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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.

How the fallacy of motivism tricks us into demagoguery

[Image from here]

Russell Brand once said: “When I was poor and complained about inequality they said I was bitter; now that I’m rich and I complain about inequality they say I’m a hypocrite. I’m beginning to think they just don’t want to talk about inequality.”

In other words, people dismissed his arguments on the grounds that his arguments were coming from bad motives, simply because they didn’t want to think carefully about his argument.

It isn’t just about people who don’t want to talk about inequality. Just in the last month, I’ve seen people dismiss Pelosi’s reluctance to impeach Trump as motivated by nothing other than her ambition, Pence’s support of Trump as motivated by nothing other than his ambition, skepticism about anti-vax claims attributed to people being in the thrall of Big Pharma, my city’s bike plan for bike lanes as being in the thrall of Big Bikes (not really—I still can’t figure that one out), the scientific consensus about global warming as motivated by sheer greed, people putting plastic bags with dog poop in them into a trash can as being motivated by sheer selfishness. These are all ways of refusing to engage with people who disagree with you by believing, just on the basis that they disagree, that they must be bad people for disagreeing. It’s motivism.

Demagoguery is

a discourse that promises stability, certainty, and escape from the responsibilities of rhetoric through framing public policy in terms of the degree to which and means by which (not whether) the outgroup should be punished for the current problems of the ingroup. Public debate largely concerns three stases: group identity (who is in the ingroup, what signifies outgroup membership, and how loyal rhetors are to the ingroup); need (usually framed in terms of how evil the outgroup is); what level of punishment to enact against the outgroup (restriction of rights to extermination). (Demagoguery and Democracy)

Here’s another way to put that: democracy presumes (and requires) that citizens work to develop informed opinions about our shared policy options. Democracy requires imaginative and reasonable argumentation about policy. Democracy presumes that people really disagree, that no solution is perfect, and that we have to consider policy issues from various perspectives. Demagoguery says we don’t need all that work. It says that we should instead think about politics as a zero-sum battle between us and them. And it’s zero-sum in the sense that, any benefit is a loss for the other side, and any loss is a benefit for the other side. So, we can win just by making them lose.

Demagoguery relies on the belief that there is one right answer to every political issue, and it is obvious to every right-thinking person (sometimes it’s only obvious to the leader in whom we should put all our faith—that’s when it’s cult demagoguery). Demagoguery undermines democracy because it means that the appropriate response to disagreement in a culture is to silence the people who aren’t saying what every right-minded person believes. And they can and should be silenced because their argument has no merit—they aren’t engaged in “good faith argumentation” (explained below). They’re only disagreeing because they’re bad people with bad motives.

“Good faith argumentation” is the term that a lot of scholars use for when people are disagreeing with one another honestly, trying hard to make reasonable (and internally consistent) arguments, listening to one another and representing the others’ views fairly, and are genuinely open to having their minds changed on the issue.

This is a useful concept because it helps you make decisions about whether to argue with a family member over Thanksgiving dinner (is Uncle Fubar willing to engage in good faith argumentation? if not, just change the subject), some rando on the internet (who might be a bot, a hatebot, or a paid troll), your boss (who has weird ideas and might punish you for disagreeing), someone concern-trolling you, or various other people with whom it isn’t worth your time to argue.

So, there’s a difference between deciding that someone is not engaged in good faith argumentation and therefore not worth arguing with because you have clear evidence that they aren’t, and dismissing all significant opposition arguments on the grounds anyone who disagrees with you must have bad motives. That second move is motivism.

And motivism reinforces the way that people there is only one right and simple answer to every complicated issue, and it’s obvious to everyone, explain disagreement. If you believe that, then how do you explain disagreement?

There are two ways: one requires metacognition, and the other doesn’t.

One requires that you think to yourself that you might be wrong, that your position might be right from your perspective, but wrong from other perspectives (and, no, that isn’t relativism[1]), that what is best for you is not best for others—that requires that you think about whether how you’re thinking about this issue is a good way (metacognition). And so you would try to find ways of making and assessing argument to which you will hold all groups, and which you would think a good way of making and assessing argument if an opposition used it (so, if your way of assessing is, “Do I think it’s true,” then you’d have to say that’s a good way for your opposition to assess arguments, and now you’re the relativist).

This way involves perspective-shifting, and listening. It requires that you really try to understand the oppositions’ arguments and why they would seem to make sense to them. Sometimes you discover that their arguments don’t make sense, that you’d reject them if they were in-group arguments, or that they aren’t engaged in good faith argumentation, but you do that on the basis of engaging with the way they’re arguing and imagining them arguing that way for your position.

The other says that anyone who doesn’t see that you’re right (since you can keep looking at the situation and see that you are) must be rejecting the obvious good course of action because of bad motives.

That’s motivism. Motivism is when you refuse to treat opposition arguments as you want your arguments treated on the grounds that their disagreeing means they must have bad motives, and could not possibly be engaged in good faith argumentation.

It’s fine to decide you won’t argue reasonably with someone because you have determined they aren’t engaged in good faith argumentation. But you determine that by how they respond to disagreement. It’s pretty unusual that on the basis of their simply having made a claim you can decide they aren’t engaged in good faith argumentation. [2]

There is, of course, a really simple way to decide if they are: ask if they’re willing to change their mind. At that point, you can decide they aren’t able to engage in good faith argumentation, but they might still have good reasons for their position. You might be the one who is being unreasonable. You can only know if people who disagree with you have good reasons by paying attention to their reasons.

You can only know if a policy argument is terrible by trying to find the smartest arguments for it and seeing if they’re terrible.

But, assuming that simply because someone disagrees with you their position is the consequence of their bad motives means that we can’t argue together. Demagoguery says that the world really is us v. them and anyone who disagrees with you should be silenced, expelled, or exterminated.

And democracy requires that we argue together.

[1] Despite what common media say, there are many kinds of relativism, and the one attributed to “liberals”—that all views are equally valid—is not held by anyone over 14 who is not smoking very bad weed. I only know of two major philosophers who advocated that position (Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Paul Feyerabend), but, since they both argued that people are wrong not to be relativist, that would be the pragmatic fallacy. (That’s the same problem with people who say, “You should never judge anyone,” which is a pretty judgmental thing to say.) Saying that people have genuinely different understandings is not saying that positions are equally valid—it’s saying that many positions other than the one I have are worth being treated just as I want my opinion treated. It isn’t that all positions are equally valid, but that all positions should have the same validity tests applied.

The notion that there is no single position from which the absolute truth is obvious is not an endorsement of any of the kinds of relativism. It’s actually a kind of realism. It is really true that, if you’re a sheep rancher, then you have certain interests, and those interests aren’t the same as someone who wants to redirect your water supply for their cornfield. People really disagree.
[2] But it happens. It happens when you’ve looked at the best sources making that claim, tried to find the best arguments for it, and determined that this claim has never been defended through good faith argumentation.

Trump, Clinton, and Epstein

Here’s what clear about Jeffrey Epstein: he has had many plausible accusations of participating in underage sex trafficking, the kind of accusations that would have landed anyone else in jail for a long time, but got him a light sentence because he has powerful connections.

Epstein has very clear ties to Trump, even more to Trump’s appointee Alex Acosta, who negotiated a deal with Epstein no one else would have gotten. Epstein, in that deal, admitted to sex trafficking. In a later interview, he was clear he had no regret about any of it. (footnote on page nine)

So, as a culture, here’s what we should be arguing: Acosta should resign, and Trump should grovel for appointing him.

Instead, we’re engaged in some kind of weird “Well, Clinton is implicated, so Trump is innocent.” Or, the even weirder, “Trump told someone that he knew Epstein was a child rapist, and so banned him from Mar-a-Lago,” so Trump is in the clear.

The people who are making those arguments would never consider those good arguments if made by Clinton supporters.

And that is what is wrong with our current political world. That’s how far too many political arguments play out. We make arguments we think would be terrible if made on behalf of out-group political figures. We look at every issue from within the frame of “this is a zero-sum contest between us and them” and then only consider evidence that shows we are winning that contest, or they’re losing (which means we’re winning). In that world, if you or an in-group political figure is shown to have done something wrong, you can wipe the slate clean by showing that an out-group person did the same thing.

[Thus, the complaint that SJW are engaged in identity politics is sheer projection. People all over the political spectrum are reasoning from their identity. Not everyone reasons that way, but every position has someone doing it–some have lots.]

When I say this to people supporting Trump, I often get the response, “Well, liberals do it too.”

That would be proving my point.

(It’s a bit more complicated with people who don’t like Trump, because they aren’t all liberals—many of them are self-identified conservatives, some are progressives or Marxists (who hate liberals), some are anarchists—being opposed to Trump does not mean you’re “liberal”. Supporting Trump doesn’t necessarily mean you’re “conservative.”)

Imagine a world that was not people hiding in their enclave throwing reasons at one another like bricks. Imagine a world in which people held all groups to the same standards. That is a world in which people preferred one group over others, but in which simply being in-group didn’t exempt someone from prosecution, let alone criticism.

In that world, anyone with ties to Epstein would be investigated fairly and thoroughly, and we would see anyone who argued anything else as enabling a child molester.

This isn’t about Democrats v. Republicans (to be honest, no issue ever really is); this is about people who enabled Epstein in his sexually assaulting underage women. It should be non-partisan.

We can have a world in which Americans agree that anyone involved in underage sex trafficking goes to jail. Or we can have a world in which we decide that accusations of involvement in underage sex trafficking on the part of our political figures shouldn’t be fully investigated, but their involvement is criminal.

I’d like the former.

Pretending your factionalism is commitment to principle

One of many weird things about politics is how people claim that their opposition to a political figure is a question of principle, but that principle only seems to apply to an out-group politician. Thus, if Chester embezzles, and you are anti-Chesterian, you are likely to try to make your position seem reasonable—and not just in-group fanaticism—by claiming that you’re opposed to dodgy real estate dealing on principle.

But, if Hubert, your candidate, is later caught in dodgy real estate dealing, you’re suddenly going to find a reason your “principled” opposition to dodgy real estate dealing doesn’t apply. There are, loosely, three ways you’ll do that without believing that you have thereby violated your principle.

By not hearing about it, or dismissing any reports of it as “biased.” You simply refuse to listen to anyone who says that Hubert engaged in dodgy real estate dealing.
By claiming that it wasn’t really in dodgy real estate dealing because Hubert had different motives (we attribute good motives to in-group members and bad motives to out-group members) or because there were extenuating circumstances. That is, we explain bad behavior on the part of in-group members externally (circumstances), but bad behavior on the part of out-group members as internally (as a deliberate choice showing their essential evil).
By saying that the in-group situation is so desperate that any behavior on our part is justified (note that this is saying that the stance on dodgy real estate dealing is, therefore, a principle for which there are lots of exceptions—you would operate on the basis of this principle were it not for the out-group).

[There is also the thoroughly unprincipled, openly irrational, and anti-democratic response that anything your group does is okay because the out-group has done a bad thing too. This post isn’t about that response—this is about people who think they’re principled and not fanatical about their in-group.]

In my experience arguing with people, they will also not uncommonly just refuse to admit that they ever claimed that their stance on in dodgy real estate dealing was principled (although they once did). They just don’t care if Hubert had and has dodgy real estate dealings—they admire it; they see it as a sign of his being a person with good judgment. Yet they remain in a white-hot rage about Chester’s dodgy real estate dealing, and they’ll suddenly rediscover they’re principled opposition.

This is just factionalism, but what I find interesting is that people who are clearly engaged in factionalism keep trying to claim they aren’t. (Some people admit that their support for one candidate or another is factionalism—this isn’t about them.)

In addition to number two (above)—you can always find ways to rationalize in-group behavior—there’s something else. It’s about identification.

Kenneth Burke long ago (1939, in a way) figured out that a really persuasive political figure presents zirself [I loathe him/her] as the same kind of person as the “real” people in a community. Many people decide whether to support a political figure on the basis of in-group membership—that person is me; that person gets me; that person cares about me. They see that person as someone they could be.

So, if I think Hubert is basically me with different opportunities, I will take every criticism of him as personally as I take criticisms of me, I will judge and explain his actions the same way I judge and explain mine. And most of us are pretty forgiving of ourselves. All of spend a lot of time finding reasons to justify behavior that violates principles we claim to hold.

Hillary Clinton and Trump both have/had accusations of dodgy real estate deals.

Assume, for the sake of argument, that HRC and Trump have equally plausible accusations of equally serious dodgy real estate deals.

If you liked HRC, if you see her as someone like you, if you think she has had a life you could have, or if you think she is the sort of person you want to be, if you admire a person with her education and intellectual achievements and abilities, if you imagine that you and she could be friends, then you wouldn’t mind accusations against her because you would find ways to explain them. You would find yourself imagining how you could have gotten into that situation, and why it wouldn’t really matter. You might even admire her for having bent the rules because you’d like to do that.

If you see her as a kind of person you don’t like, if you feel that what she is done is something you never could do, if you see her as someone you would never want to be (or you believe the rhetoric that people like her look down on people like you), then she is that bitch over there eating crackers.

If you liked Trump, if you see him as someone like you, if you think he has had a life you could have, or if you think he is the sort of person you want to be, if you imagine that you and he could be friends, if you think he really gets you and looks about for people like you, if you think that he responds to situations the way you would, then you wouldn’t mind accusations against him because you would find ways to explain them. You would find yourself imagining how you could have gotten into that situation, and why it wouldn’t really matter. You might even admit he bent the rules and admire him for it.

If you see Trump as a kind of person you don’t like, if you think he behaves in a way you never would, if you believe the rhetoric about the gold toilet, then he is that jerk to whom rules don’t apply.

So, am I saying “both sides are just as bad”? Nope, because I don’t think American politics is accurately described as “two sides.”

The important point is that neither of these responses is principled. They’re factional.

A person for whom dodgy real estate deals is a reason to reject a candidate, on principle, would investigate the claims by reading the smartest versions of the accusations against both, regardless of in- or out-group source. If that isn’t what you do, then this isn’t really about the principle of dodgy real estate deals—it’s about dodgy real estate deals being a brick you can throw at the other side. Your political positions are the consequence of irrational commitments to your in-group.

Were the Nazis leftists? No.

A lot of people believe that the Nazis were leftists. These are people who believe that the complicated and vexed world of thoughts about politics can be divided into an us (right wing/conservative) and everyone else, whom they think of as leftists. And that our current categories of politics go back through eternity.

The “Nazis were lefties” argument is also attractive because we want to believe that the Nazis share no group identities with us. That’s why it took me so long to admit that Hitler was vegetarian and a dog-lover. I just couldn’t admit that someone in two of my important in-groups could be that bad.

I kept trying to argue that Hitler wasn’t really vegetarian. But the “Nazis were lefties” argument goes one step further–it says that because Hitler couldn’t possibly have been conservative, he must have been lefty. [1] If conservatives wanted to argue that Hitler wasn’t really conservative, or he wasn’t conservative in the way we use the term now, that would be an argument to make. But, if you’re going to divide the world of politics into right-wing or left-wing, Hitler was right wing.

The solution is not to engage in mendacious or silly arguments, but to rethink the notion that the vexed and complicated world of political philosophies can be usefully divided into right- v. left-wing.

Instead of the example of Hitler being a reason to rethink their easy (and false) binary of politics, the people who say Hitler was a lefty want to reduce the uncertain world of politics to certainty–they want to believe that if you have these values, you can be certain that you are right and will never be wrong. So, this isn’t really about Hitler–it’s about their need to believe that they can be certain in the goodness of their political ideology.

Nazis self-identified as a right-wing group, they were aided exclusively by right-wing politicians, and they enacted right-wing policies (unless I’ve persuaded you to abandon the right- v. left-wing false binary, and then we can have a much more interesting discussion about Nazi beliefs), and thus they present a problem for this notion that commitment to right-wing conservative politics necessarily means you’re always on the side of good.

And, so, people who want to believe that a commitment to conservative “right-wing” values is always right have to explain the Nazis. (They don’t just have to explain the Nazis–they also have to explain away US slavery, segregation, company towns, children dying in factories.) At this point, someone committed to “my group is always right” is thinking, “Leftists did worse.” Perhaps, but that doesn’t make conservatism always right. Whether conservative political ideology is always right is orthogonal to the question of whether lefties are ever wrong. Perhaps neither is always right or always wrong. Perhaps politics is not usefully thought of as a binary of us v. them.

Hitler was conservative; he said so. He hated leftists. He said so. He said they were responsible for the loss of WWI. He said lefties were all Jews, and that was a major reason for making Germany “free of Jews”–it would free Germany of Marxists. He was entirely and exclusively supported by the conservative parties. The leftist parties–the communists and the democratic socialists–were the only ones who voted against his being dictator. When Hitler came into power, the first group he went after were communists. Every scholar of Hitler, Nazism, and the Holocaust says he was a right-wing authoritarian.

But, there are people who say he was leftist, and there are four ways they make that argument.

1) They haven’t read Mein Kampf, any of Hitler’s speeches, or any scholarship on Hitler. And, let’s be blunt, they won’t. They know that their belief that the Nazis were lefties is a fragile little gossamer wing that couldn’t withstand any consideration it might be wrong. I think this is interesting (it’s like people who say the CSA wasn’t about slavery and won’t look at the Declarations of Secession). They’d rather be wrong and loyal than right. I think these people kind of know they’re wrong, but they think that expressing loyalty to a claim even they know is irrational is the greatest loyalty there is.

2) They say that Nazis were socialists, and socialists are lefties. This one makes me sad. It’s taking the categories of our current political situation and assuming they’ve applied through time–like trying to think about the Trojan War conflict in terms of which group was Democrats and which group was Republicans. The answer is neither was either. Socialism predated Marx. That’s why he spends so much time in Communist Manifesto trying to persuade other kinds of socialists to become Marxist–because there were non-Marxist socialists, and there continued to be non-Marxists for a long time. There is good scholarship about the very weird economic philosophies of volkisch theorists, and the way that many conservatives hoped for an economy that had no one making money on the basis of interest (a conservative Catholic position)–sometimes that position was called “Christian socialism.” It had nothing to do with Marx. The notion that the market should be freed from tariffs and protectionism was, in the 19th and early 20th century, a liberal notion.

3) It says socialist in their name. And socialists are lefties. I run across this a lot. It has all the problems of the first two (it’s ahistorical), and another level of being hilarious. Okay, if we’re going to say that a word in your name being used by someone else shows who you really are, then let’s talk about Republicans. The R is USSR is for Republic, so, by their argument about socialist, Republicans are Stalinist.

They’ll never admit that–but, and this is the point, that means that they don’t have a rational position open to counter-argument. They want to believe that conservatives could never do what Hitler did, and they will scramble around to find any argument that enables them to swat away evidence that shows their faith in conservativism as necessarily and always good and never associated with anything bad is false.

4) Shoddy writers like D’Souza tell them they’re right. D’Souza’s argument about Hitler being a kind of communist relies on never quoting Hitler on the subject of communists, not citing any scholars of Hitler, bungling the history of communism, contradicting himself, and sometimes openly lying.

And, really, if someone who liked his argument ventured out of their informational enclave, they would see how wrong he is. That Hitler was a conservative is not a left/right debate.

That doesn’t mean he was a Republican. It’s nonsense to try to take our current (falsely binary) categories of politics and try to impose them on another era, country, and culture. American politics right now is not actually a binary of “leftists” v. “conservatives”–it’s silly to think that a binary that is false now would become accurate if applied to a different era.

What the Nazis meant by “socialism” was a vague notion that making money from interest was bad, the rigid German aristocratic system should be changed in favor of a class system based on race rather than class, the state should be able to call upon industries to help with the war effort. While some Nazis remained committed to that vague notion (e.g., Goebbels), there’s debate as to Hitler’s notions about domestic economy and whether he had coherent ones. There is no debate–and no debate possible, given what he said and did throughout his political career–as to whether he was “leftist.”

The argument about Hitler being a leftist isn’t about Hitler. It’s about whether loyal conservatives are willing to be so loyal that they will believe and repeat a claim that they aren’t willing to subject to rational argumentation.

Oddly enough, when I make this point with “Hitler was a lefty,” they will often say, “But lefties do that too.”

Well, as it happens, I think that people who aren’t loyal to “conservative” politics also have their irrational beliefs they protect from disproof. I don’t think all non-conservatives are lefties, and, more important, I believe that someone else believing a lie doesn’t make your beliefs true. It just means you’re both believing a lie.

Hitler was a right-wing authoritarian. If you’re going to divide the world into left- v. right-wing, that’s what he was.

That doesn’t mean all right-wing authoritarians are Hitler, nor that only right-wing authoritarians are bad (let’s talk about Stalin or Pol Pot).

It means something more complicated–and that’s why right-wing authoritarians try to make Hitler a lefty–it means that having a particular political commitment doesn’t guarantee that you are ethical, or correct, or just. It means the world isn’t right- v. left-wing. This isn’t about right or left politics; this is about people who want to believe that certainty is possible in a vexed and nuanced world–that if you have the right ideological commitments, you will never be part of injustice. That isn’t how our world works.

[1] I can’t resist pointing out that this is like arguing that, since Hitler wasn’t a dog, he must be a squirrel. If you think the world is divided into dogs and squirrels that would seem to make sense.

Maybe the world isn’t divided into dogs and squirrels.

The Sacred Band of Thebes and gays in the military

I’ve never read Plutarch cover to cover–just the parts relevant to the topics and people I teach or write about. And I’ve tended not to read much about Thebes. Still and all, I think it’s embarrassing that I didn’t know about the Sacred Band of Thebes.

Plutarch (CE 46-120) talks about them relative to the Battle of Leuctra (July 371 BCE), a battle between Thebes and Sparta. Paul Davis’ 100 Decisive Battles (a really fun read, btw) says that the “Theban victory broke the power of Sparta” (23) and, perhaps more important, “the prestige of the Spartan army had been broken” (26).

This is what Plutarch (CE 46-120) has to say about the Sacred Band of Thebes (this is a 1917 translation, so bear with me–if you really can’t stand it, just skip the long quote):

“This battle first taught the other Greeks also that it was not the Eurotas, nor the region between Babyce and Cnacion [that is, Sparta] which alone produced warlike fighting men, but that wheresoever young men are prone to be ashamed of baseness and courageous in a noble cause, shunning disgrace more than danger, these are most formidable to their foes.”

The sacred band, we are told, was first formed by Gorgidas, of three hundred chosen men, to whom the city furnished exercise and maintenance, and who encamped in the Cadmeia; for which reason, too, they were called the city band; for citadels in those days were properly called cities. But some say that this band was composed of lovers and beloved. And a pleasantry of Pammenes is cited, in which he said that Homer’s Nestor was no tactician when he urged the Greeks to form in companies by clans and tribes, “That clan might give assistance unto clan, and tribes to tribes,” since he should have stationed lover by beloved.

“For tribesmen and clansmen make little account of tribesmen and clansmen in times of danger; whereas, a band that is held together by the friendship between lovers is indissoluble and not to be broken, since the lovers are ashamed to play the coward before their beloved, and the beloved before their lovers, and both stand firm in danger to protect each other. Nor is this a wonder since men have more regard for their lovers even when absent than for others who are present, as was true of him who, when his enemy was about to slay him where he lay, earnestly besought him to run his sword through his breast, ‘in order,’ as he said, ‘that my beloved may not have to blush at sight of my body with a wound in the back.’ It is related, too, that Iolaüs, who shared the labours of Heracles and fought by his side, was beloved of him. And Aristotle says that even down to his day the tomb of Iolaüs was a place where lovers and beloved plighted mutual faith. It was natural, then, that the band should also be called sacred, because even Plato calls the lover a friend ‘inspired of God.’

“It is said, moreover, that the band was never beaten, until the battle of Chaeroneia; and when, after the battle, Philip was surveying the dead, and stopped at the place where the three hundred were lying, all where they had faced the long spears of his phalanx, with their armour, and mingled one with another, he was amazed, and on learning that this was the band of lovers and beloved, burst into tears and said: ‘Perish miserably they who think that these men did or suffered aught disgraceful.’” (2.14: Plutarch, Pelopidas 17-19)

Or, in other words, it was a band of 150 homosexual male couples, and they were fierce, and they were feared.

It’s been a while, but, when I was crawling around homophobic corners of the Internet it was around the time there was a lot of pearl clutching about letting openly gay men into the military. And one of the arguments made, in addition to that there would be sexual harassment (I could never figure out whether the people who made that argument were thereby admitting that women in the military are sexually harassed), was that it would weaken the military because gay men can’t fight.

As Codex Melcher says on their blog, “People often ask when LGBTQ concerns arise ‘Why are tons of people suddenly gay/trans/not like me when it’s never existed in history before now'” and the answer is “They’ve always been here.”

I wish I’d know about the Sacred Band when I was trying to argue with homophobes.

Page numbers for Kenneth Burke’s “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle'”

Kenneth Burke’s 1939 essay, “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle,’” is brilliant. For reasons I don’t understand, however, Burke didn’t give page numbers on his quotes. I had a hard time finding the page numbers, since he’s using a different translation from the one generally considered authoritative (by Ralph Manheim).[1]

I spent way too much time today trying to find the quotes in the Manheim translation, in order to give them page numbers and cite them correctly (since I intend to use that translation). I thought it might be helpful for other rhetoric folks to have the correct pages—to save y’all some time.

Burke 192: “The geo-political importance of a center….a hand that represents this unity.” (Manheim 347)

Burke 193: “As a whole, and at all times…bitterness against the attackers.” (Manheim 118)

Burke 197: “The more I argued with them….began to hate them.” (Manheim 62)

Burke 198: “This was the time in which…fanatical anti-Semite.” (Manheim 64)

Burke 212: [His discussion of Hitler’s tendency to provoke communists.] (Manheim 483-485)

Burke 212n: “Here, too, one can learn….blind adherence.” (Manheim 458-9)

[1] The Manheim translation came out in 1943, so this isn’t a criticism of Burke.

Rhetoric, Respect, and Institutional Racism

A few months ago, I was talking with a lot of rhetoric scholars trying to identify the qualities of good rhetoric, and it was suggested that one of the important characteristics is respect—that people need to respect each other. I was completely incoherent in my response.

Arguing that respect should not be considered a criterion for good rhetoric sounds like attacking Santa Claus, baby bunnies, or apple pie. One thing I couldn’t make clear is that I wasn’t saying the respect is bad, but that it’s setting an actively harmful criterion, for four reasons:

It’s setting the bar too high—if the parties respect each other, we’re probably in good territory anyway. We need to figure out how to have productive arguments when the people involved don’t respect one another. If respect is required for productive argumentation, then we’re saying that instances of conflict without respect have to go to violence. So, by setting the bar too high, this criterion truncates the possibilities of argumentation.
It makes the common mistake of thinking that our problem is the consequence of bad feelings for others—it’s like the civility argument. Respect is an affect; it’s a posture. We tend to judge it by whether we feel comfortable with the tone someone is using. Therefore, as long as someone is using a tone we find comfortable, we’ll infer respect. That tendency to infer respect by what feelings of ours are (or are not) being triggered (comfort/discomfort) means that we are more likely to get prickly and defensive about how someone is disagreeing with in-group members than out-group members. It’s inevitably a non-reciprocal standard—it is never applied equally across interlocutors.
And, hence, and this is the point I couldn’t get across, respect as a standard will always get entangled in hierarchies of power and authority. We don’t ask that parents treat children with the same respect as children are supposed to treat parents; we have different standards of respect for how students treat teachers than vice versa. Respect is always going to benefit people who have cultural, political, or legal authority more.
There’s another way it isn’t an equal burden on all parties, and this also is a consequence of “respect” being something we infer through affect and tone—like the notion of “civility,” it puts a higher burden on rhetors arguing for major social change or who are the victims of institutional oppression and violence. There was no way for abolitionists to make a “respectful” condemnation of slavery, because it was always taken as an attack on slavers (some of whom were euphemistically called “slaveowners” or “slaveholders”).

You see this issue with accusations of institutionalized racism—the people who benefit from the current system feel themselves attacked by such condemnations, and they inevitably express that they feel disrespected. And they do feel disrespected. So, if we’re going to say that respect is a requirement of productive rhetoric, then powerful people feeling disrespected ends the argument. In that world, how can someone raise the issue of institutional racism?

They can’t. Or, they can, but their argument will be dismissed as disrespecting people who deserve respect. And then we’re on the identity stasis, arguing about the goodness of the people who felt criticized. Political rhetoric spends way too much time on the feelings of the powerful.

And notice that this, again, doesn’t apply equally across all parties. Slaveholders, surprisingly enough, could use a language and posture of respect for their attitudes toward slaves; racists always use a language of respect for their feelings toward other races. It’s not uncommon for them to claim to respect the other group more than that group respects themselves—that they are the ones who really understand that group, and who can see what that group really needs. If you assess respect by tone and the feelings it triggers in the judge, then extraordinarily disrespectful discourse can slide through by looking calm and rational; patronizing dismissal doesn’t set off disrespect alarms in other in-group members.

We don’t know one another’s hearts, but more powerful people think they do (asymmetric insight is worse for people with power). So, what I wish I’d said is, “Making ‘respect’ one of the criteria for productive rhetoric guarantees that we won’t be able to have the hard arguments—because we’ll end up with the more powerful people focused more on how they feel disrespected than on whether we need substantial change.”

Time management and scholars

I’ve been on sabbatical this semester, my first in twelve years, and I’ve long argued that we can get our jobs done averaging 40 hours a week. I over-committed myself. I agreed to writing or co-authoring six book chapters/articles, seven campus visits in the US, several days of talks in Czechia, and reviewing one article and two book manuscripts. I was still Director of the University Writing Center. I also kept track of my time (more or less). I thought it would be helpful to tell folks how it turned out, since I know that the first time I got a sabbatical I wished that someone had given me more advice about how to use my time. You don’t completely get away from teaching or service, but you can keep it reined in.

I counted my sabbatical as nineteen weeks, from just after New Year’s till the end of finals.

I did pretty well at trying to average 40 hours a week (it was 40.5 average). That’s partially because I took about four weeks of vacation.
The largest category was scholarship (which is where visits went), with 65% of my time.
If I was at the Writing Center, I just clocked it as UWC–there’s no way I could have kept track of when I was teaching, when it was scholarship, when it was service. That was the second largest category, with around 13% of my time.
I spent just over 8% of my time on “misc work” (email, planning, phone calls, organizing).
Non-UWC service also took up just over 8%–some professional, some departmental, but mostly one university committee I didn’t realize would be such a time sink.
The rest was really random–a few hours for dentist appointments or sick days, a few on things that mixed categories (such as writing undergraduate letters of rec–that always seems to me to be both teaching and service).

The reason I emphasize average is that I keep getting misunderstood on this point. Of course you don’t work 40 hours every week. If you take off the four weeks of vacation, then I was working around 50 hours a week for the weeks I was working.

There are also always things that are hard to figure. I didn’t count the time I spent cleaning up cat barf off my desk so I could work, setting up dog beds so they wouldn’t bug me, chasing down the shoes that Pearl stole, nor the time I spent walking a dog and thinking about my writing, or talking about my work. I did, however, count the time at the gym that I spent reading things for work (so not my Sunday gym visit when I’m usually reading apologetics or sermons or Jane Austen).

Scholars and racism

There is a controversy in one of my disciplines right now, and it’s ugly, and it’s getting uglier. And the nastiest part of this argument is nasty because people are arguing as though there is a shared definition of what it means to be racist. There isn’t, and that is the problem. There are at play at least four different ways of thinking about racism: aversive, unconscious, disparate impact, systemic.

Briefly, the controversy concerns the long and documented failure of the NCA Distinguished Scholars to include a significant number of POC in its membership. There are various ways of explaining that failure—off the top of my head, I can imagine someone arguing:

That POC don’t merit inclusion in the group because they are bad people (a racist argument).

- Or, that the 70 Distinguished Scholars are knowingly engaged in aversive racism—the conventional notion of what racism is (conscious hostility toward and aversion of POC). In other words, the problem is that they are bad people.
- Or, that unconscious racism means that the kinds of networks necessary to come to be seen as “distinguished” are unintentionally racially exclusive.
- Or, that something is wrong in the process such that POC scholars have to meet a higher bar or that makes their kind of scholarship invisible in some way.
- Or that systemic racism means that POC scholars haven’t had the kinds of advantages and breaks (including mentoring) necessary to meet the implicit criteria of the Distinguished Scholars.

[There are other issues in this controversy, including some procedural ones—as to how NCA has made and communicated decisions. I’m not going to talk about those issues because I don’t know enough to say anything, not because they’re unimportant.]

Notice that these can be divided up—the first argument is simply racist (and I think many people are reading some of the documents involved as making that argument—I have trouble imagining that it is, but that’s an issue worth clarifying).

The second is saying that this is an issue of aversive racism, in which people see that someone is a POC and consciously deny them the honor.

The third is unconscious racism, such as if people are more likely to vote for people with whom they feel more comfortable, or (as will be discussed below), white discomfort with POC means that POC aren’t included on panels, in edited collections, or invited to lunches.

The fourth is what is legally called “disparate impact,” in which intent is irrelevant—if scholars’ implicit criteria is a kind of scholarship POC tend not to do (as happened with women when women started publishing more), then there is racially-valenced discrimination with neither intent nor aversion. The politics of respectability–the ways we define and enforce norms about respect and respectability–apply disparately to POC, whether they’re intended to or not.

The fifth is systemic or institutional racism, in which institutions and organizations were structured for the benefits of the dominant group at the time, and, while there is no longer necessarily a conscious intent, there is still the impact (such as previously male institutions that have inadequate women’s rest rooms).

At least one widely-distributed argument assumes that this controversy is all about identity—the identity of the Distinguished Scholars. There is one editorial being distributed that makes two occluding assumptions: first, that any claim that a process is racist is the same as accusing the people involved in the process of aversive racism. The criticism is, as this editorial says, “an attack on the association’s own Distinguished Scholars,” that the NCA is “implicitly accusing them [the Distinguished Scholars] of racism.” This editorial frames the changes in NCA procedure as an attack on the identity of the Distinguished Scholars—on their goodness, character, and judgment.

The second occluding assumption is that the only way to include more POC is to ignore merit in favor of decisions based purely on identity. That seems to be saying that there are no POC scholars who merit inclusion—what, then, are the reasons for their exclusion? Because they are excluded.

I don’t know what the NCA argument is, and I can imagine that there are legitimate complaints that the NCA Distinguished Scholars might have about how the NCA has handled this problem. But I’m concerned that there appears to be no acknowledging that there is a problem of exclusion.

This isn’t to say that you can look at the numbers and infer aversive racism on the part of the Distinguished Scholars—the assumption that many people seem to be making. I doubt it is aversive racism; it certainly isn’t about the feelings or character of the people involved. This shouldn’t be an argument about their identity.

If we move the stasis from the identities of the Distinguished Scholars, to the fact of exclusion, then we can talk about processes and institutions and systems. And, really, racism is generally about processes, about often completely unconscious biases built into those processes, even on the part of people who mean well. Racism is often about the sometimes unintended and too often unacknowledged consequences of the ways that powerful organizations and institutions function.

Take, for instance, the problem of racism in science grants. A 2016 study of NIH grants concluded that:

White women PhDs and MDs were as likely as white men to receive an R01 award. Compared with white women, Asian and black women PhDs and black women MDs were significantly less likely to receive funding. Women submitted fewer grant applications, and blacks and women who were new investigators were more likely to submit only one application between 2000 and 2006. (Ginther et al. “Gender, Race/Ethnicity, and National Institutes of Health R01 Research Awards: Is There Evidence of a Double Bind for Women of Color?”Academic Medicine Volume 91(8), August 2016, p 1098-1107)

Ginther et al. suggest that there was no conscious racism involved on the part of people reviewing applications—they noted that both women and men of color submitted fewer applications (implying problems with institutional support or mentoring).

An Economist discussion of the study points out that:

Another possible explanation is social networking. It is in the nature of groups of experts (which is precisely what peer-review panels are) to know both each other and each other’s most promising acolytes. Applicants outside this charmed circle might have less chance of favourable consideration. If the charmed circle itself were racially unrepresentative (if professors unconsciously preferred graduate students of their own race, for example), those excluded from the network because their racial group was under-represented in the first place would find it harder to break in.

If that is the case, this is not aversive racism, let alone conscious hostility.

But there is a problem with NIH grants. And, similarly, there is a problem with the processes by which the Distinguished Scholars group is constituted.

But, to solve that problem, we don’t have to talk about the identities or characters of the Distinguished Scholars.

This isn’t about them; it’s about our field, and its processes, organizations, and institutions. Let’s talk about them.