments—that what he’s doing is right because China is bad. That is, his policy is right because the need is real.

That’s an irrational argument, and an evasion of policy deliberation.

I’m finding a strong consensus that he’s handling foreign affairs, especially economic, badly, even among normally GOP- standard bearing sites. Here’s Foreign Affairs.  Here’s the Cato Institute. And even American Enterprise, which supports a “tough” stance, says Trump’s policy goals are unclear, and advocates other policies (click on the links). The Wall Street Journal says Trump is losing the trade war with China, partially because it’s working from a “shopping list.”

The very conservative organization Heritage says Trump’s policies are bad. What’s odd is that while many pro-Trump media are arguing Trump’s policies are correct because the need is real (an evasion of rational policy argumentation) many reactionary, free-market, and self-identified conservative sites are the ones engaged in policy argumentation, arguing that Trump’s policies are the wrong strategies–they’re engaged in policy argumentation.

And even media that defend getting “tough” on China aren’t defending his current strategies.

The only defenses I’ve found are along these lines—that his policy must be right because it’s punitive.  That’s interesting since George Lakoff long ago argued that “conservatives” (I would say “reactionaries”) always assume that the correct policy solution to every political problem is to identify and then punish the people who are behaving badly. That is a worldview operating in realm free of falsification, relevant evidence, and rational policy argumentation.

As far as I can tell, no one is engaged in rational policy argumentation defending Trump’s policies regarding China, and that’s important.

And, equally important, the anti-Trump public sphere is not engaged in policy argumentation attacking his policies. This is an exception.

I’ve prowled around various anti-Trump sites and found all sorts of arguments about how Trump’s tariffs are bad because is bad, his policies are grifting since he’s protected his daughter, and other evasions of policy argumentation.

What’s wrong with our political situation is not that GOPpers, who are evil, are in control, nor that Liberals, who are evil, are in control. Nor is our political situation bad because “both sides are just as bad.”

There is, of course, the “horse race” coverage, that reframes policy issues as a race between the two side, and engages in motivism—thereby accepting the demagogic premise that politics is a zero-sum battle between two sides.

There aren’t two sides. Our world is not one in which there is a side that says that China is just fine so we need to do nothing and another side that says China is bad so we need to support Trump’s actions.

The world of politics is a world of uncertainty, nuance, and luck that says we should engage in rational policy argumentation about our various policy options regarding China and not reduce every political issue to “liberals” v. “conservatives”—aka, “us v. them.”

As citizens in a democracy we are not faced with the issue of whether Trump is a good or bad person, whether Democrats are better or worse people than Republicans. We are faced with the issue of how to deliberate effectively about issues that aren’t usefully reduced to us v. them.

What matters about Trump’s policies is that they are policies. Let’s argue about them.

How Trump’s tariff war shows the deep irrationality of neoliberal media

G.K. Chesterton has an article about how some event (if memory serves, it was a fire) was framed differently by media depending on what was most politically useful. He says that the sad state of their political world was that something like a fire would be covered differently purely on the basis of whether the incident could be used to excuse or beat up on the other side. He was right.

Chesterton was describing a world in which every incident is used as an example of how the in-group is good or the out-group is bad. There is an incident (a building burns down), and factionalized media deduce how to frame the incident on the basis of what most helps their faction. Factionalized media can deduce that identical behavior (a building burns down) is an inescapable tragedy (if the in-group is in power) or a sign of the deep corruption/incompetence of the out-group (if the out-group is in power).

In such a world, there are no actually principled political positions, just group factionalism. But the people engaged in irrational factionalism don’t like to see themselves (ourselves) that way, and so they/we instead claim that we are passionately committed to a principle–such as neoliberalism. But, when the behavior of an in-group politician violates the principle, then people whose political positions are deduced from loyalty to faction face cognitive dissonance: we are actually only engaged in irrational rationalizing grounded in-group loyalty, but we like to think that  then we are principled people whose stances are logically consistent.

Thus, we might say we are enraged at the idea that a President would use his position as President for financial gain  because that violates a principle for us (such as arguments about Obama or Clinton’s book deals). People whose outrage about Clinton or Obama’s book deals was grounded in principle would be outraged at Trump pushing people to stay in his hotels.

If they aren’t, then the outrage about Clinton and Obama was never about a principle.

It was about their being Democrats. (And, similarly, if people who defended Clinton’s groping but were outraged about Trump’s groping, it’s all about faction and not principle.)

There are few better examples of that deductive factionalism of our world than what is happening with Trump tweeting that “American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China,” and how his base has responded.

The first point to make is that, had Obama tweeted exactly the same thing–that he hereby ordered businesses to stop doing business with China–, the people defending Trump’s tweet would have chewed off their own arms in rage.

In a way, this post could end there. Unless the people now defending Trump say that they would have praised Obama for the same tweet (and behavior), then they’re admitting that they’re irrationally committed to the in-group, they don’t have political principles, but just factional commitment, and their arguments in favor of any policy are deductive factionalism.

One of the characteristics of rational political argumentation is that you hold all groups to the same standards—regardless of faction. If a trade war with China is good when a GOP does it, then it’s good when a Dem does it. If people think that the Economic Emergency Act gave Trump the power to tell businesses what to do, then they would not have objected had Obama done the same thing. If Obama had engaged in a tariff war with China exactly like Trump’s, the people with rational positions on Trump’s tariff war would have supported it.

If people currently defending Trump would not have defended Obama equally vehemently had he done the same thing, then they’re just unprincipled claques.

The second point is that one of the major arguments for Trump and his policies is neoliberalism —the notion that “the market” is self-regulating , and that all intervention or governmental control makes things worse.

Neoliberals (a term that doesn’t mean what much of Trump’s base think it means–neoliberals vote GOP and support Trump) argue that open markets are the best way for the world to work. Thus, if the commitment to a free market were a principled commitment, and not just motivated reasoning, they would express outrage at Trump ordering businesses to do anything.

What Trump did is a complete violation of neoliberalism. Reason, The Heritage Foundation, Fox News, and all the “the market is rational” politicians and pundits should be in a rage about Trump saying that he can issue an order to tell the market how to operate. But, as far as I can tell, they aren’t. None of them is supporting him (which is interesting) but they are not writing the pieces they would have written had Obama done exactly what Trump is doing.

It’s the same problem with Trump’s promise to use government power to force companies to stay in the US (which he hasn’t actually enforced) or to keep coal mines open (which he hasn’t done)—that’s government intervention in the market, which neoliberals claim they are, in principle, completely opposed to. Neoliberal media would have been so outraged their hair would have caught on fire had Obama said he would do those things. Where is the outrage about Trump?

Neoliberals’ failure to call out Trump for his telling businesses what they should do is an admission that they don’t actually think “the market is rational and will sort things out.” Or, to be more accurate, they only think that when it’s a convenient thing to think–when it supports their political faction. They’re loyal to the faction first and to the principle much later than that.

What I’m seeing are various FB acquaintances who have chuffily announced that Trump is taking a hard stance in regard to China (the preponderance of tumescence metaphors in politics really gets on my nerves) who previously endorsed the unleashed market model.

If neoliberals are arguing, as they are, that the market is the true judge of everything, except when it isn’t, then they’re either saying that their claim about the market is just motivated reasoning; or they have to admit that “the market is rational” doesn’t end arguments, and we have to engage in argumentation about whether this exception is valid.

As it stands, the neoliberal defense of Trump is: the market is magically rational except when it isn’t, and we aren’t willing to engage in argumentation about any of that. That isn’t a rational position.

How (not) to think about politics in a democracy

I hope I’ve been clear that I believe that politics is about policy—that politics is the realm in which we deliberate about what policies we should pursue, as people in a shared world (what Hannah Arendt called a “common” world). Those policy options are not a binary, and our commitment to any policy shouldn’t derive from our loyalty to our in-group. Effective public disagreement about our policy options doesn’t require that we argue dispassionately, calmly, decorously, or with any particular feelings (such as respect) toward everyone else involved in the argument.

A model of public disagreement that says we need to be calm and respectful toward others is a model that assumes that people don’t really disagree, or don’t really care. That’s a bad model.

We should think about politics, all politics–the politics of our job, club, church, HOA, state, country—as the space in which we try to respond to the fact of legitimate disagreement.

Unhappily, perhaps the most common way of responding to that fact is to deny that disagreement is legitimate. This view says that our political problems aren’t complicated, that the correct answer to the problem is obvious to any reasonable person.

This assumption quickly leads to motivism and arguments for disenfranchisement.

It eventually leads to fascism or authoritarianism of one kind or another.

People genuinely disagree because we genuinely have conflicting interests and values. In addition, we all have limited perception, and therefore none of us can see an issue from every possible perspective. We disagree because each one of us is always at least a little bit wrong. We disagree because we reason differently. We disagree because we really disagree. And yet there is a we—a people whose lives are infinitely entangled, a we that includes people we don’t know, and might not have been born. In politics, the we of our policy decisions is not the we of our in-group.

So, the first rule of effective democratic deliberation is that it acknowledges that disagreement is inevitable and potentially productive.

This isn’t to say that all points of view are equally valid, nor that we are prohibited from being angry and judgmental about points of view with we disagree. It’s fine (even good) to be angry with people who disagree with us. Someone who is openly angry isn’t necessarily making a more irrational argument than someone who appears to be calm.

An apparently calm person isn’t necessarily making a rational argument, and a person who is angry isn’t necessarily making an irrational argument. The rationality of an argument is most effectively determined by the ways the claims fit together, are defended, and how they related to the argument(s) to which it claims to be a response.

The second rule of effective democratic deliberation is that we do not assess arguments on the basis of the affect of the people making the argument.

If we say that disagreement is legitimate, and that we aren’t going to dismiss arguments on the basis that some interlocutors (as they say in argumentation theory) are emotional, then on what grounds are we going to assess arguments?

And here I want to point to the fact that our common notion of political deliberation is poisoned by the false sense that you either believe that the truth is obvious or you are a rabid relativist. It is not obvious to you in the morning whether it will rain, but you do not therefore believe that all points of view regarding the weather are equally legitimate.

Our world, from the mundane (what will traffic be like on my way to work) to the global (what would the consequences be of this trade policy), is not a world in which we are either certain or clueless. We live in a world of probabilities when it comes to the weather. When it comes to the weather, we do not think that a person is either certain or clueless about it. Most of us manage to understand that an 80% chance of rain is not a statement that it will rain (although many people do manage to misunderstand that). We can make a judgment about what to wear even though we recognize our information about the weather is uncertain. Our judgment might be wrong.

The third rule of effective democratic deliberation is that we understand that the correct answer is not obvious–because we are in a world of uncertainty, but acknowledging uncertainty doesn’t mean being unable to judge.

Being uncertain doesn’t mean being indecisive. I can’t be certain that I’m picking the best outfit for the day, but that doesn’t mean I spend eternity naked in my closet. We spend most of our lives in uncertainty and still manage to make a decision about how to get to work (that might be wrong), apply for a job (that might be terrible), go out on a date with someone (which might be disastrous), buy a taco.

The problem is that a lot of people manage that uncertainty by denying that they are uncertain, and when they get evidence that they made a bad decision, they don’t admit the error, or don’t take responsibility for it. And then they can’t learn from their mistakes.

If I decide to wear a shirt that has to be dry cleaned on a hot day when I know I’ll sweat a lot, I not only have to admit it was a mistake, but then I should think about what went wrong with my decision-making process, especially if that same mistake happens repeatedly.

People felt certain that Christians should support slavery, segregation, criminalizing homosexuality. They were wrong.

The fourth rule of effective democratic deliberation is that feeling certain that you are right doesn’t mean you are. Certainty is more often affective than it is cognitive.

Slaves felt slavery was wrong. They were right.

Feeling that you’re right, believing that a source is true or objective because it rings true to you, feeling certain, having seen evidence with your own eyes—none of those things necessarily mean you’re right, but they might. Feelings are something about which we can argue. Defenders of slavery refused to consider the feelings of slaves, while they spent a lot of time talking about their own feelings. The problem with the argument about slavery wasn’t that it was a feelings v. reason argument, but that only some feelings were considered valid.

The whole point of the weather example is that the world in which we live is not one that is one that legitimates someone being cognitively certain. The sense of being certain is an affective choice—people feel certain. And that feeling of certainty is not necessarily the consequence of evidence.

Acknowledging that we are in a world of uncertainty doesn’t mean we’re in a world in which we have to think all points of view are equally valid. But it is a world in which “This claim must be true because I feel certain it’s true” is not actually a good argument.

This is a very fallacious appeal to authority, the false authority of personal conviction. That a person feels certain about something doesn’t mean it’s true; if they feel certain that their memory of an event is accurate, that’s a datapoint. But that evidence has to be assessed like any other piece of evidence, and one of the things we should consider is whether, on the whole, this source is reliable. Feeling certain is a feeling, and so it should be argued about just as much as we argue about other feelings. And we should argue about feelings—our policies should be grounded in our feelings about future generations, our fears, our hopes—but that someone has a strong feeling doesn’t end the argument. That someone feels certain doesn’t end the argument as to whether they’re right.

The fifth rule of effective democratic deliberation is that we are willing to argue about and with feelings, and that feelings don’t end the argument, including the feeling of certainty.

All political arguments are grounded in and usefully informed by feelings. People who wear “fuck your feelings” t-shirts feel strongly that anyone who disagrees with them is wrong. They also think that criticisms of racism, sexism, sexual assault, sexual harassment, ableism, and so on (what they call “political correctnss”) are grounded in the notion that those things are bad because it hurts someone’s feelings. That’s because they live in an informational enclave that inoculates them against what arguments about sexism and racism and so on are actually about.

So, is the “fuck your feelings” about feelings not mattering—an odd claim since the people wearing it feel strongly—or is it saying fuck your feelings? Those t-shirts say their feelings matter; yours don’t.

Either feelings matter or they don’t. When people argue that only the feelings of some groups matter (or only the experts of some group, or the policies of some group), then they arguing for abandoning democracy. Those are all arguments (or assumptions) that only one group really counts. That’s a common way to think about disagreements (and communities), and it’s a bad one.

It’s a way of denying legitimate disagreement that hurts communities in the long run, but seems to provide a kind of solidarity in the short run, and it makes people feel better about themselves (by pretending that “everyone” thinks the same things they do). A better strategy is to hold everyone to the same standards—everyone has feelings, and we can argue with and about them.

The sixth rule of effective democratic deliberation is that we argue together by holding one another to the same standards.

Holding one another to the same standards isn’t saying that we think all arguments are equally valid. Nor does saying that you might feel certain and yet be wrong mean abandoning judgment entirely.

It means that we need to think about ways of making and assessing arguments that aren’t just about whether a claim seems true to us. It also doesn’t mean that we decide an argument is true because it can be supported with evidence that’s true. “All cats should be killed because these cats did a bad thing” is an argument with evidence, and the evidence might be true, but it isn’t a reasonable argument. It isn’t a reasonable way for us to argue because none of us would apply that standard—kill all members of a group because some of them did a bad thing—to our in-group. It is not a way of arguing that any of us would consider valid if applied to us. Therefore, we shouldn’t apply it to others.

We all think that we are reasonable, and we can all find evidence to support what we believe. That’s how motivated reasoning works.

That you believe your beliefs to be reasonable, that you can find evidence to support your beliefs, that you can point to experts whom you believe to be reasonable who say you’re right—none of that actually means your beliefs are reasonable.

Instead of trying to figure out if we’re right by looking for evidence that supports our position, we need to ask ourselves if we would know if we were wrong. Are our beliefs falsifiable? In other words, what evidence would make us change our minds? Are we getting information from sources that tell us when they’ve been wrong (because all media make mistakes)? Are we getting information from media that represents all the positions, especially opposition positions, fairly? Are we getting information from media that would tell us if an in-group member behaved badly or an out-group member was right?

The seventh rule of effective democratic deliberation is that we have to work to make sure we’re getting information from various perspectives.

A common mistake that people make about sources is to think that sources are either “biased” or “objective.” There are more and less reliable sources, but the whole concept of bias is indefensible. We are all biased. We think, act, feel, and believe within a world of cognitive biases.

Being biased and being rational aren’t mutually exclusive. And that we are biased doesn’t mean we’re incapable of rational policy argumentation. A rational approach to argument means acknowledging the ways our biases might be influencing us, and that’s why we have to try to perspective-shift, to look at our claims from the perspective of others. Would we think this a good argument if made by an out-group? Would we consider this a good way of arguing if made by an out-group?

If not, then we need to stop making that argument, or admit it isn’t valid.

Notice that I’m talking about the validity of arguments being determined by standards that apply across all arguments. That’s what makes rational argumentation. Rational argumentation isn’t argument on the part of people who are rational, nor is it argument that has certain surface features. It’s about how people treat one another.

The eighth rule of effective democratic deliberation is that the fairness rule applies to how we assess the validity of arguments.

One common way that people think they’re being rational when they aren’t is when they’re engaged in a fallacious version of argument from authority. People have a tendency to reason by in/out-group membership. One of the consequences of our world is that there is always a study published in a journal that claims to be peer-reviewed and written by someone with advanced degrees that is unmitigated bullshit. Academic reviewers who are doing their job as reviewers appropriately don’t just argue for publication of arguments they think are true, but ones they think are worth arguing about. So, that something is published in a well-respected journal doesn’t mean everything it says is true.

And then there are journals that are “peer-reviewed,” sort of, in that, if you pay enough, you can get peer reviewers who will approve your article. There are also journals associated with an organization with a political agenda that will only publish articles that promote that agenda, such as the Family Research Association. That something is published in one of those journals doesn’t mean it’s true. Nor does it mean it’s false.

It means that studies should always be considered critically.

The ninth rule of effective democratic deliberation is that we have to understand that an argument being published in a journal claiming to be “peer-reviewed” doesn’t mean it’s true. It just means, at best, that it’s worth arguing about.

I’m arguing, passionately, for effective political deliberation grounded in rational policy argumentation, and I’m not saying that feelings should be excluded from political deliberation, especially not the feeling that you’re right.

We should feel we’re right. We should feel passionately that we’re right. Political activism (from voting to knocking on doors) requires believing that we’re right.

But believing that we’re right doesn’t require that we think that our position is the only one that should be considered—that anyone who disagrees with us is evil and should be shunned. What I’m saying (and it’s what a lot of scholars and thinkers about democracy say) is that democracy requires the conviction that you are right so deep that you act on it, with the mental caveat that you might be wrong such that you don’t kill, expel, or disenfranchise everyone who disagrees with you.

Authoritarian systems say that only this political stance is valid, and all others can be silenced as not legitimate political positions, and therefore argumentation is a waste of time. They might engage in trolling, propaganda, demagoguery, but the last thing they will do is engage in argumentation in which all parties are held to the same standards of argumentation.

People who support authoritarian systems don’t see themselves as subverting democracy. They see themselves as promoting true democracy. They believe that politics isn’t an issue of policy, but identity. They believe that there are people who are really the people, whose views really count, and a true democracy is a political system that entirely and only promotes the interests and policy agenda of those real people.

Since these people tend to think in binaries, they think that, if you aren’t as authoritarian as they are in favor of their group, you have no values at all.

Democracy isn’t about what group you’re in; democracy is a world of policy argumentation.

The tenth rule of effective democratic deliberation requires that we understand that there are ways of arguing that contribute to determining the life of our common world, and those ways of arguing operate across political positions.

Authoritarian politics says that there is only one group should have political authority because only that group really represents the interests of “the people.” States that practiced race-based criteria for voting were authoritarian and not democratic (with “the group” being a race); states that are gerrymandered are authoritarian and not democratic (with “the group” being one party).

Authoritarian politics says that it’s legitimate to deny voting rights to various groups because they don’t have the authority to make political decisions.

A person, or group, arguing that there are only two sides to our political world, and that “the other side” is entirely bad is engaged in a damaging kind of discourse, one that’s bad for our community, and bad for our common world getting to good solutions. I’m not saying they are bad, that they should be denied a voice or vote, that our world should be cleansed of them; I’m saying their way of arguing is bad.

I often find myself getting into confusing arguments on this point, partially because some people can only think in terms of identity, and so they can’t distinguish between being the two very different claims: you are a bad person; you are making a bad argument. Good people make bad arguments, and bad people make good arguments.

There are people we believe are bad, who are making what we consider terrible arguments. It’s fine for us to think some people are bad, and it’s fine for us to think (and even say) that some arguments are dishonest, ignorant, incoherent, stupid, evil, and so on. But, if we think that all arguments other than ours are dishonest, ignorant, and so on, then we’re in the realm of demagoguery. It’s damaging when we think the political realm has only one legitimate position in it (ours) and that every other position should be silenced.

I’m saying that effective democratic deliberation has people who disagree deeply, profoundly, disrespectfully, sincerely, and yet can find ways to argue together.

The eleventh rule is that we understand that we are arguing together with people with whom we passionately disagree and might even think are total jerks.

We might think the other people are jerks because they are jerks, because we disagree with them deeply, or because our sources of information have inoculated against even listening to them, and we’re projecting jerk arguments onto people who might have a point of view that would benefit us to hear.

We are not actually in a world polarized between the left and the right; we aren’t even in a world that is on a continuum between the left and right. We are in a world in which our media—ranging from some rando person’s youtube channel to MSNBC—has learned that you don’t get viewers by promising a nuanced explanation of the complicated range of options we have available to us in our vexed situation. You get viewers by simplifying issues, engaging in demagoguery, and making media a prolonged two minutes hate.

The twelfth rule is that we are not in a world of only two options on every issue, and the political realm is not a zero-sum battle between two sides.

I mentioned earlier that we are all prone to cognitive biases, but we aren’t hopelessly trapped by them. Two particularly important biases for thinking about effective democratic deliberation are in-group favoritism and confirmation bias. Our first impulse is to hold our in-group to lower standards than any out-group because, oddly enough, we believe our group is better. So, if an in-group President issues a lot of executive orders, he’s decisive; an out-group President who does exactly the same thing is a fascist authoritarian.

Another really interesting way that in-group favoritism comes up is in whataboutism, the moment that says that it’s okay for an in-group political figure to do this because an out-group political figure did it.

That can look like a fairness argument, but it isn’t. Fairness is about holding all groups to the same standard. Whataboutism comes from the weird accounting in zero-sum binary politics.

Whataboutism says that any bad in-group behavior is erased by finding any similar out-group behavior. Fairness is asking that all groups be held to the same behavior; whataboutism is about vengeance. It’s the way you argued when you were ten: you were justified in borrowing your brother’s bike without asking because he took your basketball without asking six months ago; he says he was justified in that because you took his mitt without asking a year before that; you were justified in borrowing his mitt because three months before that he borrowed….

In a culture of demagoguery, every argument is about how the in-group is better than the out-group.

In the world of effective democratic deliberation, fairness means that your in-group bad behavior isn’t justified because an out-group member did it too. It means you condemn that behavior regardless of group membership.

The thirteenth rule of effective democratic deliberation is that we value fairness across groups over in-group favoritism and confirmation bias.

These rules don’t guarantee good decisions, or even good processes, but they are ways that tend toward better processes.

The Chosen One

I used to have a colleague who got all of his information from Fox News. Whenever we got into a political disagreement (which wasn’t frequent), he would make some claim to me, and I would show it was wrong. It never changed his reliance on Fox. This isn’t just an issue with Fox—I have the same exchange with people who repeat things from Raw Story, various youtube channels, Mother Jones, all sorts of dodgy sites about nutrition, their fanatical Facebook group, and so many others.

What’s striking about all these cases is that, even in cases when they get shown that their source of information has lied to them, they don’t abandon the source.

They don’t abandon the source because they are engaged in motivated reasoning, in which they begin with beliefs, and then look for data that supports those beliefs. Motivated reasoning is our fallback way of reasoning; it’s deeply embedded even in how we perceive. And so the issue is what is our motivation: we might be motivated to believe that our in-group is good and the out-group is bad, and then we only notice and value data that supports those two beliefs (and engage in motivism when necessary).

That’s what’s happening with Trump’s saying that “he is the chosen one.”

He’s talking about the trade war with China, and, at a certain point, he looks up at the sky and says, “I am the chosen one.”

What did he mean?

He might have meant that he thinks he is the Second Coming of Jesus, the King of Israel, and actually God. While there are people who say Trump is chosen by God to be President, the people who argue that’s what he was claiming (especially in light of his retweeting someone making that claim) are on very shaky ground. I think that’s the least reasonable reading of what he was doing.

Others argue that he is just a troll, and they mean that as a compliment. He’s engaged in a trade war, they argue, that has merit (especially given China’s long violation of basic principles regarding intellectual property, which he mentions). Trump’s saying he’s the chosen one, and looking to the sky is just good TV, as he knows it will make “the libs” foam at the mouth. I suspect that’s true.

Let’s assume that’s the right reading—that Trump was just engaged in good TV, and doesn’t think he’s God–that still doesn’t make what he did okay. What he said is that all the other Presidents have screwed it up, and he sees himself as the only President since Nixon to have the right relationship to China. I don’t think he really thinks he’s the Second Coming, but I do think he believes (as do many of his followers) that he is the only one to get it right. That’s call the fallacy of “universal genius.” It’s arrogant. Either he believes that–that he is the only person to get it right since Nixon opened relations with China–or he’s lying.

Great TV happens when you make extreme claims. So, perhaps, Trump was lying, and he doesn’t think he’s getting a better deal. That should trouble his supporters, since it means he isn’t really engaged in arguing with anyone who disagrees with him.

I think he meant it. I think everything about Trump says he sees himself as a universal genius who is the only one who knows the right answer, and who gets great deals through brinksmanship. He meant what he said when he presented himself as the only President who could get a good deal with China. Better than Reagan, better than Bush. He thinks he can reject what everyone else recommends as a good strategy in favor of his gut instinct. That strikes me as arrogant.

I mentioned a colleague who only got his information from Fox, Limbaugh, and various other right-wing sources, and I mentioned that his information was always wrong. One of our disagreements involved whether Obama had claimed to have ended global warming. My colleague said he had, and I sent my colleague the clip in question, and even he had to admit Obama had said no such thing. “But,” this colleague said, “he was arrogant.”

There are two ways to think about that response. One is that my colleague cares about the arrogance of political figures and would be offended by any arrogant political figure. The second is that he was engaged in motivated reasoning, and just needed to find some reason to continue to think what Obama said was bad; he only objects to arrogance if it’s out-group.

He supports Trump.

So, he doesn’t care about arrogance. He never cared about arrogance. He was just looking for reasons to support his hate of Obama.

Our political world is really just that bitch eating crackers like she owns the place.

Personally, I think Trump even making a joke that he is the Chosen One is blasphemy, especially considering the earlier tweets, but I don’t think he actually believes he’s God. It’s still blasphemy, though. I think interpreting him as saying he thinks he’s God is just that bitch eating crackers; so was my colleague’s perpetual outrage about everything Obama did (including arguing that Michelle Obama dishonored the position of First Lady by wearing a sleeveless dress, but he had no issues with Melania).

There are two ways we get ourselves out of the bitch eating crackers world of politics: when we hear the call of the pleasures of outrage about some out-group political figure, we can ask ourselves whether we would be equally outraged were it an in-group political figure.

If not, if we would find explanations, rationalizations, exceptions for an in-group member who did the same thing, then we are not outraged on principle about the behavior. We’re just hating on the out-group. We’re just settling deep in the pleasures of outrage.

Second, we can ask whether we are getting information from sources that would tell us if the out-group behavior wasn’t that bad or that there are plenty of in-group members engaged in the same behavior. If we only get information from sources that tell us how awful the out-group is, or inoculates us against their arguments, then we’re still not actually engaged in reasonable assessment of our political options, but just rolling around in our outrage about Them.

We can work ourselves into a foaming sweat as to whether Trump sees himself as God, or whether libs are idiots for thinking he did.

Or, perhaps, could we argue about Trump’s trade war with China?

Does Trump have a coherent policy agenda? Or is it really just a very long two-minutes hate?

One argument is that Trump doesn’t have a coherent policy agenda—he never intended to be President, and he was always out for himself, and he is now just engaged in doing whatever the people who fawn on him say is the right policy, as well as whatever benefits him or his family.

The second argument is that Trump represents a new kind of conservatism. According to John Burtka, this national conservatism has these policy goals:

In economics, it would aim to strengthen the middle class, reduce income inequality and develop an industrial policy to ensure economic independence from China for essential military supplies.

Policy proposals could include incentivizing investment in capital equipment and research and development; ending tax advantages for shareholder buybacks; federal spending on infrastructure; promoting skilled trades and vocational programs; busting up inefficient monopolies through antitrust enforcement; slowing immigration rates to tighten labor markets and raise wages for the working class; holding universities liable for student loan debt in cases of bankruptcy; and raising tariffs across the board while slashing taxes on the middle class.

As relates to culture, national conservatives would aim to support families by being pro-life for the whole life. Policy ideas might include paid family leave, increasing the child tax credit, federally funded prenatal and maternal care, reducing or eliminating income tax on families with three or more children, and working toward a society in which a mother or father can support a family on a single income. America’s Judeo-Christian roots would be celebrated, and churches and charitable organizations would be given preference in caring for the poor.

In foreign affairs, national conservatives’ goal is to protect the safety, sovereignty and independence of the American people. America’s regime-change wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen would be recognized as imperial hubris, and anyone involved in their promotion exiled from future positions in Republican administrations. Presidents who ignore congressional authorization for war would be impeached, and members of Congress who eschew their constitutional duties would be stripped of committee assignments and “primaried” in the next election. We would command the seas and space, bring the remaining troops home, secure our own borders and rebuild America.

The third argument is that the pro-Trump media is scrambling to defend the deeply incoherent GOP policy agenda, one that can’t be defended rationally because it isn’t rational, and so they’re deliberately deflecting from affirmative policy arguments to “virtue signaling” and fear-mongering about the Other.

The fourth argument is that ideology doesn’t matter, just outcome. It doesn’t matter if Trump is personally racist, corrupt, senile, as long as he is getting a good outcome for the US. I’m going to leave this one aside, since it’s an actively dangerous argument—it is how democracies die. (Also businesses, but that’s a different post.)

Let’s focus on the second, since it’s the only one that claims that Trump’s actions aren’t either coming from his personal sense of perpetual injury/need for reassurance/greed or from his having done whatever the last person who flattered him said he should do.

And I think it’s helpful to spend a moment to notice that even his defenders rarely try to defend his actions as rationally grounded in a coherent policy agenda that is logically connected to defensible goals. Most pro-Trump rhetoric is that what he is doing is good because it hurts libs, the economy is good, and his demagoguery is great because he’s stigginit to the libs by not being politically correct. In other words, most pro-Trump rhetoric is openly irrational and “HAHAHA WE’RE WINNING.”

That’s interesting.

That’s interesting because the argument of many scholars of rhetoric and political science is that support for Trump is not a rational commitment to an affirmative set of political goals connected to set of policies that can be rationally defended as achieving those goals as much as an affective and tribal framing of politics as whether “we” are better than “them.”

Thus, Trump defenders responding to this criticism by saying, “Democrats do it too” supports that interpretation of Trump supporters: that they can’t defend their policy case(s) affirmatively, but think entirely in terms of a zero-sum between their reductive notion of our political options.

That’s why the second argument matters so much: this is claiming to be a coherent statement of principle on the part of Trump conservatism.

So, let’s take it seriously.

How many of those things has Trump actually done?

In other words, the strongest argument for Trump having a coherent political ideology fails on its face.

That’s interesting.

Our crisis of reasoning

We don’t have a constitutional crisis, or a crisis of civility. We have a crisis of motivated reasoning.

I am a scholar of train wrecks in public deliberation—times when communities decided, after much deliberation, and with many policy opportunities, to pursue a course of action they had plenty of evidence was a bad one. And then, usually, when they got evidence that it was a bad course of action, they recommitted to the clearly bad policy, but with more will—such as the Athenians’ decisions about whether and how to invade Sicily, the US commitment to slavery and then segregation, Hitler’s decisions regarding Stalingrad (and lots of others).

These aren’t just decisions I think are bad, but ones that the communities themselves regretted (sometimes, as with the commitment to slavery, by pretending they never made that decision).

It’s conventional for academics to say, “It’s more complicated than that,” but in this case it really isn’t complicated at all, and the ways people reason badly are well known.

Communities talk themselves into disastrous decisions, while ignoring all the reasonable criticisms of their position, when one position gets associated with loyalty to “us” (the in-group). When we are presented with complicated situations, and especially uncertainty (and, let’s be clear, every important political decision has a lot of uncertainty) we all have a tendency to manage our anxiety about the uncertainty by relying more on reasoning from in-group, and to be more defensive about our in-group. We are motivated to reason in a way that confirms our in-group is good, and all of our problems are caused by the out-group.

Imagine that you are watching your favorite team play, and there is an ambiguous situation, and the ref calls against your team, you will feel outrage on behalf of your team. The rational response (that is, one grounded in a sense that the data about the decision should be the same regardless of in- or out-group) would be to think, “Well, maybe that’s right.” But, if you are motivated to reason about the evidence on the basis of your in-group loyalties, then you’ll be outraged.

And, and this is important, your expressing outrage is also a way of performing in-group loyalty. Having a rational response (that is, one that assesses the call regardless of in- or out-group affiliation) would, especially in the case of a disputed call, show you to be not loyal to the in-group.

We are in a world of evading policy argumentation in favor of framing all policy issues as opportunities of performing in-group loyalty, which means that any argument or policy that makes Them mad is good for us. Political theorists talk about the fallacy of the “fixed pie” model—it’s the sense that the “goods” of our political world (police protection, health care, educational opportunities, infrastructure ranging from clean water to reliable bridges, being able to get political figures to take our concerns seriously) are a fixed amount, so anyone not like you getting a good must hurt you somehow. And, if you can’t get the good, then keeping them from getting a good is a kind of win.

The fixed pie model is part of making every issue an issue of in- or out-group identity. Democrats are framed as pro-immigrant and pro-government, and Republicans as anti-immigrant and anti-government, so, oddly enough, many people will vote Republican because they’re mad about a policy that Republicans enacted.

And that way of thinking about politics hurts everyone. Take, for instance, the issue of immigrants taking the jobs of “Americans” because they’re willing to work for less. The mainstream media (by which I mean Fox, which is the major source of information for a plurality of Americans) is used as an argument for being restrictive at our borders, in a way that means most of us could never have come to the US (and, no, not all the people who show up at our borders are illegal).

If the problem is that employers hire “illegal immigrants” rather than Americans, then a stricter policy at the border is not the sensible solution. If the problem is that Americans can’t get decent wages because “illegals” take the jobs, then the most obvious solution is to have high penalties for employers who hire “illegals.”

But, Trump, who hires a lot of “illegals,” isn’t arguing this point. He isn’t advocating a policy that would solve the problem he claims to care about (he never does). That’s because we aren’t in the realm of rational policy argumentation. We’re in the realm of politics as really about whether good or bad people will get their way, and simply making Them unhappy is as good as getting our way.

Middle income people caring that open borders will hurt their ability to earn a living wage is a legitimate concern. That concern is not solved by separating children at the borders. It’s better solved through various policies, including making it unprofitable for employers to exploit undocumented workers. Why aren’t we arguing about that?

Privilege and the rhetoric police

[Image from George Walling’s 1887 Recollections of a New York Chief of Police]

A lot of people assume that the only function of rhetoric is to persuade all readers to adopt your point of view. That’s wrong in a bunch of ways. A lot of times people have a composite audience, and might have different intentions for different audiences (such as a text with dog whistles, intended to calm some audience members down about whether the rhetor is a war-mongerer while having enough dog whistles that other members of the audience are cheered by the racist and war-mongering of the text—Hitler’s March 23, 1933 speech).

But, in addition, sometimes people have an intended audience, and have no intention of trying to persuade every person who comes in contact with the text.

Imagine that you and a friend are chatting quietly in a fairly empty Tacodeli, and you’re talking about how much you hate squirrels and how awful squirrels are. Although uninvited, I come in and sit at your table, and then say, “You shouldn’t be saying this or talking this way. I like squirrels, and you are doing nothing to persuade me that you’re right. In fact, you’re making me think that your kind of people are irrationally anti-squirrel.” You’d be thoroughly justified in saying, “We weren’t talking to you.” This is rhetoric policing.

Imagine that you and a friend are ranting about squirrels in a Tacodeli, and everyone there is forced to listen to your rant—it would be fair for someone to tell you to tone it down.

The internet makes that analogy weird, in that you can wander into all sorts of conversations in which you’re not part of the intended audience. Imagine a site oriented toward talking about college football. A person who thinks college football is boring might wander on and say, “This site is stupid, and I’m not interested in anything you’re saying, so you all suck. You need to make this site more interesting to people who hate college football.”

Perhaps it’s someone who loves Twilight, and the site has a lot of snark about Twilight, and so that officer of the rhetoric police says, “I have no interest in college football, and I love Twilight, and so your site is doing nothing to persuade me to like football. You should be more welcoming to Twilight fans who hate college football.” It would be perfectly fair for the regular members of the community to say, “I am so sorry that there is something so wrong with your internet connection that you have no possible way of engaging with the vast array of possible communities, and only have access to this site.” Or, perhaps, “I am so sorry that someone is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to read this site. Try dialing 911.” Or just, “Go away.”

I once wrote a talk I rather liked, oriented toward academics, about the ways that Milton’s Samson Agonistes exemplifies misogynistic discourse about women. I had a misogynist (let’s call him Bunny) not at the conference,but who ran across the talk somewhere, tell me that it wasn’t a good talk because it didn’t persuade him. He was rhetoric policing, and he wasn’t part of my audience.

But, he said, if feminists really want to change things, we will have to persuade men like him that there is some validity to our arguments. Therefore, I should have imagined someone like him when I wrote that talk. I pointed out to him that he didn’t try to think about how feminists might respond to anything he wrote, including what he was writing to me at that moment. He never understood that point. He was pretty clear that changing things about feminism would require that anything that any feminist wrote at any time and for any audience had to be oriented toward him, but he honestly was confuzzled at my notion that he would try to be aware of my rhetorical needs in something written to me.

All discourse had to accommodate him and his beliefs, but he didn’t have to accommodate others’ beliefs. His rhetoric policing was an absolutely perfect gem of privilege.

One of the powers of privilege is the power to interrupt conversations of which you are not a part and insist, not just that you be made a part, but that the whole conversation be oriented toward you, accommodating your beliefs, answering your concerns, being careful about your feelings.

Imagine a problem-solving discussion between two highly-ranked tech people about a very specialized issue. It would be seen as weird (or worse) if an intern in advertising interrupted their conversation and insisted they have the discussion in a way he could understand. But their boss, even if zir background wasn’t tech, could interrupt and rhetoric police. The boss has that privilege.

And lots of people have that privilege. Parents have the privilege to ask what their children were talking about (and most children will lie), K-12 teachers have the privilege of asking students what they were talking about (college teachers have the privilege of saying “STFU and listen to what I’m saying”).

If you are from a privileged background (as I am—very privileged), you have a tendency to assume that everyone must accommodate your beliefs, preconceptions, prior knowledge. Bunny unintentionally gave away the playbook for misogynists—what he was saying was that he knew people like him were in power, and that they would only go along with change if their concerns were pandered to.

There is a website that is, as it says everywhere on their site, “Black News, Opinions, Politics and Culture.” And a white guy wrote in and said that, while he was trying to be anti-racist, he found the site didn’t really accommodate his beliefs.  And so, Michael Harriot wrote back:

“The Root is a site for black people, by black people, about black shit. We are not in the business of transforming racists into social justice warriors or changing hearts and minds in hopes of reversing white supremacy. Words cannot do that. If they could, I would have slit my throat with the sharpest, shiniest razor I could find years ago. I would consider my life a failure.
We don’t mind if white people read our content. In fact, we like it when you do. But don’t think for a minute that we are selecting words while considering the sentiment of Caucasian acceptance.
I know that you are accustomed to existing in a universe where everything bends toward whiteness, but do not let that factoid delude you into believing that you are the sky. You are eavesdropping on a conversation among black people. We don’t care if you listen. In fact, we are happy that you are listening, but don’t be bamboozled into thinking we are talking to you.”

Rhetoric policing can be helpful, when it’s from someone we’re trying to reach, and they’re helping us be more effective. As soon as it’s about how you can persuade me, and you should do so because I count more than the audience you’re explicitly trying to reach, it’s all about privilege.