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Why the emoluments issue matters

There is a tendency for pundits to say “Trump supporters were all motivated by this” or “Trump supporters are all like that,” but I don’t think those generalizations are very useful. I think about the only accurate generalizations would be “Trump voters were motivated by the sense that he was the better person for the job,” and “Trump supporters are all Trump supporters.”

I think a lot of Trump supporters believe that the government has been on the wrong track for years, with politicians doing nothing other than line their own pockets, pandering to special interests and lobbyists, and creating a government that does little other than waste money and get in the way. Politicians are cynical careerists who say whatever they need to say to get elected, and look down on the regular people who are actually paying their wages. Our lives are filled with unnecessary regulations enforced by petty bureaucrats who just want to protect their own cushy jobs. The supposed elite—professors, doctors, supposed experts—don’t actually know what they’re doing, have very little common sense, and no real experience with the things about which they’re pontificating. The problems that face us are crucial, but not complicated, and the solutions are straightforward but politicians (and experts generally) don’t want to go for the simple solution. If they did, they’d be out of a job.

Take, for instance, a doctor. You have a recurrent complaint, and the doctor keeps giving you different medications (or maybe does nothing at all), and they don’t actually work. And, perhaps, you changed a minor thing in your life (in my case, I changed toothpastes, which got rid of the metallic taste that had completely confused the doctor) and all is well. You might come to the conclusion that doctors act as though they’re all-knowing, but they’re just guessing. Or, you might decide that the doctor is not really fixing you because then he’d lose the money from your visits and tests. Certainly, there are cases of doctors who were ordering unnecessary surgeries in order to get the money—that’s just a fact.

It isn’t just doctors, of course. It’s anyone who claims to have special knowledge. I once had a guy at a gas station claim I needed a new alternator belt because the one I had was all cut up. (This was in the 70s, when alternator belts were notched.) There are “resume services” who will, for free, look at your resume. They’ll tell you it’s awful, and you need their services. Some people have paid for the resume revision, then resubmitted that revision for the “free” review of your resume—the service said that resume was awful, and they needed to revise it.

There are definitely politicians who just liked the prestige and power it provided, and who had no intention of doing any actual work. I’ve known people in minor positions of power who behaved that way, so I’m certain it’s true of people with as much power as even a state legislator has. And we have all been on committees or teams with people who enjoyed the process so much that they never actually wanted anything to get done. We all work in institutions that have rules and processes that have no obvious explanation other than a perverse desire to see that no really good work gets accomplished at all.

For instance, a friend worked as a computer programmer at an institution that had this process for changing anything in a program:

1. someone submits a change request;
2. it is reviewed by a team;
3. if approved, the change is assigned to a programmer;
4. the programmer comes up with a plan for responding to the request;
5. that plan is presented to the team;
6. the team sends that plan up the ladder for approval;
7. if approved, the change is made;
8. the change is tested by a quality control group;
9. the team meets again to determine the change was good;
10. that information is sent up the ladder.

As you can imagine, that took a long time, and a lot of meetings, and could be irritating if there was some urgency. There was a different process, however, if it wasn’t a change request, but correcting an error. So, my friend’s team took to identifying all change requests as “correcting error” requests. The result was that users were much happier, and more empowered in their jobs. They felt ownership over the programs they were using, as they could have an impact on how those programs functioned. This process was more efficient, since there were fewer meetings, and requested changes happened faster.

They were all called on the carpet because their team was producing programs with too many errors, and had to go to the less effective and less efficient process.

Every interaction with the government is like that. What should be simple—getting a driver’s license—involves forms, lines, not having the right document and so having to come back another day and stand in more lines, filling out the forms again, and then dealing with some grumpy person who makes us jump through every hoop required by a fifty-page set of regulations we’re convinced was written by legislators with nothing better to do.

I think a lot of Trump supporters were motivated by the notion that all of this nonsense is unnecessary, and a really good leader would get rid of it.

But why Trump?

Here is the narrative in which Trump seems like a good choice:

- politicians refuse to solve the problems, so get a non-politician;
- politicians don’t solve things because they pander to lobbyists, so get someone who is already rich and powerful enough that he doesn’t need to pander to anyone;
- he has shown himself in the apprentice shows to be decisive, and to be able to make good judgments about people quickly;
- his success in business shows that he knows how to solve problems without a lot of drama.

Added to this was the sense that

- Obama had violated the constitution, and Democrats didn’t seem to care, so Dems are generally suspect—Trump insisted he would the constitution.

I want to focus on just three points: 1, 2, and 5.

Are there politicians who don’t really want to solve problems, but stay in office? Yes. Just as there are doctors, auto mechanics, hairdressers, therapists, lawyers, investment advisors, pet sitters, and members of every single profession who are just trying to keep getting money out of you. But, to return to the medical example: if there were, for instance, a simple solution to back pain, and all the things your doctor is making you do are just to line his pocket, then there must be some doctor out there who actually cares about patients, right? It can’t be 100%? And, really, if there were a simple solution to back pain, a doctor who patented it, or wrote a book about it, would be a millionaire, so, it would be out there.

And, of course, those books and videos are out there. There are magazines, links, books, articles that all claim “this housewife discovered the cure your doctor doesn’t want you to know about” (by the way, that selling strategy is at least a hundred years old), but those don’t work either.

So, in fact, there isn’t a simple solution to back pain. It’s complicated. It really is. And when your doctor tells you it’s complicated, she’s telling you the truth. Maybe you have a good doctor who will ensure you get the best treatment possible, and maybe you have a bad doctor who is just stringing you along, but they aren’t distinguished by which one tells you it’s complicated versus which one tells you it’s simple.

Back pain is a good example because it connects to a vexed political problem—use/abuse of painkillers. It’s absolutely clear that some people claim to have chronic pain who don’t, but they use that claim to get doctors to prescribe pain medication which they then sell to people who are just using it to get high. But it’s also clear that the regulations we set to stop those people end up creating a huge number of hoops for people who legitimately need a lot of pain medication because they really are in a lot of pain.

For my job, I have to fill out a ridiculous amount of paperwork to do something because someone else really did recently use that process to rip my employer off for $50k.

If there were an obvious solution to the problem of making sure that people who really need pain medication got all the medication they legitimately need without abusers getting any, a politician who figured that out would be the hero of all the TV shows. Perhaps some politicians would decide to take payoffs from Big Pharma or the Mafia or whoever not to go with the obvious solution, but, if it’s really obvious, at some point someone too ethical (or too ambitious) to get bought would have figured out that being The Politician to solve this problem is a golden ticket to Bigger Things.

No one has stepped forward with the obvious solution because there isn’t one. Setting huge penalties for abuse of painkillers isn’t a solution because it isn’t objectively clear whether someone is really in pain or just pretending.

There are politicians who don’t want to solve problems but just keep getting reelected. There are mechanics who don’t want to fix your car but want to bring it back. But in neither case should we assume that getting an outside will solve the problem. Get a different mechanic, but get someone who knows something about cars.

People have a tendency to assume that judgment applies across fields, but that isn’t really how it works out. You can be brilliant at math, and unable to write a check, or great at fixing computers but terrible at fixing cars. The whole point about eggheads who might be brilliant at their field is that brilliance doesn’t apply to other things.

But even setting that aside—whether Trump was, actually, successful at business (something we can’t know because we don’t know his debt load), or if such success would translate—we can know something about the “above corruption” claim.

What everyone wants—Trump supporters and their opponents—are politicians who can’t be bought, who will make decisions on the basis of what’s best for the US, and not for what will line their own pockets. We disagree about how to do that, but we agree it’s an important value.

Trump supporters believe that Trump being so rich means he doesn’t need more money. I’m not sure I’ve ever known anyone who didn’t want more money. But, ignoring that, it’s easy to tell whether Trump is that sort of person: is he trying to use his position as President to make more money?

If he is, then everything about the “he’s above special interests” collapses. If he is going to use his position to profit himself, then he is a special interest, and he will corrupt policy to make more money.

This was a major issue for the Founders, and that’s why they put into the Constitution the “emoluments” clause. This is what the conservative site, The Heritage Foundation, has to say about that clause:

Similarly, the Framers intended the Emoluments Clause to protect the republican character of American political institutions. “One of the weak sides of republics, among their numerous advantages, is that they afford too easy an inlet to foreign corruption.” The Federalist No. 22 (Alexander Hamilton). The delegates at the Constitutional Convention specifically designed the clause as an antidote to potentially corrupting foreign practices of a kind that the Framers had observed during the period of the Confederation. Louis XVI had the custom of presenting expensive gifts to departing ministers who had signed treaties with France, including American diplomats. In 1780, the King gave Arthur Lee a portrait of the King set in diamonds above a gold snuff box; and in 1785, he gave Benjamin Franklin a similar miniature portrait, also set in diamonds. Likewise, the King of Spain presented John Jay (during negotiations with Spain) with the gift of a horse. All these gifts were reported to Congress, which in each case accorded permission to the recipients to accept them. Wary, however, of the possibility that such gestures might unduly influence American officials in their dealings with foreign states, the Framers institutionalized the practice of requiring the consent of Congress before one could accept “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from…[a] foreign State.”

Like several other provisions of the Constitution, the Emoluments Clause also embodies the memory of the epochal constitutional struggles in seventeenth-century Britain between the forces of Parliament and the Stuart dynasty. St. George Tucker’s explanation of the clause noted that “in the reign of Charles the [S]econd of England, that prince, and almost all his officers of state were either actual pensioners of the court of France, or supposed to be under its influence, directly, or indirectly, from that cause. The reign of that monarch has been, accordingly, proverbially disgraceful to his memory.” As these remarks imply, the clause was directed not merely at American diplomats serving abroad, but more generally at officials throughout the federal government. (http://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/articles/1/essays/68/emoluments-clause)

The politically conservative Economist explains the application to Trump:

DIPLOMATS from various countries have spent the past few weeks booking suites at the Trump International Hotel in Washington in the hope of ingratiating themselves with president-elect Donald Trump. The Industrial and Commerical Bank of China, whose majority stakeholder is the Chinese government, rents office space in New York City’s Trump Tower. The 35-storey Trump Office Buenos Aires development is awaiting approval from that city’s government. These are just a few of the unprecedented conflicts of interest presented by Mr Trump’s decision to retain his business empire and hand its management over to his children. No law obliges Mr Trump to sell his assets or place them in a blind trust, though nine of the 12 presidents since the second world war have done so. But when his businesses accept money (or anything of value) from foreign governments or state-owned entities, Mr Trump may nevertheless be breaking the law. In fact, he may be violating the Constitution of the United States—and specifically, a section known as the Emoluments Clause. http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2016/12/economist-explains-2

Thus, traditionally, Presidents have been required to take any assets they have and sell them (Carter and his farm) or put them into blind trusts. It’s useful to remember that one of the main points of the “Clinton is corrupt” argument was that she and her husband had violated this clause with their Foundation.Were Trump to do something like give favor to some countries because he has business interests with them, or require that countries trying to get political favors use his hotels, then he would have violated the emoluments clause.

More important, he would have violated one of the major arguments for voting for him—he would have shown that he can be bought, that he will use the position to line his pockets, and that he will make political decisions on the basis of what benefits him personally.

He would have shown himself to be the opposite of the person for whom Trump supporters voted. That matters.

You are descended from a group that had “terrorists” and “criminals”

Many people sincerely believe that post-9/11 is the first time that Americans felt threatened by terrorism on its soil, but that fear has waxed and waned for most (if not all) of our history. Slaveholders were in perpetual fear of slave uprisings (especially after 1841), as well as of murder, poisoning, and arson on the part of angry slaves; Abraham Lincoln was killed by a terrorist; and the post-bellum era suffered from what amounted to state-sponsored terrorism (in the form of racist lynchings), as white Southerners reasserted the subjugation of African Americans. The middle nineteenth century had spates of fear-mongering about Catholics (whom, many believed to be in league with the Hapsburg Emperor and the Pope to reinstate monarchy in the US), resulting in serious arguments as to whether they should be allowed to vote, considerable prejudice against their holding office, and some talk of restricting their immigration.The late nineteenth and early twentieth century media, law, and policy show two different sources of existential threat: Asians (initially the Chinese, but then all Asians, prohibiting naturalization); and a vague and muddled fear of Eastern Europeans, which was often synonymous with Jews, anarchists, and, after 1917, Bolsheviks (all of which culminated in the 1924 Immigration Act, that white supremacists love).

If you add it up, then you get a really clear sense about American attitudes toward immigration: it was fine for people like me to benefit from a policy that I will not extent to anyone else.

A particular kind of immigrant (WASP), who didn’t learn the language of the original inhabitants (how many Dutch, Spanish, or English immigrants decided they needed to learn the local indigenous language?), said every other kind of immigrant was a poison or parasite on the body politic. Every generation of immigrants says THIS generation (the one after them) doesn’t speak English, is essentially incapable of understanding democracy, and is more committed to the homeland politics than to being here.

The tendency for descendants of immigrants to want to pull the ladder up after themselves. They’ll say, for this group: “We should prohibit this group of immigrants because they don’t speak English, they don’t the vote the way I think they should, a lot of them engage in crime, they don’t get democracy, they’re poor, and they’re really icky, and some of them are associated with radical groups.” This group of immigrants, they say, is not like the immigrants from whom I’m descended.

Let’s start with the terrorist argument, since that persuades so many people. The argument is that “My group might have been bad, but we didn’t have terrorists, and this group has terrorists, so we can’t admit them.” Thus, people who want a way of handling immigrants now that would have banned their own family then think their policy is rational because this group is different.

Actually, every immigrant group has had terrorists. And that argument was used at every step of the way for not admitting this group. Just as now there are incidents to which people point to say this group shouldn’t be admitted, so there were incidents to which people could point–for Jews, Italians, Germans, Eastern Europeans, the Irish, Asians, and so on.

Many of the incidents or supposedly supporting texts were fabrications (wild rumors of slave rebellion plots, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, recasting of incidents of Native American self-defense as massacres, coerced confessions that show more about slaveholder paranoia than slave actions).

But there were real incidents. The slave revolt of Saint-Domingue was real, as was the bomb thrown at Haymarket, the assassination of McKinley by an Eastern- European anarchist, the guard and paymaster at the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company were murdered (Italian anarchists were executed for the crime), there really was a series of bombs mailed to various politicians in the spring and early summer of 1919, and various immigrants in the United States were advocating a Bolshevik-style revolution. And, as is often the case, criminals, especially famous ones, often were recent immigrants, or of the same ethnicity—there was a Jewish Mafia, an Italian one, an Irish one. Nineteenth-century Irish voting practices could be pretty dodgy, and cities run by the Irish (New York) or the Italians (San Francisco) were corrupt. Of course, most Jews, Irish, and Italians weren’t involved in crime, cities not run by the Irish or Italians could be just as corrupt (Kansas City), and, given the criminalization of poverty (meaning that there are things, such as getting drunk, that are only criminal if you’re too poor to have a home), the percentage of criminals who were any particular ethnicity was not proof of any kind of inherent criminality.

I’m making two points. First, people afraid of certain groups would not have experienced their fear as irrational—it would have seemed to them to be grounded in “facts.” They could, after all, list a lot of examples of plots, confessions, and authorities who supported their beliefs that this group was too dangerous for the US to admit. They could point to a city run by that group and show it was badly run.

Second, every ethnic group that came over (at least since the First Peoples) had in it criminals, people who were hostile to the “American” system in some way, people advocating violent change, and/or actual terrorists. Every one of us comes from a group with a poison skittle. That’s an analogy that only works with people who have mythologized the history of their own ethnicity and immigration in the US. If your ancestors had been held to the poisoned skittle analogy, you wouldn’t be a US citizen.

If we allow mass immigration of Syrians will some of those people be criminals or terrorists? Yes. Were some of the Germans, English, Irish, Italians, Jews, Swedes, Muldavians whom we allowed to immigrate criminals or terrorists? Yes.

A few years ago, when Berlusconi had recently come to power, largely on the basis of xenophobia and anti-immigration rhetoric, I had lunch with an Italian professor, who told me that people had tried to refute his rhetoric by showing that same rhetoric had been used by the US about Italians. But, she said, it didn’t work. Why not, I asked. Because, she said, Berlusconi’s allies showed that Rumanians and other eastern European immigrants really were committing crimes in Italy. I said, “Are you under the impression that Italian immigrants did not commit crimes in the US?” “Oh,” she said, “Did they?”

It’s a mistake for defenders of standard immigration policies to say that none of the people we allow in will do anything that might enable Fox to fear-monger about them. Someone will. It’s a worse mistake for people afraid of this set of immigrants to think they’re any different from the people who turned away Jewish escapees–to believe that turning Jews back to death was bad, but turning away Syrians is justified.

Before and during World War II, the US refused to admit Jewish refugees. One of the reasons that Jews stayed in Nazi Germany was that so few other countries would admit them—there was nowhere they could go. There’s a lot of argument about whether the Allies could have reduced the effectiveness of the Holocaust by bombing concentration camps; there is none that we could have reduced the number of people killed had we been willing to accept more people fleeing Nazism—Jews, Romas, intellectuals, communists, union members.

Would we thereby have admitted some spies? Probably. Would we have admitted people who would have gone on to commit crimes? Yes. Would it have been the right thing to do? Yes.

So, people supporting what Trump is doing—if you’re arguing that we should refuse to admit legitimate refugees on the grounds that some of them might be terrorists, spies, or criminals, congratulations—you just sent Jews back to their deaths. You can’t defend one and not the other.

Authenticity and Accuracy (selection)

At the beginning of the book, I mentioned demagoguery’s tendency toward strategic misnaming and cunning projection, both of which might be characterized as deliberately misleading—for instance, policies intended to prevent members of minority religions from being able to practice their religion (e.g., religions that want to solemnize same sex marriage) or intended to force dominant religious practices onto others (e.g., prayer in school) are instances of religious repression. They are intended to restrict freedom of religion. But they’re called protection of religious freedom—strategic misnaming. And trying to characterize resisting such repression as itself repressing religion (or a war on Christianity) is projection. As discussed earlier, demagoguery often relies on claims that are clearly hyperbolic, if not actively dishonest, yet demagogues are generally described as “authentic” and the outgroup is always condemned for dishonesty. Thus, given the centrality to demagoguery of claims that simply and obviously aren’t true, why do people perceive rhetors engaged in demagoguery as honest and authentic?

That question has puzzled me since I began working on proslavery rhetoric, which often relied on obviously false claims (such as that slaveholders were outraged at mixed race relationships, or that slaves thrived in swampy areas) coupled with representations of themselves as passionate about the truth and condemnations of abolitionists as liars. At the time, I thought that it was a phenomenon that George Orwell noted—you demonstrate ingroup loyalty more powerfully by insisting on the truth of things you do and don’t know to be untrue (“blackwhite”). But, the more that I read about demagogues, the more I came to believe that many people sincerely believe them to be honest. To give simply one example: Antony Beevor describes soldiers encircled by Soviet troops, clearly abandoned by Hitler, insisting that Hitler would save them, “‘I believe in Hitler. What he said he’ll do, he’ll stick to'” (277). More recently, Donald Trump, having led audiences in cheers about jailing Hillary Clinton, and insisting she has to be locked up, announced he wouldn’t try to prosecute her after all, and his fans continued to describe him as honest, straight-shooting, and trustworthy. No matter how often he changed positions, or said things that were clearly untrue, many perceived as authentic and honest. This point seems important to me, because it has implications for what we try to do about demagoguery, and how we talk about accuracy and public deliberation.

What people perceive as authentic is the lack of filter, an apparent absence of forethought—the apparent lack of calculation is, for many people, reassuring. They believe that they are seeing the real person, and believe that authenticity matters more than accuracy. If a rhetor says what s/he really thinks, regardless of consequences, then s/he is being truthful to her own views, and people believe that is true. That expression of inner truth is, for many people, a more valuable quality than someone being truthful about our shared world. I think it has to do with the sense that the audience can then believe that a person is truly a member of the ingroup, so the authenticity comes from believing the person is incapable of being dishonest, and really is one of us. Paradoxically, this privileging of a supposed true identity over an external world means that people who claim to be realists, and who claim to reject relativism, are ultimately endorsing a highly relativist notion of truth.

This true self is performed by saying outrageous things, and, in a culture in which demagoguery is rewarded (by winning elections, getting more viewers, being able to charge more for speeches) there is necessarily a demagogic oneupsmanship that happens. The previously outrageous becomes normal, and so a person has to make an even more demagogic claim, or advocate an even more extreme policy against the outgroup.

Demagoguery, metaphors, and policy argumentation

A couple of folks have asked me questions about demagoguery. Guess what, I’m pretty informed about this!

The basic point about demagoguery is that it insists that we don’t have to engage in policy argumentation—we can settle all issues through deciding who is in the ingroup and who is in the outgroup. Demagoguery says we are in an ultimate war of extermination of us versus them.

Policy argumentation has two parts: need and plan. The need part of the argument should put forward plausible, well-supported, and well-defended claims regarding the need (problem or ill) being significant, inherent (it won’t go away on its own), and attributable to some cause (a narrative about causality).

The plan part of the argument should describe a specific plan (not just a set of slogans) that can be plausibly argued is feasible, will actually solve the specific problem identified in the need portion (this is where the narrative about causality is crucial), and deal with the problem of unintended consequences.

Demagoguery rejects all arguments about plan as weak-kneed unmanly dithering. It identified the need/problem as the presence of some bad group, and the obvious solution is to expel them from the community, prevent them from joining it, imprisoning them, and/or killing them.This narrative of our being in a supernaturally determined battle between good and evil has no place for thoughtful policy argumentation.

Thus, that the plan might not be feasible, or might have costs higher than the benefits, or might not be logically related to the need we’ve identified—all of those issues are irrelevant. The feasibility of a proposed plan, for instance, doesn’t really matter; any plan will work, as long as we stay right with God/Nature/History. It may even be that committing to an unlikely plan, with very little chance of success, after little or no deliberation, is the best approach to take: our refusal to worry about feasibility shows that we have extraordinary faith in the ingroup’s relation to God/History/Nature, and it is faith, not feasibility, that is most likely to invite divine assistance. In this narrative, heroes are irrational and impractical. Thus, this apocalyptic metanarrative prevents pragmatic and inclusive deliberation.

This posture of standing strong in the midst of the end of the world can be fairly complicated: demagoguery has to square the circle of inspiring fear while not looking fearful (since fearfulness is being paired with thinking and deliberating)—there are often claims of extraordinary courage in the face of a terrible situation, or a representation of one’s self as calm and reasonable while making apocalyptic predictions, and the odd insistence of the sheer rationality of hyperbolic claims (I will admit, this is one aspect of demagoguery that often makes me laugh).

Desperate times require desperate measures, and those desperate measures are usually some kind of punitive policies. Demagoguery seems to correlate closely with what George Lakoff has called “Strict Father Morality.” The government’s role is to act as a Strict Father to the country; if the country, or some part of it, has gotten out of order, it is because of lax policies, and we need to enact more punitive ones (for more on Strict Father Morality, see Lakoff, Moral Politics, especially Chapters Five and Six). Lakoff’s point is that this view of the government and public policy is reflected in metaphors associated with ingroup and outgroup.

In addition to the ones Lakoff argues are associated with Strict Father Morality, demagoguery associates metaphors of vermin, disease, taint, queerness (that is, transgressive behavior), monstrosity (that is, hybridity), disorder, lack of control (licentiousness), impurity (again, hybridity), thinking, and demonic possession with the outgroup. It associates metaphors of purity, tumescence (specifically, and masculinity, generally), order, action, decisiveness, and control with the ingroup. It associates dithering, wavering, impaired masculinity, and weakness with people considering protecting or defending the outgroup in any way, or any criticism of the ingroup.

Thus, the solution to demagoguery isn’t less democracy, but more. But it has to be more argumentation about policy, not identity.

StatesMEN and demagogues

womenforhitler2

Briefly, my plaint about scholarship on demagogues has four parts, three of them described previously:

1. It’s methodologically flawed to try to distinguish demagogues from statesmen on the grounds of motives, since someone’s interpretation of a political figure’s motive is very nearly indistinguishable from their perception of that political figure as a member of the ingroup or outgroup.
2. It’s methodologically flawed to try to identify the characteristics of demagoguery by looking at what characteristics are shared among political figures the rhetor doesn’t like, because that ensures there will not be any identification of ingroup demagoguery.
3. If our goal is to prevent communities from getting talked into policies they will later regret, it’s a mistake to do so by trying to identify the responsible demagogues because looking for word magicians assumes what’s at stake—it assumes that communities get into bad decision-making processes because magical individuals lead them there.
4. It’s methodologically flawed to try to identify demagogues by looking at politically successful and repellent figures because that focus necessarily means we’re looking only at individuals who had the political power (or luck) and identity that would enable them to gain power.

Here I’ll explain briefly what that last one means.

Access to political power has always been carefully circumscribed, and yet supposedly politically excluded groups have always found ways to participate in politics—such as antislavery women who, without a vote, sent thousands of petitions to Congress, with tremendously important impact.

Women’s groups were also important in pro-segregation political agitation, as well as pro-Nazi, despite—in both cases—their political agitation being in direct defiance of the political agenda and ideology on behalf of which they were agitating. Any excursion into the bottom half of the internet will show a lot of women and members of marginalized groups engaged in demagoguery, and they are not uncommonly agitating for their political marginalization, demagogically.

They have little or no power, and their motives are uninteresting. But, rhetors like that can have tremendous power, if there are a lot of people acting as they are. They can promote demagoguery in small groups, via their social media, in their social interactions. They can also help to ensure that criticism of their demagoguery is silenced, through boycotts, shunning, refusing to hire, firing. They can also legitimate demagoguery through approving of it explicitly or implicitly.

In fact, demagoguery is only dangerous when it’s supported by large numbers of people who will refuse to vote for political figures who deliberate or compromise, shun, fire, refuse to hire, or boycott people who aren’t sufficiently fanatical about the ingroup, refuse to testify about ingroup violence, or refuse to condemn it. Those aren’t major political figures—those are the people who create the wave that the major political figures ride.

In other words, focusing on demagogues, rather than demagoguery, is yet another way we let us off the hook.

[image from here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/10/06/hitler-s-killer-women-revealed-in-new-history.html]

“Political Eschatology, Imparted Justification, and Sloppy Calvinism: The Religious Basis of Neoliberalism”

wallace

This is a complicated argument, so I’ll do something I don’t normally do: I’ll start with my thesis. What I’m saying is that the problems with our polity right now—our difficulties arguing politics—isn’t just because of the hegemonic dominance of neoliberalism (Wendy Brown’s argument) but because of the resonance between neoliberalism and a particular religious culture—one that premises an ontological shift at the moment of belief, a shift that turns a person into a warrior in the inevitable war between Good and Evil.

Neoliberalism has been described as hegemonic discourse and a political rationality. As Wendy Brown points out, the political rationality of neoliberalism pervades educational policy, Supreme Court decisions, and what we think of as conventionally political discourse, and she (and others) have persuasively argued that one of the consequences is to depoliticize political deliberation insofar as it turns all interactions into market interactions. I’m interested in why it has such power as a cultural rationality.

I’ve been intrigued with this phenomenon in the relationship between religion and politics, since, oddly enough, the pervasion of neoliberalism (a profoundly nonreligious ethos) coincides with the sacralization of politics. Thus, religion has become monetized and politics sacralized at precisely the same time. That’s kind of weird.

The relationship between religion and politics has long been vexed in American public discourse. For instance, in postbellum areas that promoted segregation, religious discourse that supported segregation was considered “normal” and was therefore both common and allowed. It appeared unpolitical. Religious entities that criticized segregation were considered “political” (because “political” and “nonhegemonic” are pretty much synonymous for a lot of people), so major religious organizations were silent about segregation either because they thought it was bad or because they thought it was good. Segregation was explicitly a religious issue, and, because of various religious entities’ agreement to silence their criticism, dominant white religious defenses of segregation were normalized and therefore considered neutral.

That’s a mouthful. To be more clear: in areas with segregation (not just “the south”) white churches either never mentioned segregation or actively promoted it. And it’s hard for people now to understand the extent to which the major southern protestant religions actively supported segregation as Christian. It was central—that’s important to understand. And, because it was central, it was normal.

In other words, American fundagelical Christianity was always already (as they say) deeply implicated in segregation. But, in a weird way: segregation was so religiously normalized that to support it was seen as nonpolitical, and to oppose it was political. (This is a not uncommon misperception about what it means to “politicize” something—people use it when they’re talking about something political being brought into the realm of argument. In this model, “normal” behavior, even oppressive policies, isn’t “political” until there is an argument about it, so the people who object to “normal” policies are the ones seen as “politicizing” an issue. It’s a bad model.)

Thus, and this is important, American religious institutions that decided not to be “political” were, in fact, heavily and thoroughly politicized in regard to segregation to their core, whether they were supporting it or (in theory) opposed.

Paradoxically, then, segregation was protected by the notion that religious organizations should stay out of politics (since supporting segregation wasn’t “political”).

The shit hit the fan with Brown v. Board for southern Protestantism, since segregation was at the core of “southern culture” and southern religion. When Brown v. Board happened, there were multiple pro-segregation responses.

- Resort to terror. This wasn’t a surprising response, since it had worked for almost 100 years—just lynch, or threaten to lynch, anyone who criticized white supremacy. North Carolina, for instance, had over 100 reported lynchings, meaning ones that made it into the news. Who knows how many black males (a few Jews might have been in there too) were lynched for being disrespectful or successful that didn’t make it into that tally? Every scholar of southern history notes the reliance on state-sponsored terrorism—that the black population would be kept in control by the government allowing terrorism against them. That isn’t to say that every southerner was actively bad, but every white southerner allowed that terrorism to happen.

Everyone knows about this response, and everyone (now) condemns it. But it wasn’t the most common pro-segregation response.

- Support segregation but not through terror. The idea was that Brown v. Board was the consequence of Marxist infiltration of SCOTUS (you think I’m kidding, but I’m not). So, if we could get a non-Marxist SCOTUS, we’d be good. Let’s just delay as much as we can till we get that SCOTUS. This was considered a respectable and moderate position, and supported by people like Boutwell (who managed a discourse of “civility”).

Since segregation was not a winning argument (Wallace’s bid showed that), fundagelicals decided they couldn’t win on segregation, so they’d go for something else. They went for abortion. The hope was that “abortion” could be used to motivate people to get religiously conservative justices who would then under mind the decisions regarding segregation.

If you think I’m wrong, go the google, and find a fundagelical prior to Roe v. Wade up in arms about abortion. You might actually find a surprising number of fundagelicals advocating abortion (email me, and I’ll send some refs). Short version: every single scholar of birth control issues says this is true. Fundagelicals were not opposed to abortion till after Roe v. Wade.

There was also creationism, and I think that the two forces happened to converge—a desire to maintain creationism, and a desire to maintain segregation by getting “conservative” SCOTUS. That’s how to understand Reagan’s dog whistles about states rights, and Nixon’s Southern Strategy. (It’s important to note that “preventing abortions” did not become a political issue; instead, “outlawing abortions” was the issue.)

In any case, it’s simply clear that, after Roe, fundagelicals became more active at the local level, particularly School Boards. American political discourse has long had an evangelical flavor—think of the controversies about a Catholic president, and the evangelizing narrative behind Wilsonian foreign policy—but it has seemed to me that there has been something different about the kind of religion we’re seeing in two ways: first, the insistence, on the part of a large number of voters, that all candidates be fundagelical (not just Christian); second, open embrace of apocalyptic visions among major political figures and policies.

I think both are explained by some late nineteenth and early twentieth century shifts in American religion. Part of it has to do with seeing American foreign policy in triumphalist and missionary terms. There is a triumphalist narrative about American imperialism: they engage in imperialism in order to oppress others, but we are benevolent.

Oddly enough, instead of the triumphalist narrative of Wilsonian imperialism—we come as missionaries of democratic liberalism, who will free the oppressed from the chains of superstition and bad colonialism—there is now a narrative I find even more troubling, namely that America is taking its place in the world-ending battle between good and evil. When policy debates are framed in that context, then pragmatic discussions of long-term consequences become moot, as do questions of fairness or ethics across ingroup/outgroup boundaries.

For instance, if you look at fundagelical discussions of US Middle East policies, you can see an open rejection of such pragmatic discussions in favor of unalloyed support for whatever policy current Israeli leaders pursue. And such support is framed, not as savvy or pragmatic, but most in line with a belief in Armageddon.

That some people would feel that way doesn’t interest me; that it’s a compelling way for a large number of people to think is interesting.

The evasion of politics, and the reframing of politics as Good v. Evil, doesn’t just trouble Middle East policy. You can see it elsewhere as well—look at how much this election is a question of identity and not policies. Is Hillary a crook? Is Trump a liar? (And notice the first v. last name.) For years I’ve been wondering why we’re so averse to arguing policy. And why all policy arguments end up as identity ones. Why do we think identity is enough?

I want to toss out an explanation: that neoliberalism is a return to the prereformation religious formulation of the relationship of “good” (aka, “justified”) coupled with the reformation model of individualism and political action. Basically, we are now in a world in which many people assume that people who are saved have been ontologically changed. That ontological change guarantees that their works are justified, and that they are part of the elect who will lead the chosen people to salvation. My argument is that that version, a kind of sloppy Calvinism, displaces political deliberation with expression of identity.

It’s not uncommon to argue that liberalism has its roots in reformation notions of justification. Instead of imparted justification—Christ’s righteousness is given to believers—reformers like Luther and Calvin argued for imputed justification—we will act as though it has been given. There is not an ontological shift at the moment of justification; the person, even a believer, remains a sinner.

It’s often argued that this formulation of justification was connected to (caused? was caused by?) Enlightenment and/or humanist notions about the falliability of human perception and belief. You can’t know that you’re saved, nor that anyone else is, but you will act as though good standing members of your church are. Similarly, participation in the civic doesn’t require an ontological shift, and decision-making power can be given to people as though they have the abilities necessary to make good political decisions.

In such a moment, policy arguments would have to be about policy, and not identity (something you see, interestingly enough, in the Putney Debates, where Cromwell of all people argues that everyone has good motives, even though they disagree, and that the true course of action is hard to perceive). After all, that someone is a believer does NOT guarantee that what she is saying is true.

The Reformation didn’t question eschatology—the study of Christ’s church on earth, and the sense that human history is intensely teleological. If anything, it heightened the notion that we can interpret all human history in eschatological term. Hence, at the same moment that there is an introduction of skepticism about goodness and identity, there is the sacralizing of political history—the creation of a community of believers, of the refounding of the state of Israel, is part of the history of Christianity itself, headed toward Christ’s Second Coming. Eschatology—the history of “the church” on earth—is universalized and politicized; and political history becomes eschatology. The troubling consequence of this humanizing of eschatology is that politics is taken out of the realm of argument, compromise, and deliberation, and into a battle of good and evil.

It can be argued that this formulation of identity—imputed justification—implies a certain amount of skepticism; we don’t know who is saved, and being justified and being sanctified aren’t the same thing. Thus, we might be wrong to think we’re saved, or that someone else is. I think it’s harder to maintain a culture of skepticism within a political eschatology. If we’re inevitably headed toward a battle between good and evil, it’s hard to imagine any culture saying, “Hmmm…. are we good? or evil?” as something about which they would be skeptical and value hearing multiple sides.

In a culture of political eschatology all leaders can be divided into the Good (those who are leading us toward the good side of the inevitable battle) and the Bad (those who are deliberately leading us toward evil and the dupes who don’t realize what they’re doing). So, how do we know that a policy is good in this frame? We can look to see whether the people advocating a policy are good…. or evil. We look to their identity.

In the late nineteenth century, American evangelicalism began to slip back toward imparted justification, conflating the moment of belief with the moment of sanctification—to become a “believer” is to experience an ontological shift from sinner to saint. Imputed justification was no longer a part of American fundagelical religion, and with it any skepticism about whether a person who claimed to be saved would do good or bad things.

Thus, speaking as though one is “saved” (as long as it is coincident with endorsing the political agenda fundagelicals now argue is the necessary consequence of being saved) means an endless stack of “get out of jail” cards.

And there was one more factor, famously described by Weber—the equation of success with salvation. This was a kind of sloppy Calvinism, one that accepts the notion of an absolute ontological divide between saints and sinners, but (and?) with the assumption that saints prosper, and that their saintly identity is known to them and others. And, since the saints are, well, saints, they deserve all the good—there is no point in insisting on fairness in a culture—you don’t treat saints and sinners the same way. You give power to saints and take it away from sinners.

What I’m saying is that the problems with our polity right now—our difficulties arguing politics—isn’t just because of the hegemonic dominance of neoliberalism (Wendy Brown’s argument) but because of the resonance between neoliberalism and a particular religious culture—one that premises an ontological shift at the moment of belief, a shift that turns a person into a warrior in the inevitable war between Good and Evil.

We are all preppers now.

Aversive and institutional racism

“He isn’t racist; some of his best friends are….”

Common definitions of racism make it an issue of affect—you have the wrong feelings about some group. Some common definitions emphasize an intent to judge on the basis of race, or an avowed feeling of hostility. But that isn’t how racism works.

I remember a racist telling me, “I’m not racist. Racism is the irrational hostility toward a group, and my hostility is perfectly rational.” As an example, he said “Normal Germans would have their shop windows broken by Jewish communists, and then have to go to a Jewish bank to pay for the repairs. That is why Germans were so hostile to Jews.”

It’s false on every level—that isn’t where anti-Semitism came from, most bankers weren’t Jewish, few people had their windows broken by communists, most communists weren’t Jews, most Nazis weren’t shopkeepers. But it’s a narrative that made this racist feel as though antisemitism was justified. (By the way, some of his best friends were Jews–really.)

“Aversive” racism is the term used for racism that comes from an aversion to being close with members of that race. It’s often assumed that aversive racism is conscious and universal. So, if you’re nice to some members of that race, you don’t have aversive racism. But everyone has their “good Jew” as Himmler called them; slaveholders claimed (and probably sincerely felt) affection for many of their slaves; advocating genocide of Native Americans not uncommonly went along with praising Native American culture; George Wallace was very nice to his black aides.

I remember people saying, “I have nothing against colored people; they’re very good with children, and they have excellent rhythm. I just think we need to live separately.” Or read F.L. Baum’s argument for genocide—racism with a compliment.

There might be a person with a black neighbor, who is really nice to that neighbor. So, is she free of aversive racism? Not necessarily. She might still call the cops every time that neighbor has relatives over, or not ask the neighbor’s son to house sit while she’s out of town, or mentally exempt that family from her generalizations about “that kind.”

More important, she might even like that family and use her affection for them as evidence that she doesn’t need to examine how she treats other members of that race. She might be completely unaware that she applies different standards to resumes where the applicant seems to be African American, but tell herself she can’t be racist because she’s buddies with that family.

Racism is unconscious, and doesn’t necessarily involve hostility. There are various studies of resumes and pieces of writing, showing that white people judge the writing more harshly if they think the author isn’t white.

For instance,

Sixty partners from 22 law firms who agreed to participate in a “writing analysis study” received copies of the memo. Half were told the memo was written by an African-American man named Thomas Meyer, and half were told the writer was a Caucasian man named Thomas Meyer. Fifty-three partners completed the task. Of those, 29 received the memo supposedly by a white man and 24 received the memo supposedly by a black man.

The reviewers gave the memo supposedly written by a white man a rating of 4.1 out of 5, while they gave the memo supposedly written by a black man a rating of 3.2 out of 5. http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/hypothetical_legal_memo_demonstrates_unconscious_biases

There are innumerable studies along those lines, about how teachers respond (especially in regard to discipline), how juries make decisions (the “blacker” the defendant, the more likely a conviction, even in the face of bad evidence), how people hire, rent, and sell.

One test of how “racist” someone is is to look at implicit biases. There’s a great set of tests here (be prepared to be disturbed): https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html

Institutional racism is different from aversive racism, and it comes about in several ways. One way is that a lot of people are a little racist, and it adds up. It also happens because people assume “people like us” are the norm. So, we start from our experience, and assume everyone has it.

You can see it in some areas where there is no intention to discriminate. For instance, a lot of classroom rules established by PTA end up significantly discriminating against working parents or working class parents. There’s no intention to do that—just an assumption that all the parents have a lot of time and money. When I’m teaching, I’ll point to the building we’re in—what would it be like to be on crutches or a wheelchair? Then students often notice that there are steps with no function other than aesthetic. Did the architect put them just to discriminate against people with mobility disabilities? Probably not; probably, s/he thought it looked good and literally did not imagine anyone unable to navigate the steps. Discrimination is often a lack of thought.

But, did the architect harm people with disabilities? Yes.

So, can you hurt people on the basis of race without ever intending to, or even feeling hostility? Yes.

For instance, standardized tests discriminate against people who speak stigmatized dialects. If a person makes admissions decisions on the basis of standardized tests, when there is no evidence that standardized tests predict success for that program, that’ racist. No intent, no feelings of hostility, but discrimination and harm.

Or, let’s imagine a school that is making decisions about curriculum. If the curriculum only values authors and figures of one race, then it is sending the message that only members of that race can be valued. Intent? Feelings of hostility? Probably not, but serious harm.

It’s easy not to see the harm if we benefit from it, but that’s a different issue, about privilege.

But, the short, short version is: think about all the ways we discriminate against people with disabilities. There was a time when that discrimination was deliberate because people strongly believed that anyone with a disability should remain out of view of others. That was deliberate aversive discrimination. There remains a muddled aversive discrimination, but much of it is simply that being able-bodied is a privilege, and one of the main components of that privilege is that we don’t have to think about what it would be like to get to work, or the grocery store, or rent an apartment, or see a movie, or do any of hundred other things if we were in a wheelchair.

You might be very, very nice to the person next door in a wheelchair, and regularly take her to the grocery store. But if you vote against a bond issue that would expand services for people with disabilities you have some explaining to do. You might be nice on a personal level and discriminatory on an institutional one.

That’s why, to determine racism, people ask about whether someone is willing to acknowledge that it exists. If you think it doesn’t, that’s racism. It isn’t aversive (at least not the deliberate kind), but you probably would score pretty high on the IAT, and you definitely got the gold ring on institutional racism.