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Blue lies matter

There is an odd moment in the description of the dinner that fired-FBI Director James Comey and Donald Trump had at the White House in January: “As they ate, the president and Mr. Comey made small talk about the election and the crowd sizes at Mr. Trump’s rallies.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/11/us/politics/trump-comey-firing.html?_r=0)

Or, in other words, Trump wanted Comey to talk about how wonderful and popular Trump is. And I want to know which rallies.

That last point matters because some of the rallies weren’t all that well-attended, including the most famous: the inauguration. Did they talk about the crowd at the inauguration? Trump has had a lot of trouble letting go of his lie about the crowd size, and he was, by all accounts, testing the loyalty of Comey that evening. Comey apparently thinks he failed the loyalty test because he wouldn’t explicitly pledge his loyalty to Trump, but I think the explicit request for a loyalty pledge came about because Comey had already failed the first loyalty test. And it’s a test most GOP political figures and all of his supporters are passing with ease, and that should worry us: it’s whether they will take Trump’s lies, and make them what are called “blue lies.”

“Blue lies” is the term some social psychologists use for what they call “pro-social lies”—that is, lies that help maintain a flattering narrative or sense of identity about the ingroup. They’re the group equivalent of “white” lies (“Of course you don’t look fat in that dress!”) And, like a lot of “white” lies, they can be inconsequential—we might decide to tell a person she gave a great speech even if she didn’t simply because the speech is over and there’s nothing she can do about it anyway. Or we might tell a friend that the ex who dumped him was a total jerk anyway, and a complete fool, and our friend is completely in the right. A “blue” lie is a kid on a team saying that they lost just because the ref was out to get them, or that they actually played really well, or it’s members of a choir telling one another they did a great job even though no one got within a yard of the same key.

The inauguration had the best attendance of any inauguration; Trump didn’t (and did) fire Comey over the Russian investigation; Comey promised Trump three times he wasn’t under investigation; there were huge numbers of votes illegally cast by non-citizens; Trump hasn’t had (and has had) financial dealings with Russia—all of those are being handled as blue lies by politicians and media figures who propagate GOP talking points. And that’s troubling, because it means that lies that function almost exclusively to satisfy Trump’s ego are being given the powerful social force typically given to blue lies.

Social psychologists call these lies “pro-social” because, supposedly, they benefit the social group. But, as is clear from the white and blue lies mentioned above, that isn’t necessarily their consequence. We don’t necessarily tell a white lie because we don’t want to hurt someone—sometimes the lie will hurt them a lot in the long run, and we know it—but because we don’t want to hurt their ego right now, largely because we don’t want the conflict or drama that might ensue.

For instance, if a dress really is unflattering, and the person has a chance to change it, then the kind thing to do is to tell them—ideally, in an affirming way. If the person is going to give the speech again, or might need to give other speeches, then it might be helpful for someone to pass along some constructive criticism. If our friend keeps getting dumped because he’s doing something toxic or destructive in a relationship, such as always feeling like a victim, then lying about the situation and encouraging him to feel even more victimized is not helping. That isn’t to say that people have to tell the truth right here and now, or that everyone has to. The most helpful strategy might be to be comforting in the moment, and later having a more honest conversation. But it is saying that white lies prevent deliberation about an incident. It might be fine to prevent deliberation at that moment because it will happen elsewhere, or it might be that deliberation isn’t really necessary (the dress is a bridesmaid dress your friend must wear, and there’s no way to make it more flattering).

A parent might lie to a child about how well a game went, knowing that the coach will be more honest, and team members might similarly lie to one another without any particular harm for similar reasons. But, if there is no one to tell the truth, and if the lying will ensure that the friend will continue to get dumped, the team will continue to lose, the person will continue to make bad speeches that are bad in the same way, then the lies are harmful. If all or most of our information about something is blue or white lies, then we can’t deliberate effectively enough to make different choices in the future.

One of the characteristics I noticed in train wrecks in public deliberation was the prevalence of blue lies. It seems to me that these lies functioned in three ways (sometimes all three at once).

First, and most obviously, the lies that people told and shared helped them feel better about their group, often by reconciling some kind of cognitive dissonance, rationalizing a poor choice in the past, or excusing a decision to which they were already committed (e.g,. the Civil War was not about slavery, Germany lost WWI because of a Jewish stab in the back when it was just about to win). And, after a while, people forget that these are group-affirming polite fictions, and only pay attention to their power to affirm the group.

Second, these lies came to constitute group identity, so that being willing to commit to them in public came to serve as a signal of group identity and loyalty. You show that you are a true Chesterian by insisting that bunnies are never fluffy. If you reject that belief, then your identity as a Chesterian is suspect—these lies are constitutive of group identity.

In the antebellum slave states, you weren’t a “Southerner” unless you supported slavery (which explains the bizarre usage still sometimes in action, when people use “Southerner” and “supporter of slavery” synonymously, as though the millions of people living in the south who objected to slavery didn’t exist). For the purpose of showing ingroup membership and loyalty, it’s actively helpful for the statements to be obviously untrue or easily falsifiable. For instance, in the antebellum era, one blue lie was that slaveholders didn’t rape slaves—that was not just false, but obviously so, and yet it was a falsehood supported through threats of violence; you simply did not mention it. Now, it’s a point of loyalty in some circles to insist on the blue lie that the Civil War was not about slavery. That’s an easily falsified claim (simply looking at pro-secession rhetoric or statements causes shows that the CSA repeatedly identified their main motive as preserving slavery) and I have often found that people who make the statement refuse to look at the pro-secession rhetoric. Their insistence on the “true” causes isn’t something they’re willing to reconsider, and they know they’d have to if they looked at the evidence. They are more concerned with demonstrating loyalty to their group than thinking about whether the group might have screwed up.

And that brings up the third function of these lies. As time goes on, people often forget that the blue lies were lies (although, as mentioned above about the pro-secession rhetoric, their aversion to looking at possibly disconfirming evidence suggests to me that they know it deep in their heart of hearts). The ability of the ingroup to get its lies to become the truth for a larger group becomes an important demonstration of power. It is pleasurable simply because it is simultaneously a demonstration of power and an effective threat. “The Civil War was not about slavery” was one of those lies that, told initially by people who had, until after they lost, insisted it was about slavery; their ability to get that lie into the official histories of the event showed their power. Kenneth Greenberg (Honor and Slavery) tells an amazing story of a slaveholder who knowingly falsely accused a slave of having stolen something. He whipped the slave till the slave confessed. Then whipped the slave back into denial, and back into confession. It never anything to do with the theft—it had to do with the slaveholder’s demonstration that he controlled what could and couldn’t be said. Like the villain O’Brien’s forcing Winston Smith into saying that two plus two is five, this ability to force others into acquiescing on a blue lie is a consequence and demonstration of power.

(For some people, and this is an important point: it is the pleasure in having power.)

For the first function—making a group feel better about their past poor decisions or mistakes—the content of the lie matters, but it doesn’t for the other two. The lies don’t have to be useful lies, or, more accurately, may be most useful when the content of them is pretty nearly arbitrary. In fact, they function better as demonstrations of loyalty and power when the lies flip back and forth.

Of course, under those circumstances, they don’t function at all as useful bases for policy decisions. For instance, one of the blue lies during the buildup to the Iraq invasion was that the invasion was supported by the majority of the world’s powers and another was that only the US and UK had the balls to take on the invasion. Both of those were blue lines insofar as they were pro-Bush Administration and the GOP, and they were put forward by the same people, and they prevented even an intra-GOP debate over the need and solvency of the invasion plan. If everyone agreed we were justified, then we didn’t need to worry about whether the invasion would further alienate various Middle Eastern countries (or countries in general). We didn’t need to have a foreign policy oriented toward regaining goodwill. If, however, we were relatively isolated in our sense that the war was justified and necessary, then regaining goodwill was crucial to be able to benefit from even a successful deposing of Saddam Hussein. Those two different lies implied two different policy directions. Since the pro-invasion rhetors wouldn’t consistently hold to one or the other, there was no possibility of developing a plan that would respond to either contingency.

Similarly, it was common for proslavery rhetors to insist (sometimes in the same document) that slavery was eternal, and slavery would die out on its own. Both of those were dicta in the proslavery statement of creed, and each of those implied different policies for slave states as far as the long term. And neither could be debated, and therefore there couldn’t be a plan that would manage either contingency.

Thus, blue lies prohibit deliberation, and that’s probably why they’re associated with train wrecks. Blue lies rationalize precisely the decisions that got communities into bad situations in the first place (slaves love slavery! segregation is required by Christianity! everyone looks on the US as a liberator!).  In the case of the contradictory blue lies (slaves love slavery, slaves are always about to engage in race war) they prevent a community from looking carefully at those contradictory premises, and so they enable the community to recommit to a bad policy (e.g., the war on drugs).  The blue lie that we could have won in Vietnam if the liberal press hadn’t weakened our will was particularly promoted in the same group that agitated for invading Iraq—because they believed the US could have succeeded, the most important disconfirming example for their policy was simply renarrated.

So, blue lines increase ingroup loyalty, and they enable ingroup ideological policing, and they tank deliberation. That’s bad enough. But what’s happening with Trump’s lies is even worse than that. It’s the way that Trump’s lies are becoming blue lies for the GOP and its propagandists.

The blue lies mentioned above made a large group feel better, as in the lie that we were about to win Vietnam, which is often a sincere gesture to avoid dishonoring those who died or were severely wounded in the conflict; it functions to remove a stain from America and America’s military. The blue lies about slaves loving slavery functioned to make the entire class of supporters of slavery feel better about themselves and to demonstrate their informational power. That Germany could have won were it not for the Jewish press was comforting for the large number of Germans who felt shamed by its loss in WWI.

Trump’s lies don’t help a group. They are entirely about his ego, his achievements, and his ability to whip people to confession and denial and back. They are tests of his power over others, and their willingness to submit to whatever he wants to say at the moment. Loyalty to him is loyalty to the lies he tells himself. They don’t benefit others, except to the extent that those others see themselves as entirely dependent and submissive to him and his truth.

Trump’s lies demonstrate his ability to get anyone, even the GOP and media outlets that previously condemned him, to change their version of events at his whim. And it’s working. Republicans continue to support him, despite his having broken so many promises that he has resorted to scrubbing away evidence he ever made them.

I don’t know whether he’s conscious of that, and I don’t care. What matters is that that lies that have become blue lies for the GOP and major media are lies that function primarily (perhaps only) to make him feel better about himself, to get others to demonstrate loyalty to him, and to demonstrate his own power.

What matters is that, for whatever reason, the GOP and its propagandists have stopped flirting with authoritarianism. This is authoritarianism.

Charismatic leadership and demagoguery

According to the 2007 Encyclopedia of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, “Charismatic leadership is a relatively new and distinct paradigm,” putting its origin in “the 1970s” (Bullock, “Charismatic Leadership Theory” 70). The entry, like much other work in management and organizational theory, emphasizes the “positive effects” of charismatic leadership, while granting one sentence to some drawback (charismatic leaders can “create divisions within the groups they lead, display an authoritarian management style, and focus on trivial matters” 70). Since research on charismatic leadership began at least with Weber’s 1919 Lecture “Politics as a Vocation,” and since historians typically characterize such figures as Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, and Josef Stalin as charismatic leaders, claiming that the paradigm is recent and reducing the potential negatives of that model of leadership to one sentence might strike readers familiar with that scholarship as surprising, if not shocking.

But that history (and idealizing) of charismatic leadership is typical in current management doctrine. Bruce Avolio and Francis Yammarino, in their introduction to Transformational and Charismatic Leadership (2002) describe charismatic leaders as ones who “foster performance beyond expected standards by developing an emotional attachment with followers and other leaders, which is tied to a common cause, which contributes to the ‘greater good’ or larger collective,” an approach they define as “representing the moral high road of leadership” (xvii), a claim that might be called something even stronger than shocking, such as appalling.

Management theory has had inadequate discussion of the dangers of charismatic leadership, although some work (e.g., Steyrer) point out the connections between charisma and narcissistic traits. By far, the dominant way of talking about leadership is to privilege charismatic over Weber’s other sources of authority, and to present it as nearly ideal (with, as in the Bullock, some mild criticisms). We are, in short, in an era of nearly unqualified infatuation with a model of leader and follower/employee that is actually a very dangerous one, and profoundly antidemocratic, even authoritarian.

The charismatic leader is not just different from the leader who gets authority from law or tradition, but from one whose authority is grounded in expertise (the kind described by Hannah Arendt). The legitimate leader is one who is given authority by the followers because she has demonstrated context-specific knowledge. Charismatic leadership, on the contrary, presumes a personality trait that enables universally-valid and instantaneous decision-making abilities.

Charismatic leadership is a relationship that requires complete acquiescence and submission on the part of the follower. The charismatic leader is threatened by others taking leadership roles, pointing out her errors, or having expertise to which she should submit because it assumes that power is limited (the more power that others have, the less there is for the leader to have). It is a relationship of pure hierarchy. It is simultaneously a robust and fragile relationship because it can withstand an extraordinary amount of disconfirming evidence (that the leader is not actually all that good, does not have the requisite traits, is out of her depth, is making bad decisions) by simply rejecting them; it is fragile, however, insofar as the admission of a serious flaw on the part of the leader destroys the relationship entirely. The power of the leader is reduced by giving power.

As Arendt argued, the leader whose power comes from legitimacy (she uses the term authority, but that’s a vexed term) benefits from discursively egalitarian systems. Her authority is strengthened by the expertise, contributions, and criticism of others. And management theory, it seems to me, by setting out the charismatic leader as the ideal leader, has precluded leadership grounded in legitimacy.

Since we are also in an era in which, despite market meltdowns and other troubling signs, the business leader is idealized as the ideal kind of leader (with universally valid judgment skills), we are in an era when the charismatic leader–that is, an anti-democratic and authoritarian model of leadership–is imagined as the only and best model.

That’s dangerous.

 

Violence and rhetoric

I have a PhD in Rhetoric. I have several times ended up running a composition program, which meant managing 20-60 people, and I now direct a thriving writing center, and that means managing a staff of about 100. I have never had a management class. I have never had training in what to do when your staff is worried they might be killed on the way to work.

And this is now my concern.

There were a lot of requirements for my getting a PhD in Rhetoric. I had to take six courses in the history of rhetoric, another six or so classes in various things (including an entire course on Victorian novels), pass a 90 minute oral exam that involved being able to describe in detail such thrilling authors as Geoffrey of Vinsauf or Pierre de la Ramee (Petrus Ramus to the Latinophiles among you), achieve translation fluency in two languages (at least one a “hard” language), and write a dissertation (about 50k words on a topic).

And, from that training, I went on to management positions. Along the way, I have tried to pick up skills involving performance management, giving useful criticism, onboarding, developing a performance improvement plan. But, let’s be blunt, achieving a translation fluency of German has not been something on which I’ve often drawn when trying to figure out how to fire someone, and so my training was less than ideal. Since most of my current staff is undergraduates, and I only manage them indirectly (I spend most of my time running around the university trying to persuade supportive but fiscally-strapped administrators to give us money), my current management style is mostly to help the people involved in direct administration to be as effective as they can. And I try to get more money. I’m not claiming to be an ideal manager, but I am saying I am giving it my best effort.

Several years ago, an undergraduate committed suicide in the main library on my campus. Since he used a gun, and since there was much confusion, that incident involved a lot of my day locked down in my office in a building that was rumored to have an active shooter (it didn’t). I was behind a 1950s desk that was up against a metal filing cabinet filled with papers and a metal double-walled mail chute. I spent the time cleaning out my files and updating Facebook because friends were worried. I was willing to grant that there might be an active shooter, but, other than working to get some undergrads in the hallway into a safe space, I was satisfied with my safety and so wasn’t especially worried.

Today there was a stabbing attack that was fairly random, several hundred feet from where I was, but it was in a space through my employees walk. And so I may not sleep.

I have never been trained for management, but I like to think I have done a lot to rectify that because I can see the value in giving useful feedback, knowing how to write an ask, making sure timesheets are correct. This year I have had to find out what to do if ICE comes to my workplace and tries to drag off a student or employee, and now I have to get more training on what to do with a staff that can reasonably be worried about their safety while walking through the center of a college campus.

This isn’t about whether guns should or shouldn’t be allowed on campus. This should not be another opportunity for people with serious mental health issues to rationalize their not getting help by yodelling false flag. This certainly shouldn’t be another salvo in the war as to whether they are better than us. It isn’t about whether the assailant is a person of color, or mentally ill, or a member of them.

When this kind of act happens, the impulse is to identify the group membership of the assailant, all in service of insisting that this incident proves that they are the cause of all evil. He’s a dem, or Muslim, or white, or not white, or conservative, or Christian. His having done this things proves that dems, Muslims, whites, non whites, conservatives, or Christians, or whatever are evil.

That kind of rhetoric, demagoguery really, doesn’t help. It’s the problem. He is a consequence of that kind of rhetoric. I don’t know anything about the assailant, but I’ll guess mentally ill. And I’ll guess that he has been hanging out in an informational enclave that is full of rhetoric about how evil THEY are, and how WE are in danger of extermination. Perhaps the people promoting that rhetoric meant it metaphorically, perhaps they didn’t think much about what exactly they meant, and they just wanted to get more clicks, viewers, or ad revenues. Perhaps they meant it.

But, perhaps he only consumed mainstream media. Is that really so different? How far does one have to go in mainstream media to find hyperbolic claims about a war on the ingroup? Whether or not he was hearing voices in his head, he could have heard voices in the media telling him that some group was trying to exterminate his kind. He certainly wouldn’t have to go far to find rhetoric saying that we are in a war against them, and the only solution is to exterminate them. And so, perhaps, he did.

That might not be what happened in this case, but it might be. It certainly is what did happen when Jim Adkisson shot up a Unitarian Church, or when Dylann Roof shot up a black church. We have an awful lot of media (including mainstream media like Fox) that are all “they’re trying to kill us” all the time. And that has to have a consequence.

Yet, instead of the media deeply invested (and profiting from) their rhetoric of “THERE IS A WAR AGAINST US” having to rethink their implicit promotion of violence, I have to think about what to do tomorrow to make my staff concentrate on their jobs when we all now know that they might have been killed today.

A crank theory about individualism as an epistemology

It’s striking to me that a certain sort of person will blissfully reject disconfirming scholarship or expertise on the grounds that it appears to be contradicted by a single experience of theirs. That same sort of person will, if you make an explicit generalization (“most people in Europe are multilingual”), consider your point refuted if they give you a single example (“my cousin Terry only speaks English”). I say disconfirming because these same people don’t do this if the scholarship or generalization confirms what they believe. These people tend to make decisions entirely on the basis of their personal experience, and the experiences of their friends. And, it seems to me, they’re singularly prone to getting scammed, following harmful health fads (such as ephedra), misunderstanding the argument about vaccines, denying climate change. I’ve watched people (and sometimes myself) try to persuade them with studies, citations, and expert opinion, and it doesn’t work. And we aren’t trying (as they often think) to persuade them that they didn’t have the experience they did, or that what they’re claiming happened never happened, but just that their experience isn’t the end of the argument. Yet we get nowhere.

I’m not opposed to arguing from personal experience, or bringing in personal experience when assessing other kinds of data—this whole piece is based in personal experience. I don’t think experts are always right, nor that common sense is necessarily wrong. I think we shouldn’t be thinking in terms of which is right and which is wrong, as though it’s a binary. I think one of the reasons that we have problems with arguments about vaccinations and climate change is that this isn’t argument about claims (is this claim good or bad) but about epistemology. I think that people who value a certain model of identity (that an authentic individual is a person of certainty and clarity) tend to value a highly individualized version naïve realism (the notion that the truth about any situation is always easily obvious to a person of good sense and few prejudices).

If that’s right, then we need to stop arguing about what studies say, and we need to argue about epistemology, and the way a lot of scientists argue (a binary of naïve realism or rampant subjectivism) is just making it all worse.

Why Christians should not endorse the “sincerely held religious belief” standard…

….unless they’re racists who wish we hadn’t ended segregation.

It has become a talking point in certain circles that there should not be restrictions on what people with “sincerely held religious beliefs” can do, even if they’re governmental employees. If it’s your sincerely held religious belief that, for instance, homosexuality is wrong, you should not be “forced” to bake a cake for a gay marriage, or, as a government employee, sign a marriage certificate for such a marriage. This is presented as a fairness and tolerance argument.

It seems to be tolerant because you’re allowing people to act on “sincerely held” religious beliefs. I think the major political figures know what they’re doing (they don’t mean to allow all people to act on those beliefs), but I think a lot of reasonable people look at this as a way to be respectful and tolerant. What those people don’t know is that this is an argument for segregation. It’s also an argument for shariah law.

What people don’t understand is that the most appalling things in our history, such as slavery, genocide of Native Americans, and segregation, were all enacted by people who sincerely believed they were commanded by Scripture to do those things. People who think “sincerely held religious” beliefs won’t lead to awful things don’t know about groups like Christian Identity, who argue for appalling racist policies on the grounds of sincerely held religious beliefs.

I think it’s important to look carefully at just how bad that “sincerely held” standard is.

Here’s why it seems to be reasonable: it looks like it’s fair. It isn’t saying “my religion is good and yours is bad” (it actually is, but that’s below); it seems to be tolerant of all religions, so it’s tolerant.

But let’s stop here for a second.

This argument is assuming that people who act on “non-religious” values don’t deserve the same consideration as people who claim a religious belief. So, the very premise of this argument is that people who are religious should be treated better than non-religious people. It’s an explicit rejection of fairness across groups—religious people are saying that, because we’re religious, we should treat nonreligious people in a way we wouldn’t want to be treated.

Or, in other words, although we’re claiming to be religious, we aren’t claiming to follow Christ. I’ll come back to that.

The fairness issue gets even uglier when you look at how its advocates behave when confronted with religions other than theirs.

This policy is being sold as a tolerant and respectful thing to do, and it’s framed entirely in terms of liberty. And, therefore perfectly reasonable people, who don’t happen to pay a lot of attention to the history of religious discrimination in our country, and who are wickedly (sometimes I think deliberately) misinformed about the history of segregation, think it’s tolerant, respectful, reasonable, and fair.

It isn’t tolerant, respectful, reasonable, or about liberty. And it is nowhere near fair. It’s about the government giving members of one religion the ability to treat others in a way they would never tolerate. It’s about privileging one political/religious agenda.
Here’s simply one point. I work in a state where I cannot ban guns from my classroom, even were I Quaker or Amish. The “sincerely held religious belief” of Quakers and Jehovah’s Witnesses and other pacifists never come into play here. They have to pay taxes for war, after all. I’m religiously opposed to the Death Penalty, but I have to pay for it, and I’m struck from juries because I don’t believe in it. If that last thing isn’t religious discrimination, I don’t know what is–I am banned from being on a jury for murder trials because of my religion. My religion says that homosexual marriages are marriages; people claiming religious freedom haven’t been staying up nights worrying about the fact that they’ve denied me that religious freedom for years. That isn’t snark—that’s an important point. If something is a principle as opposed to a useful argument to get your way then you stand by that principle even if it makes something happen that you don’t want to happen.

So, when was the last time that the people now claiming to support religious freedom supported the freedom of a religion with which they disagreed? How hard did they argue for Quakers?

“Conservative Christians” want Kim Davis, as a government employee, to be able to do only those things in her job that fit with her interpretation of her religion, but they don’t want pacifists to be able to ban guns from their classrooms. Were the defenders of Kim Davis acting on the principle of “government employees should not be required to act against their sincerely held religious beliefs,” then they would include all religious beliefs in their legislation. In fact, if you look, they specify gay marriage. So, this isn’t about religious freedom, this is about gay marriage.

That means that this isn’t about the principle of religious freedom, but about one kind of person of faith getting privileged treatment. This is not even a little about fairness.

I think that a lot of the people I see (and read) repeating the “religious freedom” point just don’t know a lot of people of different religions, and so they don’t imagine things from those points of view. They don’t even know much about Christianity. They don’t know, for instance, that my commitment to marriage equality is a religious belief.

Allowing someone like Kim Davis to refuse to allow certain kinds of marriages means my government is violating my sincerely held religious beliefs. Passing a law that requires guns in classrooms violates the sincerely held religious beliefs of many teachers. Ending segregation violated the sincerely held religious beliefs of many Christians.

Many political figures support the “freedom” of a teacher to lead prayer until the moment they imagine that teacher being Muslim. It’s fine if someone on the street fails to think that way, but when political figures with considerable power think that way, then they are either failing in the major job responsibility they have (to think from various perspectives about policies they support), or they’re engaged in strategic misnaming. They never meant religious freedom—they meant the freedom for people like them to force their religion on others; they meant theocracy.

And I think it’s the second because, so often, when people point out that the “right” they are promoting would have to be extended to Muslims, Quakers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, major figures suddenly argue that the US is and must always be a “Christian” country. There’s a longer argument there, but here I’ll just mention that the argument they make for that case is internally inconsistent (they don’t use terms like “founders” or “Christian” consistently) and contradicted by the historical record.

Here’s simply one example. People with access to google will sometimes argue that the government should promote the celebration of Christmas because the Founders were Christian. And those same people sometimes include the seventeenth century New England Puritans in their definition of “founder.” But the New England Puritans weren’t the first people to settle what would later become the US, they weren’t the first Europeans to do so, they weren’t the first Europeans to settle what would later become the thirteen colonies, they weren’t even the first English to settle what would later become the thirteen colonies, and they prohibited the celebration of Christmas.

So, really, it’s a group of people arguing (badly) that the government should promote their political agenda.

Well, okay, that’s what everyone does. The difference is that this group is pretending that their political agenda is the only sincerely held religious one. They aren’t arguing for fairness across religious beliefs; they’re pretending only their religion counts. And they don’t even know the history of their religion.

There are two problems with that argument. One I’ll mention now, and the other I’ll get to later. The one I’ll mention now is simply this: let your yea be yea and your nay be nay. Don’t lie. If you want to argue for theocracy, go for it. But don’t argue for theocracy under the cover of religious freedom. The two are opposites.

It is a hobby horse of mine that we teach the history of civil rights movements in the US so badly, and this is an example of why it matters. Everyone loves the people who engaged in the Greensboro sit-in, but they don’t realize that was a private property (Woolworth’s). If you think “sincerely held religious belief” should be sufficient grounds for a private business refusing service, then you endorse segregation. If SCOTUS thought the way you think they should, we would still have race-based segregation.

That’s what segregation was—it was a practice defended by appeals to religion. You can see this in the major arguments for segregation, such as Theodore Bilbo’s Take Your Choice, texts going back to defenses of slavery (it was rare for someone to defend segregation and not slavery), and the numerous pro-segregation sermons and doctrinal statements (Haynes’ Curse of Noah traces out the importance of Genesis IX in both slavery and segregation).

Take, for example, Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises, a SCOTUS case in which an owner of a drive-in barbeque place argued that it was his right to refuse to serve nonwhites. He said he had that right because the federal law didn’t apply to him (a technical issue easily solved—it did), property rights (another easily solved issue), and his religious freedom.

In that era, the religious freedom issue was also easily solved. The tendency of SCOTUS was to say that religious freedom was a private issue, and so could be relatively easily trounced in the public by other concerns, especially fairness (more on that below). Also, courts tended to rule on the basis of mainstream religious beliefs. If you read the transcript of testimony, you would notice that the judge refuses to take Bessinger’s reading of the Bible as a basis of authority. When Bessinger tries to support his claim with a newspaper clipping, the judge cuts it short. And the judge never worries about Bessinger’s personal reading of Scripture.

And so he shut down the head of the National Association for the Advancement of White People and all the other bigots who wanted to refuse to serve African Americans. He did so because he rejected Bessinger’s religious expertise.

But, had he used the standard of “sincerely held religious belief,” then he would have had to rule in favor of Bessinger, because all Bessinger would have had to do was to show that his reading of Scripture was sincere, not reasonable.

Notice this exchange:

Q: And is it—in your treatment with every individual everyday, do you follow this?

Bessinger: Well, I certainly think I try to. I mean I do as much as I possibly can. What I mean by that, I certainly hope I am living that life, that is what your question is.

Q: Is it your belief to that effect?

Bessinger: Absolutely.

Q: Do you have any beliefs concerning segregation of the races, is that intwined or intermingled with or part of your beliefs as a Christian?

Bessinger: Yes, sir, that is very much part of my belief as a Christian, mixing of the races certainly is.

Q: By races you refer to what, sir?

Bessinger: By races, I refer to the race as the black race, the white race, and the yellow race.

Q: What is the Biblical basis, if any, for such a belief?

Bessinger: Well in the Old Testament God commanded the Hebrews not to mix with other peoples and races.

Anyone even a little bit familiar with the history of racism in the US is, at this point, saying, Oh, really, not this shit again, because Bessinger is mentioning one of the racist proof texts. But people who only know the triumphalist version want to read Bessinger as some crank.

Nope. He was mainstream. Segregation was a religious issue, with many proof texts, and he mentioned one. He could have mentioned Genesis IX, or various passages about not planting certain seeds in with others, or God having placed peoples in different parts of the world. There were a lot of proof texts people had for segregation (more than current bigots have about homosexuality, in fact, since some of those texts are about pederasty).

The court rejected his religious freedom argument because he didn’t cite external authorities (the testimony goes into an argument about a newspaper clipping he presented). And, I’d like to think, all the people now supporting the “sincerely held religious belief” argument would be appalled at the sorts of proof texts people like him provided.

But law is always an issue of principle.

And, if the principle is sincerely held religious belief, he met that standard.

So, people who want to say that Kim Davis can do what she wants are saying that Bessinger should have been able to refuse to serve African Americans. They are (unintentionally, I think) endorsing the principle that segregation was right. That’s worth taking some time to consider. If Davis is right, then so was Bessinger.

If we should allow Davis to refuse to allow some people to marry because she thinks that kind of marriage is a violation of Scripture, and our only standard is personal belief, then we have to say that the courts should have ruled that the people who believed that states could refuse to allow whites and nonwhites to marry, and businesses could refuse to serve nonwhites, and school districts could insist on segregated schools—those were all sincerely held religious beliefs. Arguing for Kim Davis is arguing for Bessinger; it’s arguing for segregation. It’s also arguing for county clerks refusing to allow bi-racial marriages, marriage after divorce, marriage of anyone wearing mixed fibers, dealing with anyone with a tattoo or who eats shellfish.

Bessinger sincerely thought he was violating Scripture by serving nonwhites in the same place he served whites. And he thought that because a tremendous amount of southern religion promoted that view. He wasn’t a crank; he was acting on what was a commonplace in southern religious discourse.

I said earlier that the “sincerely held religious principle” is important in two ways: if it’s a principle for us, then we really hold all religions to it; if we aren’t going to do that (which would mean allowing communities to enact segregation, sharia law, gay marriage, Satan worship), then this is an argument pretending to be about fairness that is actually an argument for theocracy.

The “sincerely held religious principle” either means that communities imposing sharia law is okay, as is segregation, pacifists not allowing guns in classrooms, my serving on death penalty juries despite what prosecutors want, a teacher insisting the class pray to Satan, and all sorts of other practices, or we only mean “sincerely held religious principles with which we agree.” In that case, we’re violating the notion that we should treat others as we want to be treated.

So, in service of what is supposed to be a religious argument, Christians have to violate one of the basic precepts of our religion.
That is, it seems to me, an important problem, since, if we reject the notion of “do unto others” we are also rejecting the person said that we should act on that principle. Either we allow segregation or we reject Christ.

Or maybe it means that the “sincerely held religious belief” is a disastrously bad way to base public policy.

Compromise and Purity, Pt. II

Clinton’s loss against Trump was shocking to many people, as has been the loss of Congress and the governorships. There is a narrative about that loss that is circulating, and I think it’s simultaneously persuasive and harmful. Narratives imply policy, and if our narratives are wrong, we end up with the wrong policies. I think we’re in danger of that now. I think our narratives imply that “the left” should become more purely left, either by all agreeing on a set of core goals or a single political agenda. That policy agenda can also seem to be right—to motivate people you can’t have a wishy-washy agenda.

Here’s the narrative as to what happened:

    • The Dem establishment obviously bungled because it promoted Clinton instead of Sanders.
    • That claim has two sub-claims: that Clinton only won because of the DNC support, and that it’s absolutely clear that Sanders would have won.
    • The Dems have consistently lost at every level for twenty years because they have moved toward third-way neoliberalism.
    • The DNC needs to move toward a single motivating political agenda, and it should be a more democratic socialist one, or it needs to be a more neoliberal one.
    • Or, the DNC needs to create a big tent in which we treat one another with respect and compassion and find shared ground.

Those are plausible claims, and that’s why people believe them. I’m going to argue that these claims are untrue, but, when I say that, I’m often heard to be arguing that the opposite of these claims are true—that, if it isn’t obvious that Sanders was a better choice, then I’m saying it’s obvious that Clinton was. I’m not. I’m arguing for walking away from narratives about what some set of us being obviously right and some of us being obviously wrong. I think some of us are wrong, but not obviously wrong.

Even though I disagree with those claims, I think the people who believe them aren’t idiots, or bad or stupid people, and the people who refuse to believe those claims aren’t necessarily any better than the people who do. I think they’re bad premises, but I don’t think the people who believe them are bad people, and I’m willing to admit I might be wrong.

And, in fact, that’s my whole argument: I think Dems need to imagine a world in which we agree to disagree in an inclusive sense, in which we agree to disagree while working toward common policy goals—and those goals are ones on which we agree to disagree. That is, we all support some policies we don’t like, and we each get some policies we do like. It’s taken me a long time to come around to that point of view, as I think it’s counterintuitive, but I think it’s right.

Or, in other words, the space between those assumptions about the 2016 election seeming to be true and yet their being false is the space of very important political work among good people with good motives and good reasons. I’d like to help us do that work.

I think dems need to find a world in which we act on the bases of inclusion, fairness, compassion, and long-term consequences. It is not a world in which we like each other, or even agree on premises. It is a world in which people who really dislike each other agree to treat each other well. It is a democracy.

That is a world in which we try to transcend the call of putting the ingroup first, and in which we aspire to treat the Other as we would want to be treated. I think that is a world toward which lefties aspire, and so this is about how to achieve that, but it begins with a long discussion about how not to achieve it.

And my argument as to how to achieve it is so controversial that I think I have to plead for people to continue to read. There are, conventionally, four ways that political parties succeed:

    • they agree on a political agenda;
    • they agree on a set of principles;
    • they agree hating some group/s;
    • they decide to work together although they loathe one another.

I’m going to argue that lefties need to do the last.

Not a popular argument, I’ll grant, and not one I really want to make, but I honestly think it’s the right one. To make that argument, I first need to show what’s wrong with the five points listed above about 2016, and that’s complicated because those are all points of view that can seem really reasonable. They are, I think, reasonable, but wrong. They aren’t obviously wrong, and the people who make them aren’t idiots, but I still think they’re wrong.

Making that argument requires making arguments about arguments, and also about political deliberation, and about fallacies of niceness. So, here goes.

I. A premise about argument: Or, saying “You are not obviously right is not the same as saying you are obviously wrong.”

I think we need to begin by rethinking conventional American notions about policy argumentation itself, in three ways: first, we need to reject the notion that feeling certain that you are right necessarily implies everyone else being obviously wrong (that is, lefties should be smarter than appealing to naïve realism); second, we need to stop assuming that policies necessarily follow from group identity (and so the most important arguments are about identity); third, we need to stop thinking that the solution to failure is greater purity.

In the abstract, lefties reject naïve realism and endorse various epistemologies of skepticism. In fact, however, humans live our lives in a world in which things are generally as they look, and lefties are not immune to invoking a kind of naïve realist argument about how any kind of realism is obviously wrong. It’s not uncommon, for instance, for lefties to cite studies in science to say that it’s been proven that people always fall back on confirmation bias, and are never objective. Then why cite the science? Aren’t the scientists themselves prone to confirmation bias? It makes sense to cite science to show that science isn’t some direct and unmediated contact with a stable reality (that is, to make a negative or refutative case), but it doesn’t make sense to use science to make an affirmative case about rejecting science.

I was particularly confused in the summer of 2016 by people whom I knew endorsed a social construction of knowledge epistemology, and who also said that Sanders or Clinton would OBVIOUSLY win and everyone who disagreed with them was an idiot. They weren’t just an idiot, but a dupe of someone or something, or doofusly ignoring their obvious best interest (if you’re really a progressive, if you’re really a feminist), often coupled with “How could you support THAT person?” arguments. If we really believe that there is not unmediated perception, and we believe that biases are inherent, and that we are all subject to our own constructions of ourselves, what does it mean to characterize every person who disagrees with us as obviously wrong?

I’m not arguing that we are obligated to say all points of view are equally valid. I am saying that, if we really believe the epistemology we claim to believe, then we are obligated to admit that we exist in a range of certainty/uncertainty, and that we are always obliged to argue about where we are on that range. We are obliged to argue with one another, and that means engaging their evidence, and not either simply repeating our own assertions or accusing them of bad motives.

There is also the problem that lefties are not always immune to the notion that the degree to which one feels certain is a sign of how much evidence we have, and that we should only enact policies about which feel certain. In addition, it’s common for us to think that, if you feel strongly about something, you must feel equally strongly that the people who disagree with you are bad and wrong. And, so, the first point is to try to distinguish between believing that other people are wrong and those same people are obviously wrong and bad. The notion that policies are either obviously right or obviously wrong assumes that decisions fall into a binary.

Thinking that someone else is reasonable and being what we think is right aren’t necessarily the same thing. We can be passionate, certain, and wrong. And, in fact, we’re always wrong, in some way or about some thing, but we are still certain. Saying that we are (perhaps have to be) certain and wrong at the same time isn’t endorsing the notion that all points of view are equally valid. It does mean that making any decision involves assessing the relevant information, like figuring out whether to take an umbrella on a given day. Important decisions are never questions of absolutely clear or random choice; we live in a world in which we’re always making decisions on the bases of various probabilities, and so there is rarely a binary between whether one should take an umbrella or not. Decisions aren’t binaries—they’re about the probabilities.

If the weather prediction is a 60% chance of rain, I would be a jerk to make fun of someone who made a different decision from me—whether I chose to take an umbrella or not. It wouldn’t necessarily be unreasonable to take an umbrella or not. Politics is always a realm in which we are making decisions between 30% and 70%. We should think about politics as questions of probability, like taking an umbrella. But we don’t. And, really, lefties of all people should be especially open to the argument that no single person can see things from all perspectives, and that nuance is important. Let’s not be jerks.

Compromise and Purity (Pt. 1)

When I first began to pay attention to politics, it seemed to me that the problem was clear: people started out with good principles, and then compromised them for short-term gains, and so we should never compromise. Change happens because someone sets a far goal and refuses to be moved.

Then I got more involved in various kinds of change—not just what we think of as “political,” but institutional and even personal changes. And that complicated my notion that change was best achieved by someone setting a far goal and refusing to compromise. I came to think I had misunderstood the role that compromise plays in progressive politics.

I can partially blame my misunderstanding on how history is taught in American high schools—Rosa Parks is presented as an extreme case, as opposed to someone who was part of a very savvy and deliberate campaign; King was actually a moderate; the most effective abolitionists were savvy about their compromises. Of course, one can also create a long list of appalling compromises (I think it’s plausible that LBJ decided to escalate in Vietnam because he thought it was a compromise that would get him what he wanted in terms of domestic policy, FDR may have gone along with Japanese internment as part of a nasty political compromise).

A long swim in the murky waters of the history of progressive (and reactionary) politics has persuaded me that compromise is sometimes a great move and sometimes a disastrous one. And, while, in the abstract, I can repeat what other scholars have said about the conditions under which compromise is savvy, I’m still not very good at knowing the right move in specific moments.

Part of my uncertainty involves what it means to compromise. It can mean that you’ve listened carefully to what everyone involved has to say, and you really think you’ve made all the compromises that can be made. You believe the deliberative possibilities are exhausted because you haven’t been treated as a part of the conversation.

It can also mean that you’re certain that you’re right, that your position is the best one, and that everyone who disagrees with you is spit from the bowels of Satan—you don’t need to listen to anyone else because you’re right.

Here’s the short version: it depends on whether you’re in a bargaining or deliberative situation (refusal to compromise in an expressive situation is just wanking). In a deliberative situation, the refusal to compromise can be very persuasive, if it’s grounded in good evidence that all the compromises have been made, that the compromise being requested is unreasonable, and that the power situation is imbalanced—you’ve listened, but not been listened to (listening doesn’t mean agreeing with—it means the ability to summarize someone else’s argument in a way they would say is accurate, even if you disagree with it).

If it’s a faux deliberative situation (people are claiming it’s deliberative and it isn’t), then shifting to strategies appropriate for bargaining is what a sensible person does.

Bargaining situations aren’t as simple as I used to think they were. Basically, bargaining situations are all about power. When you’re in a bargaining situation, it doesn’t matter if you’re right—that only matters in deliberation—your threats or promises only matter to the extent that they’re strategically useful, and that’s determined by:

    1. whether it’s plausible that you can enact your threat/promise,
    2. whether your interlocutor cares very much about your threat/promise (they really fear your threats and really desire your promises),
    3. whether you can offer more than they can get without you or cost them less than they can get with you,
    4. whether s/he can thwart your ability to enact them.

So, if you threaten to take your ball and go home, and it isn’t your ball, and you aren’t big enough to take it away from anyone else, no one is going to care (this is also known as the “I’m going to hold my breath till I turn blue” threat). If it is your ball, and you could take it and leave, and no one there wants you to stay, and they have another ball, you aren’t bringing a lot of power to the bargaining situation. If people really want you to continue to play, but you tell them you’ll leave unless they let you win, then keeping you there will cost them at least as much as letting you go, and they’ll let you go. If you threaten to take your ball and go home and people think they can get another ball, they’ll let you go.

It isn’t always obvious prior to a bargaining situation (and even often while in it) what threats or promises are strategically winners. Were it obvious, there wouldn’t be bargaining—it would be like playing poker with all the cards dealt at once and face up. The only one that can be obvious ahead of time is the third—if the cost of the bargain you’re offering is the same as not bargaining at all, then there is no incentive for someone to bargain with you.

It took me a long time to see that, largely because I was confusing deliberative and bargaining situations. My entrance into politics was environmentalism, and I thought (and still think) that, as David Brower said, all the compromises have been made. We shouldn’t compromise anymore because what we were asking for was the right thing. And it seemed to me so obviously right that we need to protect the earth for future generations, that we have a sacred obligation to steward the earth’s resources in ways responsible to all the present and future inhabitants, that I thought simply insisting on our rightness was the only possible strategy.

What I was not seeing was that many members of my opposition sincerely believed not just that they could get what they wanted, but that what they were doing was right. They weren’t just motivated by greed or a desire to destroy—they believed their arguments were better than mine. This isn’t some kind of hippy-dippy woah man have you ever looked at your hand all sides are equally right argument. I still sincerely believe that the arguments for drill here, drill now are internally inconsistent and irrational, but I now know they aren’t obviously so, and showing what’s wrong with them involves long discussions about Scriptural exegesis, Millerism, the prosperity gospel, the just world hypothesis, and short- versus long-term economic gain/stability.

What I’m saying is that, in a deliberative situation, my simply insisting on how right I was wasn’t going to work—regardless of whether it was true. In a bargaining situation, it was a waste of time. And refusing to compromise would mean (as I came to see) that, unless my side had some kind of plausible threat—we’ll sue, boycott, protest, cost you an election—we would end up with nothing at all. Compromising felt physically painful to me, and it felt as though it cost me in dignity (I also bought into all sorts of slippery slope narratives, about how you compromise once and then pretty soon you’re hunting endangered species while drinking heavy-metal water).

More experienced lefty activists in favor of compromise tried to argue against my insisting on being right as the only possible right strategy was to say that I was being selfish. And that, to me, seemed another obviously wrong argument: my position came from a genuine concern for beings other than me, so it couldn’t be selfish. What they were saying, I late came to understand, was that, once I’d made the realization that my strategy wasn’t going to work, my refusal to compromise came from concerns about my dignity, my aversion to the mucky murky work of compromise, my desire for clean hands.

What I had to think about, though, was what my refusal to compromise was costing, and who was paying that cost. The cost to my dignity had to be weighed against the costs paid by people who lived in neighborhoods with poisoned water, or who had to breathe unsafe air.

Being right wasn’t enough to get the right outcomes. And I had to think strategically about those outcomes.

Once I got to that point, I discovered every experienced lefty activist responded to my insight with a “No fucking shit, Sherlock.” They had figured it out long ago.

Again, this isn’t to say that compromise is always necessary. There are times we all say, “There is some shit I will not eat.” But, when we decide this is where we go and we go no further, we have to think about who will pay the cost.

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Rhetoric and Demagoguery (Denver talk)

We are, again, at a point in time when the term “demagoguery” is getting thrown around, or, perhaps more accurately, the accusation. As has often happened, the prominence, and disturbing power of an individual, gets us to worry about that kind of rhetoric, but specifically as a question of identity. We are talking about whether this or that rhetor is a demagogue. The same thing happened with Joseph McCarthy, Adolf Hitler, Charles Coughlin, Huey Long, George Wallace—when those figures were in the news, demagoguery was a popular and popular scholarly topic.

But, as will be mentioned later, in rhetoric the term (and scholarly project) were abandoned in the 70s, largely because the project was subtly circular, insofar as definitions amounted to “an effective rhetor with whom I disagree.” I think scholars and teachers of rhetoric have a really important and useful place we can intervene here, but we need to work to define the term in ways that are more rigorous and self-reflective. For several years, I’ve been trying to revive scholarly interest in the project, and below I’ll explain what got me interested—but with a focus on demagoguery rather than demagogues—and now suddenly it’s hot again.

I’d like us not to make the same mistakes that were made in the past, as far as how we, as scholars, teachers, and critics, use the term and how we imagine demagoguery working. Demagoguery is not actually a timely issue; it’s a timeless one. Demagoguery isn’t about evil and magically powerful individuals who sucker the masses; it’s about what a culture considers normal methods of political participation.

My problem with many definitions of demagoguery is that they emphasize the identity and motives of the rhetor, and that emphasis comes from what I think is a methodological error. Scholars begin by compiling a list of prominent and powerful individuals they consider dangerous. They then look to that set of individuals to see what they have in common in order to define what is wrong with that rhetoric.

Nicolas Taleb describes what he sees as a methodological error in regard to popular and even scholarly claims about what makes a successful investor. He uses the analogy of a thousand people who play Russian roulette. A lot of people will survive that first shot; some number will make it to five shots. Imagine, he says, that pundits, journalists, and scholars then approached those survivors to ask about their strategies in order to recommend them to people who want to win at Russian roulette. You would get useless information.

But it would look useful. To know that information was useless, you would have to look at the people who lost, as well as the people who won, to see if there really are strategies—if there are differences among people who didn’t make it past the first round and those who made it to the end. I think we’re in the same situation with trying to think about demagoguery—it isn’t some unusual phenomenon that guarantees success. It works in some situations and not others, and we need to think about that.

There are six methodological problems to consider with the “infer from rhetors I hate” project:

    1. Looking for the commonalities among successful and hated rhetors assumes what is at stake—that it was something about their rhetoric or identity that enabled them to succeed, rather than there being a tremendous amount of luck. If we want to know what does enable that success, we need to look at unsuccessful demagoguery.
    2. That method doesn’t enable us to see demagoguery we like—by beginning with rhetors we hate, we exclude consideration of our attraction to potentially damaging rhetoric.
    3. It also prohibits empirical research on demagoguery. And here I’m advocating a kind of research I don’t do, but that I think is valuable. If we could come up with a fairly rigorous definition of demagoguery, then we could use strategies like corpus analysis in order to be more precise in our claims of causality and consequences.
    4. Oddly enough, the standard criteria—motive, emotionality, populism—don’t even capture the most famous demagogues, or they end up capturing all political figures, so those criteria are both over- and under-determining.
    5. These criteria are demophobic and elitist, as though rich and intellectual people never fall for demagoguery, and that just isn’t true.
    6. Finally, by focusing on identities as the problem—bad things happen because we have powerful individuals who are demagogues—we necessarily imply a policy solution of purification. If the presence of these bad people is the problem, then we should purify our community of them. Since I’ll argue that policies of purification are, in fact, one of the consistent characteristics of demagoguery, that would mean, in the scholarly project of criticizing demagogues, we’re engaged in demagoguery.

Here’s my argument: I think we can distinguish demagoguery from other forms of persuasive discourse on the basis of the presence of certain rhetorical moves, not the identity of the rhetors. I think, also, we should talk about the effectiveness of demagoguery in terms of how it plays into the informational worlds that people inhabit. Demagoguery isn’t an identity; it’s a relationship.

For the scholarly project of identifying demagoguery to be effective, we need to be working with a definition that enables us to see when we are drawn to it. In addition, we need a model of demagoguery that plausibly explains a few odd characteristics about it. I’ll mention a couple:

    1. It’s obvious to us that Hitler, for instance, was a demagogue. But, clearly, he couldn’t have appeared as such to his followers—they wouldn’t have listened. If you read people who defend Joseph McCarthy (and there are many), they will argue that he wasn’t a demagogue because there really were spies in government. They don’t care that he didn’t actually identify any of those spies, that he caused to be fired people who were not spies—their argument is that he had a claim that was true in the abstract, but it doesn’t matter to them that his specific claims were entirely wrong and very damaging, not just to individuals, but to American foreign policy, especially anticommunism. His standards of “communist” ensured we lost experts who might have actually helped us in Vietnam But his defenders assume that, because he was, in a fairly abstract way, “right,” he wasn’t a demagogue. Another defense of demagogues—or ways that people try to refute the accusation—is to say the person isn’t a demagogue because he or she is nice, or a good person. I’ll come back to both of those.
    2. We talk about demagogues as magicians with word wands, who command entire populations. And while it’s true that the famous ones are politically effective through their rhetoric——demagogues are never saying anything unique. Scholars and biographers note the extent to which they were saying things exactly like a lot of other media outlets and rhetors. They were effective because they were saying things that were familiar—so what impact did they have? There is a scholarly argument as to just how personally anti-Semitic Hitler really was (I’d say very, but not everyone agrees) but there is no doubt that his public rhetoric was in line with what various Catholic and Lutheran organizations and media were promoting, with dominant racialist theory (some of which was popular in the US), and with a variety of far-right volkisch groups.

As Ian Kershaw says,

“Time after time, Hitler set the barbaric tone, whether in hate-filled public speeches giving him a green light to discriminatory action against Jews and other ‘enemies of the state’, or in closed addresses to Nazi functionaries or military leaders where he laid down, for example, the brutal guidelines for the occupation of Poland and for ‘Operation Barbarossa’. But there was never any shortage of willing helpers, far from being confined to party activists, ready to ‘work towards the Fuhrer’ to put the mandate into operation” (Hitler, the Germans 43)

It’s also useful to remember that neither the Holocaust nor WWII could have happened had Hitler been the only rhetor promoting his anti-Semitism and visions of world conquest. He had a propaganda machine. And that propaganda machine existed before he came to power, before he even began making speeches in beerhalls—the Nazis didn’t write Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Hitler and the Nazis radicalized existing beliefs about German purity and honor, and how the nation was threatened by immigrants, ethnic minorities, non-Christians, intellectuals, unions, homosexuals, leftists, and feminists. But those beliefs were preexisting.The assumption of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy that started World War I, ended it when Germany was about to win, and/or was busy seducing non-Jewish woman shows up as plot point in popular movies—not just German ones—and even popular spy thrillers in English by authors like John Buchan or Leslie Charteris.

Robert Gellately says,

“Nazi propaganda was not, and could not, be crudely forced on the German people. On the contrary, it was meant to appeal to them, and to match up with everyday German understandings [….] Thus, far from forcing unwanted or repellant messages down the throats of the population, Hitler and the Nazis carefully tailored what they said, wrote, and especially what they did, in order to win and hold the support of the people.” (Backing Hitler 259)

By the end of the war, which Germans supported, large numbers of Germans also supported the existence and use of the slave labor and death camps—things they would not have supported to the same extent before the war. The relationship between Hitler and the shift in German ideology isn’t simple to describe.

I’m not endorsing what is called the “functionalist” explanation of the Holocaust—the notion that Hitler as an individual didn’t matter, because the institutions were essentially driving themselves. I don’t think that’s the case—I think Kershaw has described it elegantly: it was the combination of Hitler’s personal fanaticism and charismatic leadership, a set of governmental arrangements and practices, conditions of the war, enthusiasm on the part of many people, and apathy on the part of others.

Just as scholars have struggled to define the exact relationship of Hitler’s personal beliefs and historical forces in the Holocaust, the field of rhetoric is struggling to find an accurate narrative for how rhetorical change happens. Narratives of persuasion toggle among fatalism, determinism, magical rhetoric, and the two modern dogma that Wayne Booth identified years ago, scientism and motivism.

I didn’t come to an interest in demagoguery via loathing individual rhetors. I came via Jurgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt through the American antebellum debate over slavery. Briefly, Habermas famously distinguished communicative versus strategic action, and most scholarship (and even pedagogy) following his line of thought was about additions to and critiques of his notion of communicative action—was it universalist, how does empirical research support it (or not). One criticism from feminist scholars such as Seyla Benhabib, I.M. Young, and Bonnie Honig, was that it was excessively averse to conflict, especially passionate conflict, and too restrictive in its formulation of reason.

Arendt’s argument for thinking (and especially her model of thinking as imagination) and her advocacy of agonism seemed a good corrective to what might be excessively rationalist about Habermas’ vision of deliberation, and also much more pragmatic. In terms of pedagogy, Tom Miller’s argument about the history of rhetorical pedagogy seemed to provide the keystone—we used to have a civic and agonistic model of teaching rhetoric, and then we shifted to an expressivist and hyper-individualized version of writing.

But here I ran up against a historical argument. If the best form of rhetorical pedagogy is civic-agonistic, and there are direct benefits to the quality of public deliberation from such a pedagogy—if the dream civic space is Habermasian/Arendtian— and such a pedagogy was dominant in the antebellum era, then why was the debate over slavery such a train wreck?

A graduate student asked me that in a seminar, and I didn’t have a good answer. So I ended up writing a book about the proslavery argument.

The argument for slavery was just a rhetorical trainwreck. Within the same document, sometimes on the same page, there would be an argument that appealed to premises that contradicted the premises of another argument—slaves are happy, slaves are always just seconds from race war, slavery will die out, slavery is eternal.

There were ways in which proslavery ideology was consistent—it was consistently authoritarian, for instance, and consistently resistant to policy deliberation or pragmatic argumentation. But, it was logically inconsistent, in terms of major premises contradicting one another, and even sometimes claims in perfect opposition. It also increasingly came to seem it wasn’t about the claims qua veridical or assertoric claims—they were phatic. What mattered about them was the extent to which they were performances of ingroup loyalty. Thus, consistently, what should have been policy deliberations—what are the long-term chances of maintaining slavery, what should happen with tariffs, what and whether railroads should be built, what should be done about the exhaustion of the soil, should we have Sunday mails, should we secede—were not times when people considered multiple alternatives, the feasibility and solvency of various plans, but were taken exclusively as opportunities for rhetors to engage in an ingroup loyalty oneupsmanship regarding their commitment to slavery.

In such a world, rational approaches to argumentation were framed as dithering cowardice, and the best way to show loyalty was to advocate a risky—even implausible—course of action. This is what I ended up calling “the rhetorical power of the irrational rhetor.” After all, supporting a reasonable plan doesn’t show ingroup loyalty as much as advocating an openly unreasonable one—that’s what shows you are a true believer, and that you believe you have God on your side. To advocate rational and inclusive deliberation was characterized as dangerously disloyal, perhaps even the consequence of such an advocate being the knowing or unknowing tool of evil forces. Dissent of any kind, even dissent about the feasibility of proposed courses of action—even if a rhetor explicitly agreed with the goals, agreed with the need, and was simply trying to debate strategy–was “refuted” with identity arguments—that you were a bad person for doubting the ability of the ingroup to succeed. And you were a bad person because you weren’t sufficiently concerned about the need.

In other words, rhetors responded to criticism of the plan with reassertion of the desperate need and performances of ingroup loyalties.

It’s important to remember that, despite the way we talk about the slavery debate, there were not two sides. Off the top of my head I generated fourteen. I’m not sure it’s useful to think of them as “sides,” as much as sets in a Venn diagram, and those positions morphed, split, and combined in the thirty years that slave states were threatening secession over the issue. A few of them include:

    • proslavery (slavery as an active good);
    • proslavery (necessary evil);
    • proslavery (slaveholders should be able to maintain slaveholding even if living in non-slave states);
    • proslavery (it will die out on its own so we don’t need to do anything);
    • proslavery pro-secession (knowing it would provoke a war);
    • proslavery anti-secession (Unionists, who believed the Union could be made even more favorable to the slaveholder political agenda, and secession was unnecessary);
    • proslavery promanumission (slaveholders should be able to free their slaves if they choose, generally associated with also believing that slaveholders should be allowed to teach their slaves to read);
    • proslavery antimanumission (the state should be able to micromanage slaveholders, such as prohibiting the teaching of reading, prohibiting manumission, and so on).
    • NIMBY antislavery (restrict it to the existing slave states);
    • anti-proslavery (the Slave Power is restricting the rights of all to protect slavery—right to petition, free speech, freedom of religion, states’ rights);
    • anti-antislavery (abolitionists are making things worse by provoking slaveholders and proslavery politicians);
    • pro-colonization anti-slavery (slaves should be freed without governmental coercion and sent “back” to Africa);
    • antislavery gradual abolition (slave states should follow the same procedures as had been used in New York and Pennsylvania, some of the people advocating this argued that slaveholders be recompensed for their losses);
    • immediate emancipation and full citizenship.

The list could go on, but I think the point is made. Proslavery rhetors didn’t want to acknowledge the broad range of possible stances, since it undermined their alarmist rhetoric—that if you weren’t in favor of the most extreme policies, then you were an abolitionist (or one of their stooges) advocating slave rebellion and race war.

At the time I was working on that book, the buildup to the Iraq invasion was happening, and I was watching the same thing happen—the demonization of deliberation (by which I mean that deliberation was actually characterized as serving the devil), dissent was treated as treason, and the complicated array of positions regarding the invasion were restricted in the most powerful media to two: for the Bush plan or against doing anything about terrorism. (In some corners, there was either oppose any military action or threat in regard to Iraq or support a war for oil.)

In fact, if you were paying attention, you could create a description of the various often overlapping positions as complicated as the one regarding slavery:

    • in favor of immediate invasion;
    • in favor of threatening immediate invasion until Saddam Hussein complied with the UN;
    • in favor of invasion after success in Afghanistan;
    • in favor of UN-supported invasion, or an invasion with a coalition of Middle Eastern countries (like the Persian Gulf War);
    • in favor of invasion with what the Pentagon considers adequate forces;
    • opposed to invasion unless Saddam stops cooperating with the UN inspectors (this position emerged after he started cooperating);
    • opposed to invading Iraq, but in favor of the Afghanistan efforts;
    • opposed to any troops on the ground, but in favor of bombing;
    • opposed to any invasion of any kind.

Again, we could come up with a longer list—that isn’t my point. The point is simply that it wasn’t a pro- or anti-invasion, but the public discourse kept reducing the complicated situation to “us” and “them.”

And various other historical train wrecks had a similar pattern—Japanese internment, the Holocaust, the Sicilian Debate, the Mytilinean Debate, segregation, American anti-immigration rhetoric, LBJ policy in regard to Vietnam…the complicated political situations were bifurcated into two groups, and, instead of arguing policy, people argued which of the two groups was better, as though that would settle what policy we should follow. And that’s when I got interested in demagoguery.

I’ve told this long story of my scholarly and teaching wanderings for two reasons. First, I didn’t come to demagoguery via demagogues, but via disastrous community decisions—slavery, segregation, Japanese internment, escalation in Vietnam, the Sicilian Expedition, the Holocaust. In fact, in most of these cases, there wasn’t a demagogue, but there was demagoguery. Second, because of that orientation, the question became what rhetorical practices were normalized in these discourse communities?

Once you stop looking for demagogues, and instead look at times that communities scapegoated some group to the point of state-legitimated violence, then you can see a similar set of characteristics:

    • Policy questions are reduced to questions of identity, which are bifurcated (with us or against us), and motive (good or bad);
    • Nuance, uncertainty, deliberation, and skepticism are rejected as unmanly and disloyal (except for skepticism about claims made against ingroup members);
    • The community is reduced to the ingroup (so that, even if “they” are legally or historically part of the community, they are never considered “real” members);
    • An outgroup is scapegoated for all the ingroup’s problems;
    • Public discourse is predominantly performance of ingroup loyalty;
    • The community is described as threatened by the mere presence, let alone political power, of that outgroup, and so the solution is some version of purifying us of them;
    • Ingroup loyalty is demonstrated by insisting that policy discussions are unnecessary because the correct course of action is obvious to all people of goodwill (disagreement is fake—either the person disagreeing doesn’t really disagree, or is fooled by the outgroup);
    • The discourse is heavily fallacious, but not necessarily emotional, and can involve appeals to authority and expertise, and can look as though there is a lot of “evidence;”
    • Public discourse focusses almost exclusively on the “ill” or need portion of an argument, with the major ill being an existential threat to the ingroup—because we are threatened with extinction, concerns like due process, human rights, and fairness are luxuries we can’t afford;
    • Finally, while there are overlaps with fascism (especially as Robert Paxton describes it), it isn’t necessarily fascist, or even political.

This is what I would suggest should serve as the criteria we look at, but I think this is a question open to empirical testing. Instead of looking at rhetors we hate, though, we would look at times of extermination, expulsion, or group oppression.

This list isn’t entirely new, and it isn’t as though no one else has ever remarked on these characteristics—Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben have both noted the state of exception, Arendt remarked on the lack of perspective-shifting in someone like Adolph Eichmann, and I’ve obviously been influenced by Kenneth Burke’s 1939 piece on Hitler’s rhetoric, George Lakoff’s work on Strict Father Morality, political scientists’ work on authoritarianism and “stealth democracy,” and Chip Berlet and Mathew Lyon’s work on Right Wing Authoritarianism. I’ve tried to focus, as I say, not just on famous rhetors like Hitler, nor only on right-wring demagoguery, in fact, not even strictly on political demagoguery. That accounts for some of the differences.

These practices don’t always lead to the expulsion or extermination of some group, for several reasons. First, demagoguery is powerful depending on the extent to which that kind of scapegoating and fear-mongering is perceived as normal. In my classes, I often use examples from PETA—I’m a vegetarian and animal lover opposed to most animal experimentation. I use PETA because I’m sympathetic to their ends, such as an article about trying to reduce interstate and international trade in various constricting snake species; the article ends up scapegoating snake owners generally, and owners of venomous snakes especially. It’s demagoguery, but probably with little impact—demagoguery about pitbulls, on the other hand, has had considerable impact.

In addition, Michael Mann’s work on ladders of extremism suggest why demagoguery can stop. His argument is that, at any given moment, the conflict between two groups could get resolved by the community as a whole choosing to revert to what he calls “normal politics.”

He mentions that heightened exterminationist rhetoric can be motivated by an ambitious rhetor who thinks it’s useful as a mobilizing passion. If the rhetor gets what he (usually) wants, then he might abandon the rhetoric (as Ward seems to suggest was the case with many southern politicians, who used race-baiting only when it would help them win an election). It can also get “resolved” by the ougroup voluntarily leaving or settling for oppression.

I’ll note that if, however, the demagoguery is motivated by a desire for political power, or increased viewers, or a plan to distract people from some other situation, then the outgroup that leaves will simply be rhetorically replaced by another outgroup to scapegoat. Now that it’s difficult to rouse much political power by appealing to fears about Irish and Italians, one sees exactly the same anti-immigration rhetoric applied to “Mexicans” and “Muslims.” Fox News had considerable coverage of Ebola prior to the 2014 election, connected to fears about immigrants—once the election was over, that coverage dropped.

At the beginning I said that I think we need to think about demagoguery as a relationship. Here I’m saying that part of the relationship is to other information available to the consumer. Demagoguery only works when we don’t think it is demagoguery, and we don’t think it is when we have a bad definition—one that relies on inference of motive, unhelpful assumptions about how easy it is to see if something is false, and equally unhelpful assumptions about what it means for an argument to be “rational.” I don’t have a lot of time to explain them, so I’m going to go through them quickly. Basically, my argument is that demagoguery works because our lay notions of what it means to participate effectively in public discourse encourage us to have unhelpful criteria for “bad” kinds of rhetors.

Here are some assumptions that people make about political decisions:

    • When it comes down to it, the solutions to our political problems are straightforward. Our political issues are the consequence of not having enough good people in office—instead, we have professional politicians who aren’t really trying to solve things. (Stealth Democracy)
    • Good people do good things, it’s easy to recognize when someone is a good person, or when a plan of action is good. So, we don’t need to argue about policy—we just need to vote for the good people who are above (our outside of) professional politics.
    • Good people speak the truth, and they don’t try to alter it through rhetoric—they are transparent. Thus, you should trust people who strike you as unfiltered, and who say things that resonate with you immediately.
    • A “rational” argument is a claim that is true (and that you can recognize easily to be true) supported by evidence, and presented in an unemotional way.

I’ve been very moved by Ariel Kruglanski’s work on what he calls “lay epistemologies,” perhaps because he confirms what Aristotle says. Kruglanski says that people reason syllogistically—this person is a Canadian; Canadians are polite; therefore, this person must be polite.

Our popular culture and, unhappily, our textbooks in rhetoric and composition, remain dominated by the rational/irrational split, despite that being a relatively recent development, and it not being what research in cognitive psychology shows. What the research shows is that there is not some distinction between emotions and logic, but a division between System 1 and 2 thinking: between cognitive shortcuts and metacognitive processes.

In System 1, you simply decide whether new information fits with what you already know. In System 2, you think about whether how you know is a good process. We spend most of our time in System 1, as we should, but we should make political decisions using System 2. Demagoguery says we don’t need to do that.

Demagoguery works with all of us when we believe that all we need is System 1—the demagoguery that “moves” us is the one that resolves our cognitive dissonances by persuading us that what we have always already known is absolutely true. We aren’t moved by new information, but by a new commitment to old beliefs.

Demagoguery depoliticizes politics, in that it says we don’t have to argue policies, and can just rouse ourselves to new levels of commitment to the “us” and purify our community or nation of them. It says that we are in such a desperate situation that we can no longer afford them the same treatment we want for us.

Metacognition is demagoguery’s worst enemy, and there is a simple way to move to metacognition—would I think this was a good argument if it were made in service of the outgroup political agenda. If people thought that way, then demagoguery would be restricted to moments of hilarity on youtube about music you hate.

In other words, I just spent 45 minutes telling y’all that what most prevents demagoguery is a culture in which we believe that you should “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” And that’s what we should teach.

Some links that might help

Trump supporters who are defending his recent actions are, as per usual, wickedly and strategically misinformed.

They believe:

    • these deportations are only of illegal immigrants;
    • Trump is relying on a bill that Obama signed to identify the countries;
    • their objections to Obama’s executive orders and actions were principled–they objected to his actions on the basis of principles about constitutionality.

So, first, it can help to explain that he is detaining and deporting people with permanent residency status.

I’ve stayed away from NYTimes and other sources they’ve been trained to reject without reading:

From ABC http://abc7.com/politics/federal-judge-in-ny-puts-halt-to-deportations-ordered-by-trump/1726167/

UPI http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Voices/2017/01/26/Trumps-policies-will-affect-four-groups-of-undocumented-immigrants/8641485437900/

McClatchy http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article129406279.html

The proof that they included legal immigrants, initially, is that Trump backed off on that. So, either he was incompetent at issuing an order, or he intended to keep permanent residents out. (If they balk at clicking on the link, tell them to watch the video.) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/29/us/politics/white-house-official-in-reversal-says-green-card-holders-wont-be-barred.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=0

These deportations include Christians: http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Two-Syrian-Families-Detained-at-Philadelphia-International-Airport-Told-to-Fly-Back-Family-Member-Says-412047173.html

Don’t mention this unless they bring it up, because a lot of the sort of people who support Trump just remember nouns and not claims. They’ll remember “Obama bill” and not “this has nothing to do with that.” Here’s the actual bill: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/158

This is the additional change that was made. I still see no connection. (And people who are repeating this talking point won’t be able to come up with one–neither Trump nor the Right-Wing Noise Machine has tried to make clear what the connection is.) https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/02/18/dhs-announces-further-travel-restrictions-visa-waiver-program

Oops, now he’s claiming it’s another thing. Here’s the refutation of that point: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/01/29/trumps-facile-claim-that-his-refugee-policy-is-similar-to-obama-in-2011/?utm_term=.0893f3634502

The DHS is violating the court order. Either they’re out of Trump’s control, or he told them to do that. If it’s the latter, would they be okay if Obama had done that? If not, then their objections to Obama’s actions weren’t based on principle, but on faction.

Here’s the court order: darweesh.v.trump_decision.and.order.document-3.pdf

After I wrote this, the defense of Trump’s actions changed again. First, they were claiming this came from a 2015 bill, then a 2011 action, now I think something else. There are two ways that all that shifting around is important: first, these actions were initially praised by Trump supporters and his media outlets on the grounds that he was finally doing something that Obama hadn’t done, and was finally securing our borders, unlike Obama–the whole theme was that this was a huge break with Obama. Now the talking point is that the outrage is the consequence of liberal media hype, and this is no different from Obama. They can’t play it both ways. Either this is good, and the same thing Obama did, so Obama’s policies were good; or, Obama’s policies were weak, and this really is a big change. It can’t be both.

Second, the EO was extremely unclear and created a lot of confusion–that isn’t decisiveness. It included people with permanent residency status, and the WH continued to insist that those people be included, then walked that back. Making a lot of different and unclear decisions about major issues in a 72 hours isn’t decisiveness–it’s being a loose cannon.