Category: Uncategorized

Rhetoric and Racism: How to argue about whether something is racist (revised)

[Image from here]

This class is about how to argue whether a text or action of some kind is racist; this is not about going through the semester stamping things RACIST or NOT RACIST. That’s a waste of time, largely because it isn’t a neat binary between racist and non-racist things (there are degrees and kinds of racism). But it’s also a waste of time because it doesn’t get at why disagreements about racism get so ugly so fast. This class is about more useful ways to talk and think about race that should enable you to have better disagreements about racism.

One point that we’ll come back to again is that almost no one thinks they’re racist (I’ve never met a racist who said s/he was racist)—many people believe that as long as you don’t mention race, use a known racist term, feel and express active hostility to every member of any other race, then what you said/did can’t be racist. There are also people who say, “I can’t be racist, I’m married to a POC” or “I can’t be racist because I’m a member of [an ethnicity against which there has also been discrimination].”

Since they didn’t say the word race, let alone mention any specific race, and are not demonstrably racist against all non-white races, the person who called them racist is the one who “made this an issue about race,” and that makes the accuser the Real Racist Here. There are other assumptions that people make about what it means to be racist that, paradoxically, contribute to racism—such as thinking that racists know they’re racist, and intend to be racist; that racism is conscious hostility to every member of that race (so your black friend is a card you can pull out to show you aren’t racist); that there is only one kind of racism (what scholars call biological racism). There’s also the muddled notion that, since racism is bad, only bad people say or do racist things, if someone is accused of having done a racist thing, they can be exonerated by someone testifying that they are good people—they feed the homeless, they are nice to people, they have a POC as a friend.

That last point is important–that people falsely believe that the claim that someone has done something racist can be deflected by pointing out something good they’ve done–, and it’s where I want to start: what happens quickly in a discussion about racism is that, if you point out that you think I did something racist, I now see the issue (what we’ll call the stasis) of the argument as my identity as a good or bad person (a racist or non-racist), and so I start defending myself as a good person. Whether I am a good person has nothing to do with whether I’m racist—as you’ll see in this class, there have always been good people, many of whom were engaged in important anti-racist activity, who did racist things.

On the whole, I think Jay Smooth’s advice is really good—don’t argue about whether a person is racist, but whether that thing they did was racist. (Also, I love the term “rhetorical Bermuda triangle.”) After a while, if a person does a lot of racist things, I think it’s fair to conclude that they see everything in racist ways, and you can conclude they’re racist—but that’s probably also the moment you aren’t engaging with them anymore. (Or you’re engaging just long enough to ask them to pass the mashed potatoes.) People who are deeply embedded in persistently racist rhetoric are, in my experience, so deeply embedded in identity politics—the notion that the political and social worlds are both zero-sum battles between their “us” and all other groups (“them”) that they’re beyond rational argumentation. This class might help you understand them better, but it won’t help you persuade them because I think they’re beyond persuasion. With people like that, just change the subject or walk away. You can try to argue with them, but don’t keep your hopes high.

But that leaves a lot of people, including you and me, who inevitably do or say racist things, or, at least, things that someone thinks are racist, and who are in situations where we think someone else has done something racist and they probably don’t think they have, but are open to talking about it. This class is not about how we persuade overtly racist people to stop being racist, nor about how we prove we aren’t racist, but about how we talk about the muddled and gerfucked world in which actions, policies, texts, sayings, comments, and conversations might be usefully described as some degree of racist. This class is not about learning to put a stamp of racist or not racist on actions, texts, or people. It’s about trying to talk better about racism. It’s about the assumptions that keep us from having better discussions about racism.

Racism is one of those topics (like grammar, oddly enough—more on that in the class) on which everyone considers themselves an expert. Recently, I found myself in an argument with someone who, when I pointed out that his definition of “racism” didn’t fit with what scholars said about it, said, “Who are these ‘scholars’ of racism? Where are they?” I wanted to post that gif of someone clicking on google, but it would be google scholar. In any case, what matters is that he could have answered that question himself had he queried the topic via google scholar, but he didn’t. He didn’t because he thought racism was an issue about which every person is an expert (or, at least, everyone who agreed with him).

But there are scholars of racism (who agree that there are different kinds and degrees of racism) and the history of concepts of race (who agree that those concepts have changed over time, and they vary across cultures). We’ll read some of them. What scholarship about rhetoric brings to their work is an understanding of how people argue, and especially how people argue productively about definitions.

Different definitions of racism: the rhetorical triangle
The first thing to understand about disagreements is that people in any disagreement engage in what’s called “motivated reasoning”: “motivated cognition refers to the unconscious tendency of individuals to fit their processing of information to conclusions that suit some end or goal.”  One way to think about different definitions of racism is in terms of the rhetorical triangle—people will appeal to different points on the triangle as what constitutes racism.

The notion of the triangle is that a text is created by an author who has a conscious intent as to what impact that text should do to the audience, and it happens within a context. Thus, I am writing this text to try to explain racism to students in the class I’ll be teaching this fall. I’m writing this within the context of the course requirements and readings, and also the context of a President being accused of racism and our world one of increasing  racially-motivated violence.

The rhetorical triangle is really simplistic. The situation is actually much more complicated than that—for instance, I make certain assumptions about students (what references you’ll get, what I’ll need to explain). You look at the assumptions I make and infer what kind of reader I think I have. That is the implied audience. Those assumptions might be wrong; they’ll inevitably be at least slightly wrong. A group of students is a “composite audience” (some of you know more than others, some won’t understand references, and some will find my explanations unnecessary). The actual readers of the text won’t match the implied audience. Similarly, there is a difference between who I really am and how I present myself in this text—the difference between actual and implied author.

This triangle doesn’t really do a good of modelling how texts are actually created, or how people are actually persuaded, but it is a good model of how people think communication works (what might be called “folk rhetorical theory”). And, so, people tend to use it (without even thinking) when trying to assess if someone said or did something racist. So, for instance, if we disagree as to whether Chester said something racist, here’s how that argument might wander around the points on the rhetorical triangle:

• Author: intent
This is the most common stasis for an argument about racism, and it’s often not actually relevant and very rarely useful. People often argue about whether an author consciously intended to say something s/he knew to be racist because the most popular understanding “racism” is that it is the conscious intent to hurt people of another race. I think there are two times that it’s useful to talk about intent, and one is figuring out what we do about it. People often use a term they don’t know is racist, cite a source they don’t realize it’s racist, engage in cultural appropriation when they think they’re honoring a culture, or otherwise do racist things that they wouldn’t have done if they had understood beforehand. But, in all those cases, the lack of intent doesn’t mean the racism disappears. It means the person apologizes and doesn’t do it again. The second way that the discussion of intent can be useful is if Chester sincerely believes he has been misunderstood—he was being sarcastic, for instance. (Dave Chappelle has said some really interesting things about his comedy routine in this light, and Oluo talks about this issue really nicely in her book.)

There are a lot of problems with making “intent” the stasis for arguing about racism. First, it means we aren’t talking about the most important and most damaging kinds of racism (structural, cultural, implicit bias). Second, we quickly get into the issue of motivism—of trying to guess someone’s motives. We’ll talk about both of those much more in the class.

• Author: actual
This stasis also seems sensible within the frame of racism as coming from deliberate intent, and it’s inevitable if we always decide that racists and not racism matter—that is, if we think that there is a binary of racist or not, and we’re trying to figure out whether the person is racist (as though that settles the question of whether the act/text was racist—it doesn’t). If racism is bad because racism is something only bad people do, then if we can figure out if a person is bad or not, we’ve settled the issue of whether they’re racist or not.

That’s like assuming that only bad people are bad drivers, so if you say I’ve driven badly, I could respond with evidence about other ways I’m a good person. Good people can be bad drivers. People can be good in many ways and still engage in, support, or enable racist practices.

• Author: implied
This stasis is pretty uncommon—I’ve only seen it when people are trying to figure out the intent of someone they don’t know, or whom they can’t really identify, or where there isn’t enough information (such as the question as to whether Edgar Allan Poe supported slavery), and so you have to rely on a single text or a few texts. It’s still about whether the person is racist.

• Text: word choice
My sense is that this stasis is in a tie with “actual author” for second most common. This stasis is on the issue of whether the text has the word “race” in it, or a racist epithet. If it doesn’t, then it can’t be racist.

This stasis is attractive to people who believe that things don’t exist till they’re said. These are the same people who, if Uncle Hubert says something racist, and cousin Chester says, “Hey, that’s racist,” that is when the conflict started—everything was fine till then. These people think that they can keep a child from being gay if they don’t let the child come out. There isn’t conflict till the conflict is named because nothing exists till it’s named. (MLK Jr. talks a lot about this, especially in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and “Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience.)

One version of this is almost hilariously casuitical (that is, hair-splitting): that if a rhetor doesn’t mention race, but “culture,” then it isn’t racist. Until the rise of biological racism, “race” was always country of origin. Even after the rise of biological racism, there was a lot of “science” that showed that people from various countries (or continents) were inferior—the Irish, the Poles, the Italians–, biological racism never had a coherent biological definition of race. Some scholars use the term cultural racism, but I’m not wild about that term, since all racism is and always has been about country of origin (sometimes going back pretty far, as with Latinx whose families have been in the US far longer than Trump’s, or Native Americans who are oddly framed as not native to the US). The Jews are not a race.

Here are some questions to ask yourself: are people from Spain white? If two people from Spain move to Mexico and have a child (so that child is a Mexican citizen), is that child white? Are Germans white? If two Germans move to Mexico and have a child, is that child white?

Racism never is and never was actually about biological categories—it’s always about socially constructed categories we have that are entirely political, historical, and thoroughly cultural. Nazis claimed their categories were scientific, but “Jewish” is not a race. Harry Laughlin, the expert who advocated forced sterilization, and extremely restrictive immigration quotas for Poles, Croats, and, well, Eastern Europeans generally, argued that they were different races from the Irish and Italians (or something—his argument is more than a little hard to follow). Madison Grant, still influential among racists, insisted that there were three white races, and intermarriage among them was disastrous. His categories weren’t biological, but cultural, religious, linguistic, and whatever helped his argument (that is, motivated reasoning). In other words, as we’ll talk about in the class, making a “cultural” argument often, but not always, is a racist argument (it depends on whether the “cultural” qualities are naturalized).

Another way that the word choice stasis comes up (with overlaps with context and audience) is whether an author is using dog whistles. That issue is sometimes straightforward (“welfare queen”) but sometimes more complicated, as when there is a possibility of someone not knowing that something is a dog whistle (there was a funny letter to an advice column about an older colleague who was, apparently completely innocently, usimg the Pepe the Frog emoji in emails.).

• Text: argument
This stasis is on the question of whether an argument endorses policies or positions or beliefs that are, in consequence, racist. If you are advocating that some races are more intelligent than others, it doesn’t matter if you avoid “racist” terms—that’s a racist argument. David Duke, for instance, spends an entire book insisting he isn’t racist, while arguing that some races (his) are better than others in every way that matters. It doesn’t matter if he avoids the ‘n’ word. He’s racist. The text: argument is a really productive stasis, but it’s hard for a lot of people to grasp. A culture really concerned about racism would spend a lot of time on this stasis. We don’t.

• Text: tone
Another way that people defend racist arguments or policies as not racist is that they pay attention to tone. Too many people (falsely) assume that the problem with racism is that it is a feeling of hostility toward all members of another race (or toward all other races). They see racism as an expression of hate, and they assume you can’t hate someone without knowing it. It isn’t especially helpful to frame racism as a kind of hate; while there might often be some kind of aversion, racism is quite frequently grounded in condescension, in-group favoritism, erasure, nostalgia, fallacious universalizing, and other ways of thinking that don’t require active hate on the part of individuals. But, if people assume that racism is hate (something we get from movies, where racists are mustache-twirling hateful bigots who know they are bigots and know they hate others), then they assume it can only be expressed with a hateful tone. What you’ll see in this class is that a lot of people have advocated (and enacted) extraordinarily racist policies—including forced sterilization, race-based imprisonment, even genocide—with a calm, “scientific,” sometimes apparently compassionate tone.

• Text: source, format
This stasis doesn’t show up very often, and it can be productive—it can rarely settle the issue, but it can be relevant that an author has a long history of writing racist (or anti-racist) pieces, it’s from a press or journal with a long history of racist (or anti-racist) arguments. That information can help determine if something is satire. It’s also useful to look at sources—if an author is citing racist sources as though they are reliable (and not in order to make a point about their being racist)—then it’s probable that the argument is racist (so this is useful in conjunction with the argument stasis).

• Audience: implied
The implied audience (which some people call “intended” audience—it’s the kind of person the author appears to intend to reach—and others call the textual audience) is the kind of person implied by the various assumptions the author makes. You’ll do much better if you don’t identify the audience by social groups (e.g., students, teachers, white people) since you inevitably end up making generalizations about groups, many of which are false (so, for instance, Malcolm X wasn’t trying to appeal to “black people” with “The Ballot or the Bullet” since it’s an exclusively American argument, and not even all African Americans would agree with his premises). Try to identify an audience in terms of beliefs and assumptions, not identity.

Looking carefully at implied audience can help with disagreements about the argument. For instance, when we’re trying to figure out if an argument is racist we might need to decide if something is satirical, if an author is calling for violence or just engaged in hyperbole, if an author is serious or joking, if an author is repeating a racist claim because s/he endorses it or thinks it’s racist on its face. And trying to figure out that implied audience can help us do those things.

• Audience: actual
In this class, we’ll talk a lot about racism being a question of consequences, and so it’s useful to see how the audience responds (such as that Malcolm X’s audience laughs a lot, or commenters on a post don’t get it). If a text rouses an audience to racist violence, it’s reasonable to argue that it’s racist. Oddly enough, it doesn’t always work the other way—a text might be racist in argument and yet not in consequence because the audience has shifted, its rhetoric is incompetent, or various other reasons.

• Context
When people are arguing about racism, we often end up on the question of context—was that text racist in context (such as Ronald Reagan talking about “states’ rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi; whether we should consider something racist if it was using language and arguments considered “normal” in the era; if the argument was progressive for its era or context). It’s perfectly possible for something to be not racist in one context and racist in another.

As is clear from the above, I think some stases are more productive than others, but I don’t want to sound as though there is only one right stasis. This list is mainly useful for you to understand why people are disagreeing—often you have one person arguing from the stasis of actual author (“I know Chester, and he is a good dog”) and someone else arguing from actual audience (“after that speech, his audience rioted, and attacked squirrels everywhere”). Being able to identify that they are arguing from different stases can mean that the discussion might move to a better place—you might argue, “I’m not saying that Chester is a bad dog, but I’m saying that speech reinforced the racism of the audience, and so he shouldn’t have made it.”

Also, it’s sometimes useful to argue that a text or action is racist from several different perspectives, or to note that someone is fully on the issue of actual author and the issue really is systemic racism. (We’ll talk about that more in class.)

The other point I want to make here is that we often want to make every bad action racism, and that isn’t always helpful (or accurate) for various reasons. Sometimes it is productive to stay off of the racism argument entirely, and just argue that the person is a jerk or the action was terrible.

Different kinds of racism

You’ll read a lot of things this semester that argue for different ways of dividing up kinds of racism. So, when you argue that people disagree about whether This Text is racist (paper #3), and you want to say that one person is assuming that all racism is biological and the other side is cultural, you’ll want to cite specific sources for your definition (such as the Encyclopedia of Race and Racism).

Racism is an instance of in-group favoritism—the tendency to think that members of your in-group are entitled to more than members of out-groups; that in-group members have good motives, and out-group members have bad motives; that the world (or your nation, culture, community) would be better were it only in-group members; that most of our problems are caused by the out-group; that the in- and out-groups shouldn’t be held to the same standards.

So, for instance, I live in an area that has a lot of cyclists come to time themselves for races. Many of them run stop signs, yell at pedestrians, and are generally jerks. I am not a cyclist. For me, cyclists are an out-group. At a certain point, I found myself thinking that cyclists are all jerks. But, once I thought about it, I had to admit that every day I see one or two cyclists behave like jerks, and I see twenty or more cyclists who don’t. Every day, I see a much higher percentage of drivers behave like jerks, but I never came to the conclusion that drivers are jerks. That’s because I’m a driver. They’re in-group. That’s how in-group/out-group thinking works—your mental math is different about in- and out-group members, so you always think that your judgment of the out-group is grounded in empirical data—those two jerk cyclists—but it isn’t, because that data wouldn’t cause you to condemn your in-group (drivers). That’s in-group favoritism.

You take bad behavior on the part of an out-group member as proof that they are basically bad people.

Racism takes in-group favoritism and “naturalizes” it by associating that bad behavior with culture, “race,” ethnicity, or some inherent and inescapable character of a group. My irrational assessment of cyclists wasn’t racism not just because I never said or thought the word race, but because “cyclist” isn’t a category associated with an ethnicity, race, country of origin. Once that cyclist wasn’t on a bike, I wouldn’t assess them as out-group. Racism has two parts: it is in-group/out-group thinking that makes out-group an inescapable identity; also, it is the world in which privileges are (generally unconsciously) given to the inescapable identity of in-group.

Here I’ll review some of the more recurrent categories that scholars use for talking about kinds of racism:

• Cultural racism.  It’s important to keep in mind that the word “race” was used interchangeably with “people” until the early twentieth century (and many people used it that way even longer). Thus, people might talk about “the French race” or “the Irish race” or try to pretend that Jews are a “race.” They were naturalizing the borders and social groups present at that moment in time, by pretending that there were necessary consequences of being a member of a particular language group, within certain borders, or some other odd quality. It was common for people to talk about “race” when they meant religion (as in the case of talking about the Irish race, which meant Catholic). Cultural racism never came up with a coherent definition of “race,” nor used it consistently. Many scholars believe cultural racism is a new phenomenon, with the discrediting of biological racism (the only good thing the Nazis did), but really it’s just a return.
• Biological racism. In the eighteenth century (or perhaps earlier) there was a need to defend a new kind of slavery. Slavery is a long tradition, but, with the exception of the Spartans’ enslavement of the Helots, it wasn’t perpetual—meaning that you might be enslaved because you lost a battle or got indebted, but you could get out of it, and your children weren’t necessarily slaves. The consensus among scholars is that, as the economic practice of “perpetual slavery” (you could be born into slavery, there might be no way out) came to dominate in some areas, there was a need to naturalize it—that is, make it not just an economic or cultural practice, but something grounded in nature. This was particularly important, since the New Testament lists slavers among people who are sinning, and the Hebrew Bible has passages about how to handle slaves violated by the practices dominant in many “Christian” communities.

Thus, through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, experts were trying to find ways to argue that some races (a term they never managed to define) deserved to be enslaved. This is an example of the just world model, or the just world hypothesis (that is, the tendency to assume that the world as it is is just, and so everyone is getting what they deserve—if you’re a slave, you did something or are someone who deserves slavery). This was the era of categorizing (and putting into hierarchies) all the flora and fauna, and so it was an era of saying that differences among human groups were biologically determined.

And there was a tendency to make all taxonomies (ways of categorizing) hierarchical. This was an old notion—that the entire world of God’s creation could be put into a Great Chain of Being. Thus, just as we could say that an ant is lower than a human, we could say that an Italian is lower than a Greek (note, still, there is no coherent definition of race). This all predated Darwin. And, in fact, Darwin didn’t endorse the notion that an ant was “lower” than a human, and he was anti-slavery. Darwin didn’t endorse the notion that evolution heads toward perfection, that some beings are better than others because they are more evolved (the teleological explanation of evolution). But many people used his notion of competition among species to justify how some groups (which they called “races”) had come to dominate others. So, again, the just world model.

• Institutional racism (sometimes used interchangeably with systemic racism)
I think the best way to explain this is for you to think about Parlin (the building). When the building was built in 1953, it didn’t have ramps, only stairs, so it was (and still is, I think) pretty much inaccessible for anyone with even mild problems with stairs. The people who designed the building didn’t get up in the morning and think, “Oh, boy, how can we design the building so it discriminates against disabled people?!” They just didn’t think about disabled people at all. (Which is kind of weird, since lots of students, faculty, or staff end up on crutches at some point.) Institutional racism often comes about people just don’t think about someone having experiences different from theirs—teachers who only include authors of their ethnicity in coursework, or putting a lot of emphasis on standardized test scores in fields or programs where those scores have little predictive value. But it also comes from the ways that unconscious racism can influence decisions, such as a tendency for teachers to come down harder on AAVE than other dialects (because they don’t even realize that they think AAVE is somehow “worse” than other dialects), or operating on the default assumption that all Latinx students are ELL. This really interesting study of how lawyers assess resumes shows that they found more typos (and generally assessed resumes more harshly) if they believed the applicant to be African American. Lawyers use preemptory challenges in ways that hurt non-white defendants disproportionately, and jury deliberations are notoriously influenced by unconscious racism (and sexism, and various other biases) in many ways, ranging from mistrusting testimony by POC to giving POC defendants harsher sentences.

Why is it so hard for us to have good disagreements about race?

We have trouble arguing productively about race as a nation because we have trouble disagreeing about anything. A lot of people believe that the truth is obvious to people of intelligence and goodwill, and that, if two people disagree, one of them is wrong—the people who disagree with us know they’re wrong, and are arguing for perverse reasons; they are idiots corrupted by their political agenda; they are greedy and just looking out for themselves. We are not good at acknowledging that disagreement might be legitimate, or that we might be wrong.

The dominant model for how we know things (an epistemology) is “naïve realism,” which says that you just have to look at the world in an unprejudiced way, and you can see the truth. In fact, we reason by confirmation bias, so that, if you believe that Lithuanians are rude and interrupt everyone, then if someone is rude and interrupts everyone, you’ll be likely to decide that person is Lithuanian, with little or no evidence to that effect. Oddly enough that experience will enable you to think that your racism about Lithuanians is rationally grounded. It isn’t. You don’t know if they are Lithuanian.

If you believe that Lithuanians are rude and interrupt everyone, and you know that someone is Lithuanian, then you’ll notice every time they interrupt anyone and interpret behavior as rude that you wouldn’t consider rude if you did it. (The cyclist example from above.)

Naïve realism gets entangled in supporting racism in three ways: first, naive realists believe that they can know if they’re racist by asking themselves if they are consciously operating from racism; second, they believe that they can know whether someone else is racist by asking themselves whether that person seems racist; third, it enables racism by making people think that races are real—they can look and see different races, and they can see that That Race is bad (again, the cyclist example).

More important, naïve realism—the notion that you can know if something is true by asking yourself whether you really think it’s true—means that people, when presented with disconfirming evidence, just recommit to their beliefs. Naïve realism is confirmation bias; it’s in-group favoritism.

So, one reason people engage in racist actions is that they think they would know if they were doing something racist (a combination of the notion that racism is always conscious and naïve realism), but another is that our entire complicated, nuanced, rich world of policy options is reduced by political parties, the media, and our choices regarding media consumption to the false binary of liberal v. conservative. If you’re in an informational enclave, and you or an in-group political figure is criticized for doing something racist, you’re unlikely to hear the evidence that might support that claim (but you’ll hear about all the evidence for out-group political groups or figures).

We all inhabit worlds of information, and some of those worlds are explicitly in-group (Fox, MSNBC, Infowars, Rush Limbaugh, Mother Jones, Reason). And what those rabidly factional groups do is spend most of their time persuading you that the opposition arguments are terrible, so you shouldn’t even listen to them. This is called inoculation. It isn’t new. Media, pundits, and political figures making racist arguments have always generated support among their base by arguing that, “We are good because those people are awful” and then reducing all the various complicated ways that people disagreed into “Them” (a dumbass parody that no one actually advocated). In the US, in the antebellum era, you either supported the most extreme proslavery positions or you wanted slaves and white women to have sex, you wanted race riots; in the era of segregation, you either supported the most extreme segregationist policies or else you supported black men and white women having sex (I’m not kidding—this was a big deal), a “coffee-colored” world, and the decline of our civilization.

Those arguments (and ideologies) were illogical and entirely false, but they appeared to have a lot of data. Most important, they seemed reasonable to people who thought that the desire to end slavery and segregation was motivated by the desire for black men to have sex with white women. It wasn’t, but the pro-slavery and pro-segregation media presented that as the only real argument that critics of slavery and segregation had. When you watch or read the King/Kilpatrick “debate,” notice that Kilpatrick never really responds to what King actually says, but is obsessed with sex; you’ll see Theodore Bilbo do the same with black scholars—Kilpatrick and Bilbo have been inoculated against counter-arguments, so they don’t even listen.

As I’m emphasizing throughout this class, we should talk about racist actions, but  our culture tends to talk about whether a person is racist. That’s another reason our arguments about racism are so bad. Many people believe that racist actions are the consequence of deliberate decisions to be racist on the part of people who consciously decide to engage in an action that they themselves believe to be racist because they are racists. In this (false) world, there are some people who are racist, and everything they do is deliberately racist.

Also, too many people think there is a binary between racist (really bad) or not racist (good). Some people describe it as a continuum, and that’s a better model, but I think that’s just part of it, because you can have (as you’ll see in the readings) something that argues against biological racism but rests on the premises of cultural racism, or that uses somewhat racist arguments to end a very racist policy.

Our culture also tends to assume that there is a binary of shame v. pride in how we think of ourselves, our nation, our culture—there is the assumption that you are either proud of yourself (meaning you have only done good things), or you think you’ve done something bad (in which case you’re ashamed of yourself). This applies to your sense of your group—you can either take pride in your group (meaning you believe it’s perfect), or you can think your group has behaved badly (in which case you should be ashamed of your group). That’s an actively dumb way to think about ourselves, our culture, our in-groups.

Imagine that someone says to you, “Hey, I think what you just did there was kinda racist,” or “America has a racist past,” or “The Confederacy was racist.” If you believe the three false assumptions above—racism is necessarily an identity argument, something is racist or not, and you can either be proud or ashamed–, then here’s what you hear: “Hey, you are a bad person who should wallow in shame because you decide to be racist every day and every way.” Or, “As an American, you should wallow in shame about the US and spend your whole life apologizing because America and Americans are entirely evil for their deliberate racism.” Or, “If you live in a CSA state or are descended from anyone who fought for the CSA, you should do nothing but wallow in shame and hate your ancestors because they were completely evil.”

You can think your ancestors were completely evil and yet not feel that you have to wallow in shame, you can think they were evil for their racism, but good for some other reason, you can be proud of the good things they did and remorseful for what they did wrong. You can try not to take personally criticisms of your in-groups and acknowledge flaws. There isn’t a binary of shame v. pride—to take pride in something, it doesn’t have to be perfect. And shame is not a particularly useful response to criticism (in fact, it shifts the stasis from what you did to who you are—which is sidetracking).

Think about it this way. You’re driving along, and someone (call him Chester) changes lanes into you and causes y’all to crash. Your car is really damaged. And Chester gets out of his car and you have this conversation:

You: You just changed lanes into me.
Chester: No, I couldn’t have done that because that would make me a bad driver and how dare you call me a bad driver! I am a good person. I foster blind owls, and teach a literacy class at the local public library, and pick up trash on the road.
You: Um, that’s all great, but you did change lanes into me.
Chester: I couldn’t have done that because I’m a good driver. I have never been given a ticket (because I treat police officers with respect, unlike some people), I think terrible things about very unsafe drivers, and I always check my blindspots. And I think the real issue here is that you’ve accused me of being a bad driver.

You wouldn’t say, “Oh, wow, well, yeah, that’s all evidence that you are a good driver, so you can’t possibly have just changed lanes into me.” That would be an absurd conclusion. You would say, “I don’t really care if you’re normally a good driver. I don’t care who you are–I care about what you just did.”

Yet, when someone does something racist, and someone else points it out, we have the “I can’t have changed lanes into you because I’m a good driver” argument. We need to stop having that argument.

There isn’t some binary of being racist (bad, shameful) and not racist (good, pride). Racism isn’t about who we are; it’s, to some extent, about what we do, but even more, it’s about how unconscious biases on the part of many people have a particular outcome. The solution to racism isn’t that some group should feel shame, or stop feeling pride; the solutions are complicated, but we won’t get to those solutions unless we argue better about race.

Hence this class.

I am, on principle, opposed to corruption–except in-group corruption. That’s okay.

[Image from here.]

My father used to tell a story about when he met my mother’s grandmother–an Irish Democrat who loved Jimmy Walker. He asked how she could support him considering how corrupt he was. And her answer was that he couldn’t be corrupt because he was so nice, and he gave so much money to the church.

I’ve been recommending Jan-Werner Müller’s What is Populism since I read it recently—everyone should read it. Here I want to talk about what he says about corruption. His basic argument, as mentioned in a previous post, is one endorsed by many people—that far too many people are willing to be persuaded that only people like them really count when it comes to issues of public policy, laws, and rights. [1]

Unhappily, as Rogers Smith showed, we have always lived within a world of two notions of nationality: one based in in-group/out-group thinking (this group can be trusted in democratic deliberation), and an inclusive one based in the trusting democratic deliberation (which supports birth-right citizenship). The first is racist; the second understands that ideology is socially constructed.

Müller calls the first way of thinking about national identity “populism” (I’d quibble with that term, and call it toxic populism). As he says, that this notion of a real group that counts (Americans/Germans/Lutherans) versus people who don’t count (people with American/German citizenship or church membership who disagree with me) isn’t particular to any one place (or area) on the political spectrum—think Chavez (Bolivarian Marxist), Berlusconi (liberal-conservative), Lenin (Marxist-Leninist), or Trump (who is now being defended as a nationalist conservative). They, and many others, argue(d) that there isn’t a complicated world in which we need to find political solutions that are good enough for everyone and perfect for no one—the correct answer to any policy question is obvious to Us (real), and anyone who disagrees is Them (whose views can be dismissed). [2]

One of many brilliant things that Müller does is to connect that insight about people who think in terms of real v. unreal group members with the always puzzling aspect of so much demagoguery: that people condemn something, like corruption, as though they are on principle opposed to corruption, but, when an in-group member is engaged in exactly the same behavior, they dismiss, deflect, or praise that same behavior. They aren’t opposed to corruption on principle, but only rigidly opposed to out-group corruption.

Had Obama behaved exactly as Trump is—had as many family members on the White House staff, had those staff members go on a trip pushing their products, gone on far more vacations than other Presidents, and in a way that meant government funds went into his pockets, put in place tariffs that helped his daughter’s business—Trump’s supporters would have burst their own spines with rage. They would have called for impeachment.

But they aren’t calling for impeachment of Trump, or even calling what he does corruption, and why not? Müller argues that it’s because of populism’s reliance on “clientelism.” He says that “populists tend to engage in mass clientelism: the exchange of material and immaterial favors by elites for mass support. [….] What makes populists distinctive, once more, is that they can engage in such practices openly and with public moral justifications, since for them only some people are really the people and hence deserving of the support by what is rightfully their state.
“Similarly, only some of the people should get to enjoy the full protection of the laws; those who do not belong to the people or, for that matter, who might be suspected of actively working against the people, should be treated harshly.” (46)

Müller notes “the curious phenomenon that revelations about what can only be called corruption simply do not seem to damage the reputation of populist leaders as much as one would expect” (47). And he explains it: “Clearly, the perception among supporters of populists is that corruption and cronyism are not genuine problems as long as they look like measures pursued for the same of a moral, hardworking ‘us’ and not for the immoral or even foreign ‘them.’” (48)

They don’t see behavior that would have them foaming in the mouth on the part of opposition politicians (payoffs; nepotism; using the power of the government to settle personal scores, throwing business to cronies, coercing people to support dodgy foundations or stay at one’s hotel properties) as “corruption” on the part of leader they think really gets them—what Müller calls the populist.

Müller explains one reason that talking about Trump’s corruption (which is what his supporters would call it if Obama had done the same things) won’t work:

“It is a pious hope for liberals to think that all they have to do is expose corruption to discredit populists. They also have to show that for the vast majority, populist corruption yields no benefits, and that a lack of democratic accountability, a dysfunctional bureaucracy, and a decline in the rule of law will in the long run hurt the people—all of them.” (48)

While I completely agree about the pious hope, and I agree that the topoi [3] that Müller suggests are good ways to argue about our current situation, I think they won’t work with a lot of people. Müller is suggesting that we point out to people that the person and policy agenda they are supporting will hurt them in the long run because it sets into place a process that can be used against them.

That isn’t an argument on the stases of particular policies, parties, or political figures (which is where most current political discourse is); it’s an argument on the stasis of how we deliberate. And Müller is proposing three topoi not currently in play (which haven’t been for years): 1) we should think about current decisions in terms of what processes they put in place rather than what we get now (we should reject outcomes-based ethics); 2) we should make decisions about politics in terms of the long-term rather than short-term; 3) we should care about fairness across groups.

And I completely agree that we need to shift the stasis from whether this leader is demonstrably loyal to the in-group to whether our way of thinking about politics is a good way (which is what Müller is saying we should do), but I think it’s pretty hard.

One of the reasons it’s hard is that we don’t just have a large number of people who choose to consume only media that tells them their in-group is good and the out-group is bad (again, this happens all over the spectrum, so that Republicans who don’t support Trump are essentially socialists, there is no difference between Trump and Hillary Clinton, all Christians are Trumpagelicals, all critics of Trump are atheists, and so on), but that the self-identified “right wing” media has renarrated the ideal outcome of policy argumentation: as long as something Trump says or does angers (or “triggers”) “libs,” it’s a win for “conservatives.”

This is openly a shifting of public discourse being policy argumentation to being a bad version of a WWE performance—as long as you’ve hurt the other side, or made them unhappy, you’ve won. I’m starting to see the same argument being made about stigginit to “conservatives,” and that isn’t good.

This is wrong on so many levels. In the first place, that media isn’t “conservative” in any consistent ideological way—the current “conservative” talking points aren’t about policy but identity (we are good because we aren’t them). But, in this world, as long as the outcome of a policy or statement is “stigginit to the libs,” then many people think it’s good. The outcome is good. But that outcome is just making the other unhappy.

There are many other groups that define success in zero-sum terms—hurting them is a kind of winning, even if we’re hurt too—so this isn’t unique to people devoted to Trump, and so I think that Müller’s rhetorical project is really complicated. It’s right, but it’s complicated.

[1] A lot of people make that argument or a similar one. Berger talks about this as a characteristic of “extremism;” I’ve talked about it as a quality of the nastiest kinds of demagoguery; Jeremy Engels, Catherine Kramer, and other scholars of resentment talk about it; it shows up in discussions of polarization, such as Lilliana Mason’s work; scholars of racism, ranging from Zitkala Sa to James Cone, identify it as a crucial aspect of racism, and cultural critics like Ijeoma Oluo and Ta-Nehisi Coates write about it persistently. Policy argumentation is short-circuited by shifting the stasis to whether real Americans, Christians, composition scholars, dog lovers (“us”) are getting what they/we deserve.

[2] Just to reiterate: our policy options are not usefully reduced to political group identities, and those groups are not usefully reduced to a binary or continuum. The world is not a binary of people who agree with us and those who should be cast into outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

[3] Topoi is a rhetorical concept that everyone should know. Topoi are kind of best thought of as rhetorical cliché—sometimes not usefully called a meme. A topos is the recurrent (disputable) claims within an argument—there are Muslim prayer rugs found in the Texas desert, the Democratic primaries were rigged, abolitionists inspire rebellion, the Bush family supported Nazis, these policies are unfair, these policies will have bad consequences.

Pray away the guns

Many people who call themselves Christian, and think they represent all Christians, believe that, when communities are living by God’s word (which they understand, unequivocally, from God’s mouth to their ears, so to speak) then that community will not be punished with terrible things. Thus, they reason, if there are terrible things happening, we just need to get back on the right path, and those things will go away. That’s the argument being made by a lot of people about gun violence.

It’s a kind of bastardization (as Kenneth Burke would say) of the Jeremiad. The Jeremiad is a rhetorical narrative—our culture was once in touch with God, and following God’s laws, and we were prosperous and happy and there was no disagreement; but, we have fallen from God’s law, and now we are suffering bad things (especially disagreement, but also violence), and so we need to purify our culture from practices that God condemns, and then our problems will be solved.

The Jeremiad depoliticzes political issues. It makes all policy issues not issues about what policies we should have but issues of personal will and out-group presence.

The American fascination with the Jeremiad is usually attributed to second generation New England Puritan preachers saying that things were great with the first generation–who were pure of heart–, but now they’re bad because people aren’t pure enough. What’s really odd about that argument is that the first generation wasn’t good. They saw people drop like flies. They bickered over everything, and sued one another like the lawyers they were. A large part of The History of Plymouth Plantation was about their lawsuits.

There never was a golden age in American Protestant religion when people weren’t dying, killing, suing each other, and, for that matter, buggering various animals (the most entertaining part of The History of Plymouth Plantation). The Jeremiad is a historical narrative (people followed God and things were great, now we don’t, and things are terrible) that is indefensible as an argument about history.

MAGA is a Jeremiad, especially when connected to notions about how when “In God We Trust” was on our money things were better, and crime has been going up ever since we banned prayer from schools (it hasn’t, and we didn’t).  But, okay, let’s run with that argument. Things were better when there was slavery? Things were better in the 50s?

One thing I think we should ask white Christians engaged in Jeremiads about how we need to go back to when America was great, in the fifties, is: could they please explain how that time was better? What, exactly, was better, and more in line with what God wants, about segregation, about a time when people posed cheerfully in front of a castrated, flayed, and burned black body? Was that when America was great? When a man could rape his wife, even if they were legally separated, and he could know he would suffer no consequences? When employers could pay POC and women less for the same work? Where is that in the Bible? When “conservative” rhetoric could criminalize the very people employed in order to break unions?

Christians engaged in Jeremiads about how times were better and we used to follow God’s law are generally engaged in what I like to think of as narcissistic ethics (the world is good or bad as it is good or bad for them and people like them) and what others have called naïve realism (something is true if it seems true to you). Personally, I don’t think either of those is much in line with what Jesus said, but I’ll set that aside just to emphasize that, if you try to engage someone making this argument about how things were better when you could have a picnic while lynching a black man who hadn’t done anything, they’ll talk about abortion or gay marriage.

This isn’t an argument about history; this is a statement of personal commitment to an irrational political agenda that is supposed to stand for a relationship with Christ.

It also a statement of personal commitment to an irrational narrative of causality. The dumb version of the Jeremiad says that things used to be great because people used to follow God’s law (and there is a short and ahistorical list of what that meant—we prayed in schools [no that didn’t happen everywhere], we had “In God We Trust” on our money [the history is pretty complicated], but appalling practices from those “good old days” are cheerfully ignored), and now things are all bad (they aren’t).

Thus, people who believe this false narrative say, the bad things that are happening to us are not because of policies for which we have voted, or the politicians we have voted to put in place, but because we have stopped following God’s laws, and so those things will go away if we all become more righteous.

Here things get a little murky. There are people who believe that gun violence is a scourge God has put on us because we allow abortion. (So, why wasn’t there this level of gun violence before abortion was outlawed?) Thus, the white supremacist Trump supporter drinking deep of toxic masculinity who could easily get a weapon that would enable a mass shooting is just an agent of God, not a consequence of white supremacy, toxic masculinity, the eliminationist and victimization rhetoric he regularly consumes.

A person who says he is engaged in mass shooting because he believes his actions to be what right-wing pundits say he should do (like Jim Adkisson) has nothing to do with right-wing rhetoric. It’s about lack of prayer in schools. But, the same people who claim that right-wing shooters aren’t inspired by right-wing rhetoric will blame any shooter who can be labeled as leftist on leftist rhetoric (James Hodgkinson).

In other words, if there is a shooter, the first move for mainstream “right-wing” media (by which I mean Fox, Limbaugh, and the other main sources of information for many people—the most mainstream media there is) is, if possible, to say the person was a “lefty.” If that isn’t possible, say he was mentally ill, an anomaly, and it would have been prevented had there been good guys to shoot him.

But you also get the argument that he was an agent of God because bad things happen when we do not follow God’s law.

People say we politicize gun violence when, after a shooting, we want to talk about policies about guns, and many of them mean that because they sincerely believe that, if we all just believed what they believed (which they describe as having faith in Christ) then no one would do anything bad. They believe that we can pray away the gay and we can pray away the guns.

They believe that gun violence would simply end were we a culture in line with their vision of Christ. Therefore shooting isn’t a political issue (that is, one that could be solved through a change in policies), but an issue of personal faith and cultural commitment. Gun violence can’t be solved through policies about guns, but only by a spiritual rejuvenation.

Note, however, that they don’t think they can pray away abortion. Abortion is a political issue that can be reduced, they believe, through a change in policies. (It can, but not the policies they’re advocating.) They say they think gun violence is bad, and they say think abortion is bad, and so they are working (and have been working for years) to change the policies on abortion.

That’s because, they say, abortion is a violation of God’s will. And gun violence isn’t?

The political power of the irrational rhetor

There are, loosely, two ways to think about what disagreement means in a democracy (or, really, any other group). For some people disagreement is productive because, in fact, we really do disagree, and disagreement means that those different ways of thinking about a problem are being openly discussed. These people view disagreement in a democracy as a necessary condition because no individual can have enough information to know the right solution—in fact, there is no right solution because people really and legitimately disagree. There is no plan that is perfect for anyone, let alone for everyone.

But other people believe that disagreement is unnecessary because, not only is there a plan that is perfect for real Americans (or Germans, Venezuelans, Austinites, Christians), but it’s perfectly obvious to everyone of good will and even moderate intelligence what that plan is. We end up with imperfect plans because there are people involved in the process who are dumb, selfish, misled by evil people. People like this believe that those dumb and selfish people should be ignored, disenfranchised, or expelled—they shouldn’t be able to participate in deliberation.

People who believe in this democracy without disagreement see themselves as supporting democracy, but it’s democracy of the “real” people (Jan-Wenner Muller explains this all beautifully). In what they think of as a “good” democracy, there wouldn’t be disagreement; there would just be quick and efficient enacting of the perfect plans.

It’s well-documented that people faced with a loss (or even uncertainty) tend to demand greater in-group purity (much of this research is summarized here). And, consistently, in the train wrecks in public deliberation that I study, people respond to clear evidence that their plan is bad by deciding that they just need to recommit to that plan with greater will (e.g., how Hitler and his generals spent mid-1943 on).

I am oriented toward solving problems, believing that our political situation is usefully complicated by our being a pluralist society with people who have genuinely different points of view, different short- and long-term interests, and fundamental disagreements about values. I also believe that the right answer to all political questions is not obvious to anyone (the false model of the “universal genius”—a different post). I am a “liberal” in the old sense of the word—a person who believes that we shouldn’t be striving to enact policies that are obviously true to us, but that we should have a world in which we consider a lot of arguments “good enough.” That is, we can say something is a good argument even if we think it’s wrong—it’s good enough.

A “good enough” argument is one that is fair to its opposition(s), is internally consistent logically, and is grounded in sources that are also fair to the opposition(s) and internally consistent. A good enough argument might still be wrong, but it’s good enough to be taken seriously in public deliberation.

My appreciation of “good enough” arguments came from teaching argumentation, in which it was important that students who disagreed with me could get good grades, and that students with whom I agreed might not, but more importantly from my awareness that very smart people often disagreed, and that I was often wrong—being right and agreeing with me (or being a member of my in-group) were not the same.

Our goal in political deliberation shouldn’t be to have a sphere of public discourse that is only people who agree with us, or policies only informed by people who think like we do. Democracy requires good enough arguments.

It also requires that people compromise, listen to one another, and  don’t expect always to get what we want. If we accept the premise that people really disagree, and that people really have different interests, then we have to accept that no policy will be the one we want.[1] Or, as Jan-Werner Muller argues, democracy is about pluralism, and accepting that we are in a pluralistic society means that we accept “a commitment to try to find fair terms of sharing the same political space with others whom we respect as free and equal but also as irreducibly different in their identities and interests” (What is Populism 82).

But, a lot of people don’t think democracy is about people with different interests and legitimately different points of view trying to find ways to live together. In a course on how to teach argumentation—entirely for people getting their PhD at a prestigious institution–, I asked the teachers to identify arguments with which they disagreed but that they thought were good arguments. A non-trivial number of teachers said there was no such thing.

In other words, the irrational insistence that only arguments with which you agree are “good” arguments is not a question of how educated you are.

It’s just a bad way to think about democracy. And a bad way to think about decision-making, but that’s a different post. People who think that only their political ideology merits consideration are all over the political spectrum, all over levels of education, and all over areas of expertise.

I’ve been at Faculty Council meetings where world-famous scholars stood up and argued against a policy because it didn’t fit how they teach, or who argued in favor of it because it would force everyone to teach as they did. (In the first group was a scholar of rhetoric, and in the second a scholar of democracy.) The irony was not lost on me, but I think my snorting on the back row did not win me friends.

Unhappily, far too many Americans have that model of democracy, and it is really not democracy—it’s inevitably authoritarian. That notion of good democracy not requiring compromise, and deliberation not benefitting from agreements means that our public discourse creates a kind of tragedy of the rhetorical commons in which it is in the short-term benefit of far too many political figures and pundits to advocate irrational policies.

Here’s why:

Sarah Binder and Frances Lee, in a chapter called “Making Deals in Congress,” describe the problems faced by members of Congress. One of them is the problem presented by “’intense demanders,’ who are critical to politicians’ fundraising and activism base” (243). These people feel passionately about an issue, but

“often have little understanding of what is and is not possible in Congress. Constituents will not be happy to hear that they must settle for less than what they wanted or that they must make unpalatable concessions to achieve desired goals….Rather than accept disappointment, they may prefer to listen to other voices—such as those of activist group leaders or congressional hardliners—who tell them that a better deal was possible. As a consequence, lawmakers must continually cope with constituencies, activists, and supporters who push them to take a tougher line and refuse compromise.” (243)

Bind and Lee quote Congressional rep Barney Frank, “On both sides, the task is dealing with all the people who believe that insufficient purity is why their party hasn’t won more elections” (qtd. 243-4).

And it isn’t even new.

I read an entire year of Congressional debates (long, complicated story)—if memory serves it was 1835-36, but that might be wrong—and I wish I had kept track of the number of Senators or Reps who stood up and called for war against other countries (I do remember Spain, England, and France, being among them, but I think there were others).

The rhetor who stood up and did an impassioned speech for war with England didn’t really want the US to declare war on England—I think he knew that would be a disaster. He was like the jerk in a bar who threatens to get into a fight, and yells to his friends, “HOLD ME BACK!” because he does, really, want them to do exactly that. The Senate or Rep who called for war on England wanted to look like someone willing to die on that hill, but he really wanted other people to hold him back. He was trying to garner support among the folks back home by looking  irrationally committed to a policy they liked. But, he really knew was a terrible idea and hoped he wouldn’t persuade the House or Senate to adopt his stance.

This particular performance of in-group loyalty requires that other people hold him back. Someone else has to stand up and explain why that’s a bad idea. But we can get into a kind of rhetorical tragedy of the commons, in which rhetors get short-term gains by rabidly advocating policies they don’t really want enacted, and no one will take on the unpopular position of saying that the situation is complicated, the solution isn’t obvious, and the immediately satisfying “Let’s show THEM! We’ll declare war!” position is actually unwise.

The term “tragedy of the commons” comes from the observation that, if you have a common area in which people in the community can pasture their cattle, people will make short-term benefit decisions that hurt everyone—including them—in the long run. Here’s how it works.

Imagine that the common area can support ten cattle easily—if there are ten cows, then each cow gains ten pounds. If there are eleven, then each cow gains nine pounds. If you’re the person to put that additional cow on the commons, then you’ve now got two cows and a gain of eighteen pounds. It sucks for everyone else, though (since they’ve all lost a pound per cow). If there are twelve cows, then each cow gains eight pounds—again, bad for the community as a whole, but good for the person who put on an additional cow on. At this point, any sensible person would put as many cows on as possible, to the point that the commons is destroyed, and no longer providing food for any cows. This is called the “tragedy of the commons.” [2] The short-term best interest of any individual is not in the long-term best interest of any individual. But, because people believe that others in the community will only think in terms of their immediate best interest, then everyone is racing to destroy the commons on which they all depend.

It is tragic because it is always in the short-term best interest of someone to screw over the community as a whole—if everyone behaves that way, then everyone loses. (This is related to what is sometimes called the “free rider problem”).[3]

The economy of attention, a world in which there are always too many things demanding our attention, means that a pundit or political figure who makes hyperbolic and fear-mongering claims will get more attention than one who says the situation is complicated. That is the tragedy of the rhetorical commons—that irresponsible rhetors will benefit, in the short term, even if their short-term benefit means the destruction of the our common rhetorical and political space.

Our rhetorical world is a tragedy of the commons. We have a public that, on the whole, only rewards demagogic media (through viewing, clicks, sharing), and that has far too many voters who, having only paid attention to media that says “This is a battle of good v. evil, and we should only vote for people who refuse to compromise,” only wants politicians or pundits who will die on this hill. And that hill. Every hill in fact. And the politicians are pundits who decide they want the short-term benefits of pandering to that irrationality about politics are the people putting the extra cow on the commons—it gets them the short-term benefit of getting votes, but it trashes our ability to make good decisions.

We are in a world in which there is considerable political power to being openly an irrational rhetor who refuses to compromise, refuses to acknowledge legitimate disagreement, and dies on every hill. This destruction of our common world will only stop when voters and consumers stop voting for political figures and consuming media who say, “It’s all very simple, and we just need to refuse to compromise.”

We need to stop rewarding the irrational rhetor. As long as we reward the irrational rhetor, we can’t complain when the commons can’t sustain any cows, that our rhetorical commons is an argumentative desert, and we have a lot of dead people on hills. We made the short-term choices that got us a long-term outcome we don’t like. We have only ourselves to blame.

[1] I’m not saying that all compromises are good, nor that we should never refuse to compromise, but simply that, as Muller says, “democracy is a system where you know you can lose, but you also know you will not always lose” (79).
[2] Unhappily, some people have this concept to make an internally contradictory argument about immigration. That’s a different post.
[3] 3] That is why there are no magnificent natural features preserved in private ownership in the US—because it’s never in the short-term best interest of someone to preserve the natural features. (This is also why “the market” should not be allowed to determine everything, since it is not actually rational in the long-term.)

There aren’t two sides on political issues

There aren’t two sides on abortion. There aren’t two sides on gun control. There aren’t two sides on immigration. There are far more than two. But reducing a complicated issue to two sides is politically useful—as Hitler noted, it’s easier to persuade people if you make issues very simple, and as people have noted about Hitler’s rhetoric, that’s most effectively done by reframing the policy issue as simply one instance of the war between Us and a common enemy (Them). That reduction of complicated issues to “us v. them” is appealing to people and therefore profitable for media.

I’m not saying that everyone who uses that method is Hitler, since we all do that when it comes to issues that trigger what is often called “hot cognition”—that is, trying to make a decision about an issue that pushes a lot of your buttons, that gets you hot under the collar. It isn’t just that these issues set off all sorts of passions (fear, anger, desire for revenge, outrage) but that they are issues (or settings) that suggest connections between this argument and beliefs central to your sense of self. In conditions of hot cognition, we tend to think in binaries.

For instance, if your being a dog owner is important to your sense of self—you often describe yourself that way to others, you post a lot about your dogs on social media, you see yourself as someone who loves dogs–, and you read an article about an abusive dog owner, you’re almost certainly in the realm of hot cognition because a dog being abused is very upsetting, and another dog owner (an in-group member) has behaved badly. You’re triggered in three ways: your feelings about dogs, your in-group membership, your need to condemn bad behavior in public (virtue signaling).

People trying to think in the midst of hot cognition tend to rely on binaries, and the binary in this case is likely to be the defensiveness/outrage one. If you take the defensiveness track, you might respond with #notalldogowners (as though that needs to be said), that person was not A Real Dog Owner (the no true Scotsman fallacy), or that person didn’t really abuse the dogs (which, by the way, might be true—this is the person who will go into deep research to find out what really happened, and they might then find that the media coverage is false, or they might end up in embarrassing pedantry).

If you take the outrage track, it might be outrage that an in-group member behaved badly, a need to vent, a need to show that not all dog owners behave that way (so #notalldogowners has two options).

If you aren’t a dog owner, you aren’t necessarily responding differently. If, for instance, dog owners are an out-group for you, then you’re also in a world of hot cognition—this story triggers your sense of yourself as good because not a dog owner. So, you are likely to take this story as an example of how all dog owners are bad without any consideration of whether the report is valid, credible, internally consistent.

If you are a dog owner but that isn’t important to your identity, or you aren’t a dog owner but don’t see dog owners as an out-group, you don’t care. You didn’t click on the link.

Also, if, in fact, it was a really complicated situation, and it’s hard to tell whether this is really is a case of abuse, and media reported it that way, then only that third person—willing to try to figure out what really happened—is going to click on the links.

In other words, topics that trigger hot cognition simultaneously get our attention more effectively than ones that don’t and they trigger binary thinking.

And here is how I’m not sure how to describe it: it isn’t actually the topics; it’s how those topics are presented and interpreted. In a for-profit media, the best way to get the most readers (and therefore, have the best advertising revenue) is to present issues in ways that trigger hot cognition in as many ways as possible.

For instance, imagine that Millard Filmore has been accused of abusing his dogs. An article about Millard might note that he is Irish, Libertarian, left-handed, a member of Toastmasters. Or, it might note that the person accusing him of abusing his dogs is Irish, Libertarian, left-handed, a member of Toastmasters.

If you are running a media outlet in a community (or world) in which pro- or anti-Toastmasters triggers hot cognition you will mention if anyone is in Toastmaters. (If you aren’t, you won’t.) In a community polarized by membership in Toastmasters, an article about a Toastmaster will get more clicks, even if Millard’s membership in Toastmasters is irrelevant to the question of his treatment of dogs (or the reliability of the critic) or transient (he was a member for a brief time years ago). An article about Millard Filmore that gives no information other than that he is accused of abusing dogs only gets those people for whom “dog owner” is in- or out-group.

The world is not actually divided into pro- or anti-Toastmaster, and Millard may or may not have abused his dogs, a question that has nothing to do with whether he is a member of Toastmasters.

But, and this is important, the media has no motivation to report what happened in a nuanced and non-Toastmaster way. That won’t get them clicks.

More important, why should we care about Millard? Does he represent some bigger issue about how dog abuse cases are handled? If the case of Millard exemplifies a common case, then let’s use it for the bigger policy issue. If not, let’s include Millard in our Two Minutes Hate (during which we emphasize his out-group membership) and go on. Or maybe we could skip the Two Minutes Hate, or at least recognize it for what it is.

There are two problems with Millard’s case: first, if we are in an informational enclave, we let our in-group media frame the question of Millard’s behavior as part of the zero-sum argument between pro- and anti- Toastmasters. Second, once that’s the issue, then anyone who does a little research and finds it’s more complicated than what our in-group media says gets condemned by the people in in-group enclaves as Them.

Talking about a complicated issue in terms of outrageous behavior on the part of Them (out-group) is more profitable for media because we don’t click on things that say, “Here is the complicated situation regarding dog abuse.” That doesn’t trigger hot cognition.

The issue of dog abuse isn’t us v. them. Almost no one is in favor of abusing dogs, but there are lots of complicated arguments about how to define it, write laws about it, enforce those laws, finance the enforcement of those laws, prevent it. That argument is boring. Who clicks on links that are nuanced explanations about the vexed situation of animal control?

Who clicks on links about how awful Millard Filmore is?

I’m not saying that being passionate about dog abuse—or politics in general—is bad. It’s great. What I’m saying is that being passionate about dog abuse should mean we know that we are prone to thinking about the issue as a binary, and we need to step back from that. We should care enough about dog abuse that we try to find a policy solution not grounded in hot cognition. We need to be so passionate about preventing dog abuse that we don’t think about it as a binary of two positions.

If, however, thinking about dog abuse effectively and politically (that is, in terms of our policy options) gets filtered by the demagogic assumption that all policy issues are really a zero-sum battle between us and them, then it all gets mixed up with virtue signaling or performances of in-group loyalty, and we’ve got a train wreck. We’ll only get information from in-group sources, we’ll make Millard out-group (and thereby not only condemn him pre-trial, but never have the more important argument about dog abuse—it isn’t and never has been an in- v. out-group issue).

My point is simply that political issues are complicated, and assuming that anyone who disagrees with you does so because they’re bad means that you lose, as a citizen, from understanding other points of view, and our community as a whole loses, because we all slouch into demagoguery. It’s fine if you have a short list of individuals (Uncle Fubar), contexts (Thanksgiving dinner), or positions (I never engage with 9/11 truthers—there’s no falsifiability), but, if you never have the confidence in your beliefs to expose them to argument with people who deeply disagree with you, and who show all the signs of being willing to engage in good faith argumentation, then even you are admitting that your beliefs are indefensible.

Racism and the false binary of shame/pride

Showing the GIS results of "beautiful hair"

It’s really hard for us to have a good conversation about racism for a lot of reasons, but mostly because we have a lot of false assumptions about what racism is and how it functions. I’ve mentioned elsewhere the false notion that you aren’t racist if you’re talking about culture—racism has always really been about culture. I want to mention three other beliefs here.

First, we should talk about racist actions, but instead we talk about whether a person is racist. We believe that racist actions are the consequence of deliberate decisions to be racist on the part of people who consciously decide to engage in an action that they themselves believe to be racist because they are racists. In other words, we think there are some people who are racist, and everything they do is deliberately racist.

Second, we think there is a binary between racist (really bad) or not (good).

Third, we also have a binary of shame v. pride—we tend to assume that you are either proud of yourself (meaning you haven’t done anything really bad), or you think you’ve done something bad (in which case you’re ashamed of yourself). This applies to your sense of your group—you can either take pride in your group (meaning it’s great), or you can think your group has behaved badly (in which case you should be ashamed of your group).

Imagine that someone says to you, “Hey, I think what you just did there was kinda racist,” or “America has a racist past,” or “The Confederacy was racist.” If you believe the three false assumptions above, then here’s what you hear: “Hey, you are a bad person who should wallow in shame because you decide to be racist every day and every way.” Or, “As an American, you should wallow in shame about the US and spend your whole life apologizing because America and Americans are entirely evil for their deliberate racism.” Or, “If you live in a CSA state or are descended from anyone who fought for the CSA, you should do nothing but wallow in shame and hate your ancestors because they were completely evil.”

You hear someone making a claim about racist behavior as an accusation of your being an evil person (or part of an evil group) who should be filled with shame, wandering around beating your breast, and hating yourself and everyone in your group.

You might believe that because you consume media that tells you that’s what SJW believe, and they might even find a quote from someone they say is an SJW that kinda sorta maybe could be interpreted as arguing that you are condemned to a life of shame. That’s because your media is engaged in inoculation.

There isn’t a binary of shame v. pride—to take pride in something, it doesn’t have to be perfect. And shame is not a particularly useful response to criticism (in fact, it shifts the stasis from what you did to who you are—which is sidetracking).

Racism is an instance of in-group favoritism—the tendency to think that members of your in-group are entitled to more than members of out-groups; that in-group members have good motives, and out-group members have bad motives; that the world (or your nation, culture, community) would be better were it only in-group members; that most of our problems are caused by the out-group; that the in- and out-groups shouldn’t be held to the same standards.

So, for instance, I live in an area that has a lot of cyclists come to time themselves for races. Many of them run stop signs, yell at pedestrians, and are generally jerks. I am not a cyclist. At a certain point, I found myself thinking that cyclists are all jerks. But, once I thought about it, I had to admit that every day I see one or two cyclists behave like jerks, and I see twenty or more cyclists. Every day, I see a much higher percentage of drivers behave like jerks, but I never came to the conclusion that drivers are jerks. That’s how in-group/out-group thinking works—your mental math is different about in- and out-group members, so you always think that your judgment of the out-group is grounded in empirical data—those two jerk cyclists—but it isn’t, because that data wouldn’t cause you to condemn your in-group (drivers). That’s in-group favoritism.

You take bad behavior on the part of an out-group member as proof that they are basically bad people.

Racism takes in-group favoritism and “naturalizes” it by associating that bad behavior with culture, “race,” ethnicity, or some inherent and inescapable character of a group. My irrational assessment of cyclists wasn’t racism not just because I never said or thought the word race, but because “cyclist” isn’t a category associated with an ethnicity, race, country of origin. Once that cyclist wasn’t on a bike, I wouldn’t assess them as out-group. Racism has two parts: it is in-group/out-group thinking that makes out-group an inescapable identity; also, it is the world in which privileges are (generally unconsciously) given to the inescapable identity of in-group.

Those two things are equally important. Trump’s racist tweets are a good example of the first; google image searching “beautiful hair” is a great example of the second. (That picture is above.)

Racism isn’t about people getting up and thinking about ways to express their conscious hate of that race. Racism is about relying on the cognitive bias of in-group favoritism; it’s about thinking that people like us are normal, and people not like us don’t merit consideration; it’s about how we explain behavior; it’s about our unconscious framings.

There isn’t some binary of being racist (bad, shameful) and not racist (good, pride). Racism isn’t about who we are; it’s, to some extent, about what we do, but even more, it’s about how unconscious biases on the part of many people have a particular outcome. No one got up in the morning and said, “How can I be racist today?” and decided to make sure that a GIS of “beautiful hair” was racist. But you can see the results show that how we think about beauty is racist.

Racism is a cultural phenomenon and, in my experience, very rarely a conscious hostility. It’s people who value standardized test scores when there’s no evidence that those scores are predictive of success in a field; it’s people noticing errors in resumes when they think the applicant is African American; it’s a teacher or school who treats a children of color differently from white children who did exactly the same thing; it’s a director who has few POC in their films; it’s our culture’s reliance on racist tropes.

Racism isn’t really about hostility as much as it is about forgetting and assuming.

That means that racism isn’t about a racist twisting his mustache thinking about how to be extra racist today. It means that racism is about how a culture works, and not necessarily the conscious intent of individuals. It means that an individual being racist is like an individual being greedy, or selfish, or irrational.

My husband makes fun of my family because, as he says, “They are always one step away from fame doing something mildly disreputable.” And, really, that’s true. One ancestor involved in the Revolutionary War was such a terrible commander that he got removed from active duty and was put in charge of a prison. When I joined a genealogy group, I found a relative who tried to make him out as a great man and hero of the war. It wasn’t. She was lying.

If you try put everything into the shame/pride binary, you either have to condemn him, which is odd, since he did support the Revolution, or you have to deny his being appallingly incompetent (her choice). Maybe just say he did some good and bad things, and take pride in the good things.

If you accept the shame/pride binary, and you accept that being racist is not good, then you either have to condemn your ancestors, or you have to deny they were racist. Because, let’s be blunt, not only would it be hard for most of us to say we have never been racist, we would have an even harder time claiming that no one in our ancestry was racist.

The world is not a fight between your in-group (obviously and always good) and everyone else (obviously and always bad). The world is a complicated place in which we are always failing to be as good as we would like, but in which we might be better than we are.

Policy argumentation

Image from here.

Policy argumentation involves several steps:

First, identifying the issue (the stasis). This is where so many arguments go wrong—our impulse is to make all issues personal, and either about whether we are being respected enough, or whether our in-group is being respected enough.

Shifting the issue to other stases thus helps us get out of who in the argument is the better person.

These are better stases:

Need:
• What, exactly, is the problem?
• Is it serious?
• Will it go away on its own?
• What caused it (what is the narrative of causality)?

Plan:
• What, exactly, is the plan?
• How will that specific plan solve the problems identified in the need (solvency)?
• Is the plan feasible?
• How does this plan compare to other possible solutions?
• Will there be unintended consequences worse than the need?

Most of our political discourse is about the need, and there isn’t even an attempt to connect the plan with the specific need.

One of my favorite examples of the ways that policy arguments go wrong is when a Texas state legislator proposed banning “suggestive cheer leading.” His need was that teen pregnancy is bad. And it is, and it’s persisted long enough that it will not go away on its own. But his narrative of causality made no sense—he couldn’t possibly claim that teens only had unprotected sex because they were driven wild by cheerleaders.

The plan of banning suggestive cheerleading had no real details; there’s no reason to think it’s feasible—how would the term “suggestive” be defined, how would it be enforced, who would enforce it? Cheerleading can lead to college scholarships, so if the standards hurt students’ abilities to compete effectively, it could have unintended consequences of hurting Texas cheerleaders’ chances of getting college scholarships.

Where the plan thoroughly fails is in terms of solvency. Texas cheerleaders could be required to lead cheers in personal tents, and it would have no impact on teen pregnancy. None.

There are other plans for reducing teen pregnancy, many, and many of them are much better in terms of all these stases.

So, his case completely fails as far as policy argumentation, but it has a certain cunning rhetorical power. It’s hard to point out that this is a stupid argument without sounding as though you’re a perv who wants to watch teenage girls dance suggestively and don’t care about teen pregnancy.

And that’s how most people hear policy arguments. We focus on need; we need to keep in mind all of those stases.

Democracy and Inoculation

Showing that politics is not a continuum, but more like a scattershot

Were I Queen of the Universe, no one would graduate from high school without knowing the difference between causation and correlation, and no one would graduate from college without understanding the rhetorical concept of inoculation.[1]

Democracy requires understanding opposition points of view. Our current media undermines democracy by relying heavily on inoculation—regardless of which “side” your media is on. It makes you think you know the opposition point of view when you really don’t. It presents you with a weak version of an argument, so that you won’t even listen to the stronger version—you will reject as stupid someone who disagrees with your party line.

It does that through two strategies.

First, most media relies on the false frame of there being “two sides” (Dem v. GOP) to every issue. There isn’t. There is no issue that is accurately bifurcated into two sides, let alone two sides that map onto the two major political parties. That false frame takes the rich, entangled, and nuanced world of policy options, and reduces it to an identity issue—do you see yourself as liberal or conservative?

In our current world, all politics is identity politics.  And it’s a deliberate evasion of policy argumentation.

That’s a bad world, a damaging frame for democratic politics, and a different post. Here I’ll just use the example of what to do regarding drug addicts to point out it isn’t a Dem v. GOP issue. There are people who are opposed to legalized abortion who prefer rehab to jail for drug addicts—are they conservative or liberal? There are people who want no government restrictions on the “free” market who also want no criminal penalties for drug use—conservative or liberal?

Let’s just walk away from the notion that there are “two” sides on any issue. There aren’t. There isn’t even a continuum. There are people who really disagree.

The second strategy builds on the first. It’s inoculation. Once you’ve persuaded your audience that the complicated world of political decisions is actually a zero-sum fight between us and them, then you need to persuade your audience of a particular construction of Them. This is a little complicated. You have to acknowledge that there is a group that disagrees with your group’s positions, but you know that, if your audience looked into the issue with any effort, they’d find it’s more complicated than you are trying to pretend it is—they’d find there are lots of people who disagree, and those people have some good arguments. So, you’ve got the tricky task of making your audience believe that they know what They believe while persuading them that they shouldn’t actually look into Their argument in any detail.

You rely on inoculation.

Vaccines, inoculation, work by giving the body a weak version of a virus, so that, when the body gets the stronger version, it shuts that shit down.

Con artists often use inoculation. They tell their marks that there are people out to get them, and give a weak version of the criticisms, framing it all as part of their being the real victim here, and it often works. The mark refuses to listen to criticisms of the person conning them on the grounds that they know what that critic will say, and they already know it’s wrong. They don’t. They haven’t listened. Inoculation is about persuading someone not to listen to anyone else because you believe (falsely) that you already know what they will say (you don’t.) It works because the con has established what feels like a real connection with the mark.

That’s how it works in politics and media too.

People who inhabit rabidly factional enclaves believe that they are not rabidly factional—they believe that they have impartially considered “both” sides (mistake number one—there aren’t only two sides) because they believe they are thoroughly informed as to what “the other side” thinks.

They aren’t. Matthew Levendusky has shown that factionalized media spends more time talking about how awful They are than they do defending their group. So, it doesn’t actually argue for a policy; it argues against an identity. And it does so in a way that makes people feel good about themselves (we aren’t as dumb as those assholes) while trying to ensure that the audience doesn’t try to understand why people disagree.

What I’m saying is this: the biggest problem in our political situation is that we rely on media that spends all of its time with two messages: we are good because those people are assholes; they’re such assholes that you shouldn’t even listen to them but repeat these talking points we are giving you.

Here’s what I think. People really disagree. The real disagreements in our world are not usefully divided into two groups. You should never rely on an in-group source to represent any out-group argument accurately. You should try to find the smartest versions of opposition arguments.

I love vaccines. I think, when it comes to biology, we should all get vaccinated. When it comes to politics, we shouldn’t. Polio might kill you; a different political point of view won’t.

[1] I’d also insist that Billy Squier’s “Stroke Me” be put on mute for a couple of years, just because I’m really tired of it. I’m open to persuasion on this.

Freedom, tolerance, and fairness

Image from here.

The political theorist Isaiah Berlin famously identified two very different ways that people talk about freedom: for some people, “freedom” is the freedom from being told what to do; for others, “freedom” is the freedom to do things. Thus, for example, joining a union restricts your freedom from rules (you have to pay dues and go on strike if the union says) but increases your freedom to get better wages and working conditions.  

For a long time, I thought Berlin was right, and I used his categories. But, having spent an equally long time (perhaps too long) crawling around the digital world arguing with assholes, I don’t think his division is right. I think, actually, that everyone uses the term “freedom” to mean the same thing.

Cicero, the brilliant Roman orator, said that if you have a controversial thesis, you should delay it, and so I will.

Let’s start with an old argument: from about 1644 to 1652, John Cotton (a 17th century Massachusetts Bay Colony minister) and Roger Williams (generally considered the founder of the Baptist Church) got into a nasty and wordy argument about many things, but especially whether Williams’ eviction from the Massachusetts Bay Colony was just.

I happen to have read the whole long exchange, and what struck me as interesting is that they agreed on the stasis.

In rhetoric, it’s generally agreed that a good disagreement has people agreed on the stasis—the hinge of the argument. A good door has a hinge that connects it to the wall. If there is no hinge, then either there is no door, or the door just falls in. Most really bad disagreements are the consequence of not agreeing on the stasis. If you snoop and find that your partner is cheating on you, you will want the stasis to be their infidelity, but they will want the stasis to be which of you is the better person, and, they will then try to make the issue your snooping. (In rhetoric, this is called deflection.)

But Williams and Cotton agreed on the stasis: they agreed that a good government allows freedom of conscience. Williams argued that his freedom of conscience had been violated because he hadn’t been allowed to have the religious beliefs and practice his conscience told him were right.  

Cotton agreed that “freedom of conscience” meant the freedom to do what your conscience told you was right, but, he insisted that Williams must have violated his conscience since he did something that Cotton thought was wrong. In other words, as Cotton said, “freedom of conscience” is the right to do what’s right. By that, he meant the freedom to do what he thought was right. Cotton believed that every action is either right or wrong, and that the right course of action and the right set of beliefs (his) is obvious to everyone. Thus, he said, Williams wasn’t just wrong, but knew he was wrong—there is, Cotton said (and sincerely believed) no real disagreement on issues of religion. This is one instance of what is called naïve realism.

Naïve realism is the belief that the truth is obvious to everyone of good will, that if you want to know if something is true, you just ask yourself if you’re really perceiving things correctly. It’s the notion that perception is accurate, and that bad judgment happens because you then deliberately distort those perceptions to justify actions you kind of always know are wrong, or because you’re blinded by your commitment to a group. This is all false. That isn’t how perception works at all, but let’s leave that aside and go back to Cotton and Williams.

Cotton’s notion about how people perceive things—that everyone really has the same beliefs  he does, but they deny them, that he is the person whose beliefs are entirely right (his epistemology)—was what made his political stance (banishing Williams) seem not just reasonable, but a way of honoring the principle of freedom of conscience. Cotton believed everyone should be free to be just like him, and he should be free to force them to do so.

Cotton said that freedom of conscience meant the freedom to do what your conscience told you to do. And he sincerely believed that your conscience told you that you should do what he thought you should do. Because, of course, he sincerely believed he was right, and he couldn’t imagine that, given how certain he was about his being right, that anyone really believed anything different, let alone that he might be wrong. Cotton confused that sense of certainty with an unmediated perception of reality. A lot of people do. The problem with Cotton wasn’t what he believed, but what he believed about his beliefs.

That’s a weird sentence, but it’s everything about democracy. Democracy thrives not when people believe the same things, but when we know other people really believe other things, and we want them treated as we would like to be treated. Cotton didn’t really think anyone disagreed with him. Cotton believed that freedom meant the freedom for him to force others to do what he thought was right because he believed everyone really knew he was right. Our problem now is that our political world is filled with John Cottons.

Williams recognized that Cotton was sincere in his beliefs, and believed that Cotton was wrong, and that’s why the founder of the Baptists believed in the separation of church and state. Williams believed that people sincerely disagree. Williams believed that freedom meant the freedom to disagree with him.

I think the notion that our always deep, rich, and entangled pluralistic political world can be put into a binary of left v. right or a continuum is like saying that all motorized vehicles are either trucks or compacts, all pets are Siamese cats or Labradoodles, all fonts are comic sans or Calibri. Taking those false binaries and making them a continuum doesn’t make them more nuanced; it just reinforces the stupidity.

So, I’m not making a claim about both sides being flawed (a claim often made by the person who watches the trolley and hopes someone else makes a decision).

I’m making this claim: our political discourse has a very consistent use of the word “freedom”. and it’s the one Cotton used: “freedom” is the ability to do whatever you think is right, and the freedom to force everyone else to behave as you think they should.

Freedom and tolerance are both claims that come from our own perspective, our own sense (our Cotton sense) that our position is the position of truth. Williams wasn’t a relativist; he believed in truth. But he tried to work toward a world of fairness, a world in which we value disagreement.

We need to stop talking about “freedom” (or “tolerance” which is similarly vexed), not because those are bad values, but because the way we’ve been using that term is so muddled and entangled with in-group favoritism that we just need to walk away from the terms for a while.

Instead, we need to talk about fairness. We’ve got a good source in that Jesus (a prophet for Muslims), and so many ethical systems say that ethical behavior means reasoning past in-group preference.

“Fairness” does not mean being equally critical of “both sides” because the wonderful world of our policy options is neither a binary nor a continuum.

We are in a world of demagoguery, a world in which every issue is falsely framed as a zero-sum contest between us and them, a world in which we are free to do what’s right or they restrict our freedom.

What that really means is that we are in a very nasty moment when “freedom” means the freedom to force everyone else to do what we know to be right. That’s what Cotton sincerely believed. That’s also what Stalin sincerely believed. That’s what a lot of people believed who turned out to be totally wrong.

Freedom shouldn’t be seen as the right to be seen as right, but the freedom for all groups to be held to the same standards to which we hold ourselves. Freedom is only freedom if it’s grounded in fairness of standards, not niceness, and not in a binary.

Trump’s racist tweets

Donald Trump said:

“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run… Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

And the question is: is that racist? And the answer is yes. The more important point is that this is a great moment for talking about how racism actually works, since racism continues because people don’t know it when they see it.

A lot of people look at what he said, and say, “This isn’t racist, because he never mentions race, and he’s talking about culture of origin, not race.”

The notion that something isn’t racist as long as you don’t explicitly mention race is like saying it isn’t cancer as long as you don’t say that word out loud.

A lot of people believe that a racist action happens because a person (who is racist in every single encounter) gets up in the morning and says, “I sure do have an irrational hate of X race. How can I be more racist toward that group every day and every way?” And, when that person engages in a racist action, s/he says, “I am doing this to you purely because you are X race.” Thus, as long as someone isn’t deliberately hostile, or their hostility isn’t irrational, or they don’t explicitly mention race, they didn’t do something racist.

In that world, someone saying that what you did is racist is accusing you of being that kind of really awful person. And so you are offended, and then the conversation shifts to how you feel about getting accused of getting up every morning and ironing your hood. (This is called “white fragility.”) So, you point out that you didn’t use racist terms, you have friends of X race (which might or might not be true), you have done un- or anti-racist things. None of that–your feeling of having been disrespected, your avoiding racist terms, your friends, your past behavior–is actually evidence that this you just did was not racist.

Think about it this way. You’re driving along, and someone (call him Chester) changes lanes into you and causes y’all to crash. Your car is really damaged. And Chester gets out of his car and you have this conversation:

You: You just changed lanes into me.
Chester: No, I couldn’t have done that because that would make me a bad driver and how dare you call me a bad driver! I am a good person. I foster blind owls, and teach a literacy class at the local public library, and pick up trash on the road.
You: Um, that’s all great, but you did change lanes into me.
Chester: I couldn’t have done that because I’m a good driver. I have never been given a ticket (because I treat police officers with respect, unlike some people), I think terrible things about very unsafe drivers, and I always check my blindspots. And I think the real issue here is that you’ve accused me of being a bad driver.

You wouldn’t say, “Oh, wow, well, yeah, that’s all evidence that you are a good driver, so you can’t possibly have just changed lanes into me.” That would be an absurd conclusion. You would say, “I don’t really care if you’re normally a good driver. I don’t care who you are–I care about what you just did.”

Yet, when someone does something racist, and someone else points it out, we have the “I can’t have changed lanes into you because I’m a good driver” argument.

And that’s how this argument about Trump is going.

But, let’s take seriously the argument that he isn’t racist, but xenophobic. He isn’t xenophobic—his wife, in-laws, and father are or were all immigrants—he is not opposed to immigrants. He’s perfectly fine with engaging in chain immigration, which he has condemned in the abstract, for his family, and his wife’s visa is problematic. And, this isn’t really about immigrants—this is about what counts as a real American.

Keep in mind that all of the women he criticized are Americans. That’s the country they’re from. So, he just said the US has a government that is a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world.

Perhaps we should take him at his word. Or, in other words, paging Dr. Freud.

There are only two ways to interpret what he said—either he is unintentionally showing what he thinks of his own government, or he believes that those women should be seen as coming from the countries from which their parents came. Three of them, after all, were born in the US. And he sees their ethnicity—their parents’ country—as what matters about them. And that is what makes it racist. That is how racism works—as seeing some groups as not really American.

That’s really common among racists. Americans gleefully put Americans of Japanese descent into camps (as they were called at the time) because the assumption was that, if you were second generation Japanese you weren’t really American, an assumption not made about the Italians, Germans, Romanians, or other Nazi countries in the 1940s (but made about all of those groups at some point). That was a political, and not biological, decision. All the decisions about who gets to be white have always been political and not biological.

Again, that’s how racism works. Until the rise of biological racism, “race” was always country of origin. Even after the rise of biological racism, there was a lot of “science” that showed that people from various countries (or continents) were inferior—the Irish, the Poles, the Italians–, biological racism never had a coherent biological definition of race.

Some scholars use the term cultural racism, but I’m not wild about that term, since all racism is and always has been about country of origin (sometimes going back pretty far, as with Latinx whose families have been in the US far longer than Trump’s, or Native Americans who are oddly framed as not native to the US). The Jews are not a race.

So, saying that Trump was talking about country of origin and not race means he’s perfectly in line with how racism typically works.

Trump has had a lot to say about what’s wrong with America, and how the government is awful. In fact, a lot of his base believes there is a Deep State trying to work against him. Trump and his supporters are the ones telling everyone how the government should be run.

So, Trump and his supporters have no problem with someone going on and on about how awful the government is—they think that’s great. That’s what makes them love Trump.

And, really, if you want to have an example of viciously telling people things, Trump’s tweets would be up there.

Again, that’s how racism works. When an in-group member engages in a certain behavior—let’s say disrupting coffee shops with protests—you defend it as required by external circumstances, and the consequence of good internal motives. When an out-group member disrupts coffee shops with protests, you say it wasn’t necessary, and it was the consequence of bad motives.

If you believe that disagreement is useful for a democracy, if you believe that people really disagree, if you believe that we should argue with one another—in other words, if you believe in the values on which the US is founded—then you would attribute someone’s disagreement to their disagreeing.

Either criticizing the government is okay, or it isn’t. And if it’s okay for you, then it’s okay for others. And if you say that someone’s argument should be dismissed because of their race, ethnicity, or country of origin, you’ve made a racist argument.