Category: Uncategorized

The old right, I mean alt-right, is clear what they’re doing.

Here’s what’s interesting to me about the current old-right. I am a huge fan of Ralph Ezekiel’s ethnographic study of neo-Nazis (The Racist Mind). But I’ve often wondered the internet changed the dynamics. Years after the book came out, he wrote an article, “The Racist Mind Revisited” that I found really useful. I’ve been reminded of it this weekend, and I’m thinking that the internet changed how the message is disseminated, but not what the message is, nor why it’s persuasive.

These quotes are from this article: “An Ethnographer Looks at Neo-Nazi and Klan Groups: The Racist Mind Revisited.” American Behavioral Scientist, 09/2002, Volume 46, Issue 1.

I’ll mention that he also talks about the macho ideology and the marginalized participation of women.

“Americans today often learn about Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan through television clips of rallies or marches by men uniformed in camouflage garb with swastika armbands or in robes. These images often carry commentary implying that the racist people are particularly dangerous because they are so different from the viewer, being consumed by irrationality. The racists and their leaders are driven by hatred, it is suggested, and one can scarcely imagine where they come from or how to impede them.” (51)

“The movement’s ideology emerged as one interviewed leaders, listened to their speeches, and read movement newspapers and pamphlets. Two thoughts are the core of this movement: That “race” is real, and those in the movement are God’s elect. Race is seen in 19th-century terms: race as a biological category with absolute boundaries, each race having a different essence—just as a rock is a rock and a tree is a tree, a White is a White and a Black is a Black. ” (53, he’s avoiding the first person.)

“At the ideological level—in the writings and speeches of leaders—the contemporary Klan has joined the neo-Nazis in identifying the Jews as the prime source of evil. Leadership speeches throughout the movement present “the Jew” as the central enemy, with African Americans, Latinos, and Asians as the rather dumb members of “the mud races” who are pawns of the Jews, as are many brainwashed Whites. The leadership ranks gay men and lesbian women with Jews in the enemies list.

“Among the rank and file, the picture is more traditional. Most followers whom I have met exhibited intense prejudice against African Americans that tended to reflect the general prejudice of their families and neighborhoods. Followers could repeat the party line about the Jews, but my strong impression from interviews and from watching socialization into the Detroit group was that new members arrived with strong antipathy toward Blacks but little interest in Jews. They came in hating Blacks and liking the idea that the movement represented Whites in a struggle against Blacks; after entry, they had to be taught who the Jews are and why they should hate them.” (55)

“The youths I met had first become involved in racist activity in junior high school. Their prior (and subsequent) schooling had not led them to harbor a concept of community. The classroom had seldom been shaped as a community in which class members had felt mutual responsibility for one another. On the contrary, the classroom probably had reflected the desperation and the atomization of the society outside the school.

“Equally, the schools had left no feel for democracy. The youths had no positive association to the word, which seemed to them a meaningless term used by adults for hypocritical purposes. School had afforded little chance for real impact on decisions that mattered, opportunities to learn in action the meaning of the word democracy. Both community and democracy can be taught through experience in the classroom, when schools consider these goals part of the curriculum and invest energy in building related skills.

“For the neo-Nazi youths, the teaching in school of multiculturalism had been another adult exercise in hypocrisy. Black History Month was an annual annoyance. It is easy for an adult-led discussion to seem like sermonizing.” (65)

If I tell you that you should do something that you pretty much already want to do anyway, and my reason is something you think is true, you might sincerely believe that I’ve given you a logical and reasonable argument, even if there is no logical relationship between my conclusion and my reason.

I might say, “You should vote for [the candidate of the party you always support] because [the candidate of the party you hate] did/said this bad thing,” you might feel you’ve been given a logical and reasonable argument. But that isn’t a logical argument at all—it’s just an appeal to rabid factionalism. It feels logical because you’re likely to believe that your commitment to your party is rational, and that supporting the other party is irrational.

But, whether you feel your position is rational or not isn’t actually a good measure. Is there a major premise that you would accept in the abstract, even if it didn’t get the conclusion want? And this statement doesn’t do that. This bad thing the other candidate did—is it something that would cause you to refuse to vote for your party’s candidate? If not, then you don’t have a logical argument; you have rabid factionalism.

If I told you, “You should clean my litterboxes because 2+2 = 4” you would probably catch the logical problem. But it’s no less logical than “You should vote for [the candidate of the party you always support] because [the candidate of the party you hate] did/said this bad thing.” Neither has a defensible major premise.

We don’t tend to catch the logical problems (unless we deliberately work at it) when we like the conclusion and the minor premise. If my evidence is associationally related to my conclusion (if you believe my evidence and you’re sorta open to my conclusion) you won’t notice that problem. If you’re feeling a little guilty about not doing enough around the house, or you feel you owe me a huge favor, then, suddenly, “You should clean my litterboxes because 2 + 2 =4” might seem like a “good” argument to you. It’s only good insofar as it seems to give you the justification to do something you were pretty open to do anyway. But it’s no more logical than it was when you didn’t want to do it.

Associational rhetoric works particularly well when we’re talking about an outgroup. Since we generally consider an outgroup icky, then an argument that says, essentially, “My policies are good because the outgroup is icky,” will genuinely seem to be a logical or reasonable argument, but it’s all association. (The outgroup might actually be icky and the policies disastrous.)

If you really like Chester Burnette as a candidate, and you loathe squirrels, and I say, “Chester Burnette is a great candidate because squirrels are evil!” the argument might seem “logical” to you. I’ve given you a claim, and I’ve given you a reason. I would probably follow up with lots of evidence about evil things squirrels have done. So, you could easily believe that your attitude about Burnette was totally logical.

But, what if Hubert Sumlin also advocated policies that would restrict squirrels? In logical terms, the “major premise” of the “Chester Burnette is a great candidate because squirrels are evil” enthymeme is… well, what is it? An enthymeme is supposed to be a compressed syllogism.

A compressed syllogism would have the major premise of “Everyone who hates squirrels is a great candidate,” a minor premise (the evidence) of “Chester hates squirrels,” and the conclusion that “Chester is a great candidate.”

Look at it this way. Imagine that I said, “Hubert Sumlin is a Nazi because he wears a brown shirt,” and you really don’t like Sumlin. You might notice he really does sometimes wear a brown shirt, and, of course Nazis did too! That’s associational thinking, because it ignores the major premise. That’s only a logical argument if you are willing to say that everyone who wears a brown shirt is a Nazi. You aren’t (or shouldn’t be, anyway), and you also either need to say that Hubert is just as good a candidate as Chester or else your argument isn’t logical.[1]

Associational reasoning isn’t necessarily bad. I happen to think it’s really helpful when you’re brainstorming, and it’s clear from the history of science that associational reasoning has had some tremendous benefits. But, like arguments from identity, it’s just one data-point. It is useful, but not sufficient, for democratic deliberation. It isn’t policy argumentation.

What’s useful about thinking in terms of logic and not association is that it helps us step back from what social psychologists call motivated reasoning. We can always find a reason to do something we want to do anyway—we are motivated to find reasons to support our ingroup, justify what we want to do, rationalize away something awful we’ve done. But being able to attach a reason to a belief doesn’t make a belief reasonable.

[1] Sometimes when I make this argument, people will say, “I don’t care if it’s logical to support Chester because he hates squirrels”—I just do. Well, that’s fine, but you don’t support Chester because he hates squirrels; you just support Chester. And just admit that your opposition to Chester’s critics is just ingroup loyalty–you don’t value fairness across groups.

A few years ago, I was talking to one of those young people raised to believe that Reagan was pretty nearly God, and he said to me, “At first I was mad when people said Reagan has Alzheimer’s but then I decided that it didn’t matter.”

I thought that was interesting. He wasn’t mad because it was false; he was mad because it seemed mean. He didn’t change his mind about it because he went from thinking it was false to thinking it was true; he changed his mind because he found a way to explain it as non-trivial.

This was in 2005 or so, but it perfectly reproduced my experience of arguing with Reagan supporters in 1980. Reagan said a lot of things about himself and his record that were untrue. He might have sincerely believed them or not–I think he did–but if you pointed out he was saying things that were untrue, his fans said you were mean. He declared his candidacy literally on the site of one of the most appalling pro-segregation murders of the 1960s, and said he was in favor of states’ rights, and his supporters were apoplectic if you said he was appealing to racism. “He isn’t racist,” they’d say. “He’s a good man.”

If you tried to point out that the economic model on which he was going to base US policy was thoroughly irrational in that it was completely unfalsifiable, you were rejected as some kind of egghead.

When I asked a few more questions (such as, if your policies are best advocated by a person with Alzheimer’s, maybe there are problems with the policies), it became clear that he saw Reagan’s failure to be able to grasp complicated things as a virtue. That’s what made Reagan go for simple solutions, he thought, and he thought that meant that Reagan cut through the bullshit.

That, too, was my experience of Reagan supporters in the 80s (except the Marxists I knew who voted for them because they said he would bring about the people’s revolution faster, and the Dems who voted for him as a protest vote against Carter and then Mondale). They liked that he didn’t seem to understand the complexities of political situations. They sincerely believed that political issues aren’t really complicated, but are made so by professional politicians and eggheads just trying to keep their jobs, and so a person who looked at things in black and white terms would get ‘er done.

In May, where I work, a young man with mental health issues stabbed several people (including a person of color). He was immediately subdued by some police officers who arrived quickly because they were on bikes. The politically useful narratives of this event arrived just about as fast as the police officers.

In July of 1835, some gamblers were lynched in Vicksburg, Mississippi, after a typical pre-lynching “trial.” An early account says it was because they behaved badly at a fourth of July celebration. There were later other versions.

The incident at my university quickly became a datapoint about the victimization of white males, the inherent violence of black males, and the failure of the liberal media to be sufficiently alarmist about the black/liberal conspiracy to exterminate white males. That it was such a datapoint was proven by several other claims that turned out to be false (the attacker went after “Greek” white males, there was another stabbing of a “Greek” white male at the same time—the attacker stabbed a non-white, wasn’t targeting “Greeks,” and the other attack never happened). The incident of the gamblers involved gamblers morphing into abolitionists, and then getting glommed onto a non-existent conspiracy of a guy called Murrell.

These two incidents seem to me extremely similar, and the similarity between them is why I’ve been worried for some time about American political discourse—the way the public “knows” things is worryingly similar to the rhetoric that got us into a war.

That’s obviously a strange argument, but not deliberately perverse. I mean it.

The short version is that how both incidents were quickly renarrated and used signifies larger problems with the normal political discourse of the day. I could have picked another pair—the Charleston pamphlet mailing and Benghazi, for instance—and the similarity would remain. The similarity isn’t about the incidents, but about how they were transformed into an entirely and obviously false narrative that resisted all attempts at refutation. It’s about the easy demagoguery of everyday politics.

This is a sort of complicated argument in that there is so much demagoguery about demagoguery that I have to do a lot of clearing before I can make the argument I want to make. And I worry about starting with a statement of my argument, since my whole point is that what caused the Civil War was that a large number of people refused to listen to anything that might contradict their central beliefs. The Civil War is, unhappily, a great example of how the narration of historical events gets glued on to current issues of ingroup identification (so that whether a particular narration is “true” is determined by whether it is loyal to the ingroup).

In a culture of demagoguery, all issues are reduced to a competition between the ingroup and outgroup. A claim is “true” if it shows that the ingroup is better than the outgroup.

Popular understandings of the Civil War (really, a failed revolution) are dominated by ingroup/outgroup thinking. For many people, admitting that secession and the firing on Fort Sumter were bad ideas would entangle admitting that ingroup members behaved badly. There isn’t a way to look clearly at primary documents about slavery, the declarations of secession, the proslavery provocation of war, segregation, and “the South” that doesn’t involve acknowledging that “the South” (an instance of strategic misnaming, explained below) judged things badly.

The South—that is, the entirety of people in the southern regions of the US–never supported the fairly bizarre system that was US slavery. While Native American tribes in the southern regions had slaves, the system was nothing like the dominant version (which was primarily lucrative because of selling slaves); it’s reasonable to think the large number of slaves didn’t support slavery; Quakers and others were sometimes opposed to slavery, and often opposed to the dominant system (which, by the 1830s, largely prohibited teaching slaves to read the Bible, and which violated property rights by the amount of state control over what slaveholders could do with what law said was their property). The equation of “the South” and “proslavery” is an example of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, in which disconfirming examples are simply not counted.

[This is NOT to say that the large number of white politicians who criticized slavery opposed it, by the way, since many of the were making either the “necessary evil” or “wolf by the ears” argument. The first of those was that slavery was bad, but it was necessary for some vague greater good, and the second (most famously promoted by Jefferson) was that slavery was a crime against Africans, and they were so justified in being angry about slavery that we couldn’t free them. Slavery enabled us to hold them down, and any release of that hold would result in their killing whites in an act of justified rage. So, we must maintain slavery.]

When we talk about “the South” we generally mean the white proslavery political leaders, and their motives in secession were absolutely clear: they were protecting and promoting slavery. And that is what they said, over and over, every time the issue came up. Speeches in Congress, speeches for secession, declarations of secession, speeches at fourth of July celebrations, sermons, judicial decisions—the South was about slavery.

So, anyone who wants to argue that the Civil War was about “states rights” and not slavery has to argue that the people who wrote the declarations of secession and the people arguing in favor of secession were lying. [They also have to explain how the Dred Scott decision and the Fugitive Slave Laws respected the principle of states’ rights—I’ve always found it entertaining how a CSA apologist will, when presented with that argument, either go silent or threaten violence—both responses are admissions that they have no rational response.]

There is a more complicated argument about secession not really being about slavery per se, but about how Southern political and intellectual leaders wove slavery into Southern culture. That argument is that proslavery rhetoric had become a staple of American politics, with oneupsmanship about loyalty to slavery requiring that Southern politicians (and their non-Southern allies, called “doughfaces” because proslavery politicians bragged they could make them have any emotion they wanted) get increasingly extreme in arguments about what should be done to ensure the expansion of slavery. So, it wasn’t slavery, but rhetoric about slavery that caused many slave states to engage in the extraordinarily unwise and unnecessary act of secession.

What people often don’t realize is that slavery was safe, even under Lincoln. Slavery was well-ensconced in US politics, with a majority of the Supreme Court, Congress, and the Presidency. Lincoln’s election was a glitch, in that he was only able to win the Presidency because the proslavery forces split. And he was willing to support a constitutional amendment to protect slavery in the existing slave states. The rational choice on the part of slave states would have been to sit tight until the next election, resolve their internal divisions, and elect another proslavery President.

Thus, were the secession really about slavery as an economic institution, it wouldn’t have happened—slavery as an economic institution was safe, unless you believe the evidence (which is pretty compelling) that slavery was not an economically efficient way to grow sugar or cotton. There are some who argue that slavery was deliberately uneconomic in that owning slaves wasn’t about making money, but it was a marker of success. So, just as driving an unnecessarily large car with poor gas mileage is a marker of masculine success in our culture, and not a rational economic choice, so owning slaves was a marker of masculine success in the antebellum south. A different argument is that slavery wasn’t profitable as an economic system, but it was profitable as a sales system—the profit in slavery came from selling slaves, so slavery was only profitable as an economic institution if there were expanding markets for slaves. If you put both these arguments together, then the otherwise irrational behavior of proslavery rhetors makes more sense, in that, while Lincoln was willing to allow slavery to exist eternally in slave states, he wouldn’t let it expand. Certainly, a lot of primary documents of the era insist on the importance of opening new markets to slavery. (If you want to see a longer review of scholarship on this argument, and my own take, see Fanatical Schemes.)

Whatever the motivations—and perhaps all three arguments are right about some set of people—from the 1820s until the Civil War, proslavery rhetoric was consistent: every single political issue was about ingroup (proslavery) and outgroup (not proslavery), and any success on the part of the outgroup meant the extermination of the ingroup. And that is our situation now. And while all parties engage in it too much, not all sides do so to the same degree.

And, no “both sides” aren’t equally guilty because saying there are two sides is part of the problem.

I’m saying that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, per se, but the consequence of proslavery rhetoric. Slavery can’t cause a war, but how people value it, what they connect it to, what it means to them, how central it is to their sense of identity, how they think they would look if they were seen as not supporting slavery—all those things can cause people to go to war because those things cause people to believe that their identity is threatened with extermination if this policy passes. And that’s what pro-secession rhetoric said (which went back into the 1820s): if we don’t get this policy passed, then the Federal Government will send troops into the South and force abolition on us and then we’ll have race war (it’s disturbingly similar to NRA rhetoric about the Federal Government knocking down doors, taking guns, and then the riot of criminals that will ensue).

In a world in which you’re hearing the same claims and same kind of claims repeated everywhere, the fact that none of the are true doesn’t matter as far as the kind of impact that those rumors can have. There is a Chesterton story in which Father Brown says that people think that 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 equals more than 0, and I’ve always thought it’s a sweet description of how antebellum proslavery rhetoric worked (and how much rhetoric works now): a long series of non-events is taken as proof of something for many people simply because the series is so long, and they forget it’s a series of false predictions. If the media we’re consuming is repeatedly wrong, the rational choice is to abandon it as unreliable. But, if the media keeps making predictions we want to be true, then the fact that those predictions are always false doesn’t make us mistrust the media—we trust them more because we perceive them as media that want the same things we do. [I’ll mention two examples: Charles and Camilla breaking up, the world ending this year. The fact that those predictions are always wrong doesn’t destroy the credibility of the predicting media for many people because those media keep making the prediction—that the media is always wrong triggers the cognitive bias of no smoke without fire.]

Tremendous numbers of people who didn’t financially benefit from slavery personally identified with slavery, and so they sincerely believed that an end to slavery meant an extermination of their identity.

And none of that was true: Lincoln wouldn’t end slavery; the end of slavery wouldn’t mean race war; as was demonstrated in the non-slave states, it was quite easy to maintain white supremacy without slavery. But the proslavery claim that it was either support slavery in the most extreme ways possible or there will be race war would have seemed true to someone reading southern newspapers because those papers were full of reports of events that never happened. And that argument signified what was, to me, the most striking characteristic of antebellum Southern newspaper rhetoric—it was rabidly factional.

It wasn’t a binary. In the 1830s (the era in which I dredged deep), there were multiple parties. And each party had its newspaper system, and each system reprinted articles from others in the system. Some reports were shared (fabricated reports about abolitionist conspiracies would be reported in all the factions hoping to benefit from anti-abolitionist fear-mongering, for instance), and some weren’t, but an article was printed or not on the basis of whether it helped the faction. And all those papers had mottos like “free of faction.”

In rhetoric, that’s called strategic misnaming. You simply declare that you’re doing the opposite of what you’re doing. It works to a disturbing degree, mostly with people who make political decisions on the basis of political faction (or ingroup favoritism).

Someone reading southern newspapers could list all sorts of times that abolitionists engaged in conspiracies of extermination against them. The very real incidents of mass killings of “them”—Native Americans, African Americans, anyone accused of abolitionism—were not mentioned, or were not framed as incidents of ingroup violence. They were self-defense, even if the incidents that supposedly justified the revenge hadn’t actually happened (and that was common). Consumers of that media couldn’t have a reasonably accurate understanding of who was committing violence against whom. There were in the antebellum era (and in the postbellum) communally insane acts of violence against the bodies of Others (mostly African or Native American, but with other kinds of Other thrown in), all of which were rhetorically rationalized as self-defense, and none of which were. Some, like the gambler incident, had nothing to do with politics, and some were political only in the sense that the people enacting the rhetorically-framed “revenge” violence were motivated by a politics of racist or pro-slavery politics. So, in the antebellum era, everything was politicized. And even, as in the case of the gamblers, the correct version of the incident was available to the media, the false version lumbered around the public sphere, crushing any accurate version.

And here we return to the tragedy of my campus. The incident on my campus was not racially motivated, and it was not part of some massive conspiracy against privileged white males. The notion that it was part of a May Day revolution, that an antiracist group had anything to do with it, or that there were other attacks has been thoroughly and completely refuted in any media open to reason. But we live in a world so rabidly factionalized that many of the media that promoted the false version either continue to repeat the false one, or have never repudiated the false one. And so the fear-mongering one lumbers around the internet confirming people in that informational cave that black people and liberals are conspiring against them, that whites are the real victims here, and that the “liberal media” won’t report the truth about the war on whites. And so, as in the antebellum public sphere, there are people roused to violent levels of self-defense over incidents that never actually happened.

In other words, those two incidents worry me because they indicate eras with similar ways of arguing about politics. Then, as now, many people believe that you should get all your information from people who are like you, who share your values, and who remain in a state of permanently charged outrage about them. You only trust people who, like you, insist that we are inherently and essentially good and they are inherently and essentially bad.

Since the dominant method of political argument didn’t play out well in the antebellum era—it ended in a war that was unnecessary–maybe we should rethink that we’re doing it now.

I recently had a piece published on Salon, and it was thrilling. http://www.salon.com/2017/06/10/demagoguery-vs-democracy-how-us-vs-them-can-lead-to-state-led-violence/And the comments quickly skeeved off into the direction of whether “liberals” or “republicans” are better people. That was frustrating.

My argument about demagoguery has several parts:

1. 1. demagoguery shifts the stasis (as rhetoricians say) from policy arguments to identity arguments, relying on the assumption that all that matters is whether advocates/critics of a policy are ingroup or outgroup.
   2. therefore, in a culture of demagoguery all arguments about policy end up relying on two points: which group is better, and what group an advocate is in—in other words, it’s all identity politics.
   3. so, all arguments end up being deductive arguments from identity.
   4. this part is barely mentioned in either book I’ve done on the issue, but that reasoning on identity is done by homogenizing the outgroup, so if a person seems to be a member of this group, you can attribute to them everything any other member of that group has said or done.

There are other characteristics, but these are the ones that seemed especially important in the comment section on the article.

And here I have to go back to some really old work, and say that I think we remain muddled on how public discourse operates—we flop around among models of expression, deliberation, and purchasing.

Lay theories of public deliberation aren’t expected to be entirely consistent—as social psychologists have noted, we all toggle between naïve realism and skepticism in our everyday lives. But I think there are important consequences of our failing to realize that we flop around among various models of arguing and various models of knowing.

There is a basic premise: major policy decisions shouldn’t be made on the basis of some kind of model of us versus them when we’re talking about a culture that includes us and them. The idea that only group is entitled to determine policy isn’t democratic, sensible, or Christian.

If we want a thriving community (or nation state or world or even club) then we want enough disagreement that we can prevent the problems associated with what is often called groupthink—when a bunch of like-minded and ingroup people agree that what they think and who they are is, obviously, the best.

It’s clearly demonstrated the people have trouble admitting error, and therefore, if we want to make good decisions, we need people who will tell us we’re wrong. Good decisions rely on people contributing from various perspectives—not just people like us.

That’s the deliberative model of public argument: that the point of Congress and state legislatures is that they would consider various points of view, the impacts on all communities, and then come to a decision. If we look at public decision-making from that perspective (what’s often called the deliberative model), then we would ensure that there is diverse representation in deliberative assemblies, such as the state legislature or Congress. (The notion that the best decisions involve various perspectives is a given in successful business decision-making models.)

There is another model: the expressive model. For many people, there is no such thing as persuasion, and public discourse is all about people expressing their opinions (usually their statements of commitments to their group). Public discourse isn’t about deliberation or communal reasoning—it’s a bunch of people shouting in a stadium, and the group that has the people who shout the loudest win. You don’t go into that stadium intending to listen carefully to what other people are shouting in order to come to a new understanding of your own views: you come to shout out the others.

I can’t think of a time when this model of public discourse led to a community coming to a good decision.

The third model is that ideas/policies are products sold just like shampoo. The hope is that the market is rational, and so if a particular shampoo sells the best, it is the best product. This is a problematic model in many ways, not the least of which is that it’s circular. The market is assumed to be rational because it represents what people value, and it’s assumed that people’s values are rational. This is an almost religious belief in that it can’t be supported empirically, and has often been falsified (bubbles). The problem with the market model is three-fold: people buy products on the basis of short-term benefits and inadequate information, whereas policy decisions should be made in light of long-term consequences; second, it makes voters passive, who can whinge about a candidate not being adequately sold (instead of seeing it as being our responsibility to inform ourselves about candidates); finally, if I buy the wrong shampoo, my hair falls out, but if I buy the wrong candidate, my community is harmed.

The activity of market always represents short-term choices, and assessments of “marketability” tend to be about short-term gains. Unless you have a circular argument (the market choice is rational because the market choice is defined as rational—which a surprising amount of people on this issue assume), then the market does not represent the long-term best interest of the people (think bubbles). In addition, the market, by definition, cannot represent the values of those without the resources to participate (future generations, for instance). The market is always the tragedy of the commons.

(You never get a defense of the inherent rationality of the market that isn’t logically circular, doesn’t assume the just world hypothesis, or doesn’t appeal to prosperity gospel.)

While I believe that the deliberative model is best for community decision-making, I think a healthy public sphere has places where each of these models is practiced. It’s fine if someone’s facebook page (or twitter feed) is entirely expressive. But, on the whole, there should be a place where people try to deliberate with one another, or, at least, acknowledge in the abstract that the inclusion of people with them they disagree is valuable. The problem is that people are spending all of their time in expressive public spheres, and making decisions on the basis of group identity.

I was definitely one of the people who thought that the digitally-connected world would be the Habermasian public sphere, and that isn’t how it played out. I think there were moments (in the 80s) when it seemed to be something like what Habermas described—a realm in which argument and not identity mattered. But, what became clear is that identity does matter.

And so here is what I came to believe: in good arguments there are a lot of data. And identity is a datum. But that’s all it is. It isn’t a premise: it’s a datum.

[As an aside, I have to say that sometimes I think that public deliberation could be wonderful were we to understand five points: 1) a premise and datum are not the same thing; 2) don’t put always or never or necessarily into someone else’s argument; 3) treat others as you want to be treated; 4) there isn’t a binary between certainty and sloppy relativism; 5) a claim can be false and/or illogical even if the evidence for the claim is true.}

But, what happens in a lot of public discourse is that people assume that you can deduct the goodness of an argument from the goodness of the person making the argument, and you can make that determination on the basis of cues. That is, if a person says something that, for you, cues that they are a member of a particular group, you can assume that they believe all the things you think members of that group believe. If that particular group is one you share, then you’ll attribute all sorts of wonderful qualities and beliefs to them; if it’s an outgroup for you, then you’ll attribute all sorts of stupid beliefs, bad motives, and bad behavior to them.

That last point is simultaneously simple and complicated. We tend to homogenize the outgroup, and so if an outgroup member says that squirrels are awesome, and another outgroup member says that little dogs are the best, we’ll assume that second person thinks squirrels are awesome. People who are particularly drawn to thinking in terms of us versus them will take mere criticism of the ingroup as sufficient proof that the critic is a member of the outgroup, and will then attribute to that person all the things that are supposed to be true of outgroup members.

This is deductive reasoning—inferring beliefs of individuals from our assumptions about what those people believe. It’s pervasive in toxic publics.

And, no, it isn’t particular to any one “side” of the political spectrum. But, the fact that that question even comes up—who does this more?—is a sign of how uselessly committed to group loyalty our political world has become.

Democracy presumes that there is no single person, or single group, that knows all that is necessary to make good policy decisions. And that means that, while it isn’t necessary that people in a democracy believe that all views are equally valid (or even that all views are valid), it is necessary that we believe that we have something to learn from people with whom we disagree—we cannot delegitimate everyone who disagrees with us and continue to claim that we believe in democracy. (For me, this tendency to dismiss every other point of view as corrupt, servile, or in other ways illegitimate is especially troubling in people who self-identify as democratic socialists—c’mon, folks, it isn’t democratic if it’s a one-party system.) The tendency to insist that only one point of view if legitimate is profoundly anti-democratic—it assumes that the ideal situation is a one-party system. And that’s authoritarianism. And it has never ended well.

Comey, being a careful person, documented his deeply problematic meetings with Trump in the moment, and he’s released a statement with all anyone needs to know—Trump used his power to fire Comey in order to try to coerce him into closing down an investigation.

But that isn’t how it will play out in the hearing tomorrow.

For many years now (at least since the rise of Fox News), the GOP Political Correctness Machine has so consistently engaged in projection that you can tell the weakest point of a GOP candidate by noticing what accusations the Fox media (and other water carriers, as Limbaugh called himself) make about their opponents (think about their attack on Kerry for his war record).

For years, they’ve been flinging the accusation of political correctness at their opposition, and it’s a great example of projection.

Originally, the term came from the way that the Stalinist propaganda machine would decide what was the correct line to take on some event: Nazis are evil, Nazis are okay, Nazis are evil. To be politically correct meant that you were in line with what the higher-ups said was the right line to take on a political issue. And it was even better if you could pivot quickly.

To be politically correct means that you don’t have principles that operate across groups (adultery is bad whether it’s a GOP, Libertarian, Dem, Green), but that you know what your beliefs are supposed to be. And the GOP is all about political correctness in that sense—that’s why they accuse others of it so often. Michelle Obama dishonored the office of First Lady by wearing a sleeveless dress—that was presented as a principle. But, that they hadn’t objected to Nancy Reagan’s sleeveless dresses, nor the current First Lady’s problematic sartorial choices long ago shows it was never about the principle. They pivoted to condemn Obama and then pivoted again not to condemn Trump.

So, what will be the politically correct thing to say about Comey?

While large numbers of people across the political spectrum make policy judgments on the basis of their perceptions of identity (if “good” people support a policy, it must be a “good” policy), loyalty to the group is more a value among people who self-identify as conservative (see Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind). Authoritarians also tend to reason from ingroup membership, and authoritarians are more likely self-identify as conservative (Hetherington and Weiler’s Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics has a good summary of the research on this; so does John Jost’s work in political psychology).

In other words, the GOP Political Correctness Machine has also been engaged in projection in its making one of the politically correct things to say that lefties engage in identity politics. They’re all about identity politics.

So, what we can expect is that the politically correct Congresscritters will attack Comey’s identity. They’ll dodge any of his claims of what happened in favor of questions that enable them to present him as a bad person, especially as one disloyal to GOP values.

Of course the head of the FBI should not be a loyal Republican. The very same people who will condemn him for that disloyalty would fling themselves around in outrage were a Congress with a Dem majority and/or President to insist that he be loyal to Dems.

So, let’s be clear: this isn’t about a principle that operates across groups. This is purely and simply about factional politics. This is about loyalty only being a value when it’s a loyalty to their group.

It will be identity politics.