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Writing Centers at the Center of Writing. And Democracy.

New Writing Center with bright windows, open spaces — The University Writing Center in the main library at the University of Texas

[This is a slightly longer version of the talk I gave for the 30th Anniversary of the University Writing Center]

Thank you for this celebration, and thank UT for supporting such an extraordinary place as this Writing Center for thirty years—this is it, at the center of the campus, in the midst of one of the best university libraries in the nation, and part of the prestigious Department of Rhetoric and Writing. There are several reasons that this place exists, and that it’s as vibrant and successful as it is.

In no particular order:

The determination on the part of some Writing Center and some University Library staff to make it exist—they worked for at least sixteen years to have a Writing Center in a Learning Commons in the Library, just pushing and pushing, just a continuous force.

Peg Syverson, who hired well, retained well, trained well, created a community of caring and professionalism, who also went around campus generating goodwill, respect, and enthusiasm for what the Writing Center was doing.

The staff she retained and hired, who are kind, collaborative, creative, problem solvers, who nourished everyone they worked with.

lorraine haricombe, who (like me) had the advantage of taking over a position from an effective and respected predecessor, whose very position as a Vice-Provost shows that UT sees the Library as central to the mission of the University. Her support for the Writing Center has been invaluable, but in line with how effective she is.

The DRW has supported the Writing Center in pragmatic and important ways, having the position of Director a tenured faculty member, providing releases for the Director, including it as crucial for long-term planning, but also in day-to-day assistance in crises and brain-storming.

The College of Liberal Arts also supported in pragmatic ways—such as over half a million dollars—and, when I was Director, I knew that, when problems or questions arose, I could get good advice and support from both COLA and the DRW. What makes this Writing Center so special is the way it is pragmatically, institutionally, financially, and genuinely supported.

Here’s a contrast.

Old Army-style bungalow with chalk marks outside the windows

In 1977, when I was a sophomore in college, I applied for a job to work at the Berkeley Writing Center. It was here, in what were called “Temporary Buildings.” They had been built in World War II. A few years after I left, in the late 1980s, Berkeley built a really lovely Writing Center in a central part of campus.

The first UT Writing Center was called a “Writing Lab,” and it was in the basement of Parlin. It went away. When the Division of Rhetoric and Composition was formed, Lester Faigley created the Undergraduate Writing Center, which moved to the Undergraduate Library, and then in 2014 it became the University Writing Center, and moved to spectacular digs in the center of campus and the main floor of the library. That shared narrative of changes in architecture and geography is kind of a metaphor for how people thought about Writing Centers (or Writing Labs as they were also called)—something that was supposed to be a quick fix for a temporary problem came to be seen as central to the mission of the university.

Some of that shift is the consequence of new ways of understanding how universities function, who should attend them, and the relative importance of assessing v. teaching (to put it in simple, if not simplistic, terms, whether we should approach teaching with a fixed or growth mindset). But, I want to suggest something in this talk—that shift also has to do with how we have changed in our thinking about writing, changes that, I’ll suggest, are provocatively similar to changes in how some people argue we should think about democratic deliberation and democracy itself. And both those sets of changes are epitomized in practices in this Writing Centers.

The Berkeley Writing Center, as I was told, originated to serve students who were designated “affirmative action”—that is, students who had been admitted although they did not meet what were supposed to be the minimum GPA or standardized test score critera. When I was there, athletes and affirmative action students (often the same group, for not very good reasons) had priority, but other students could also sign up for tutoring.

Just to hit the point home, the foundational assumption was that there was at that moment a new kind of student who was lacking in something most college students had (or had had up to this point); this was the same time that a new course was created that in credits, name, numbering, staffing, and even department, was very explicitly marked as not really a college course (called Subject A—all other courses had numbers).

The UT Writing Lab, if I understand things correctly, had its origin in a similarly deficiency-based model. The idea was that some students lacked basic “grammar” skills, and so should be drilled in them. The foundational assumption was that methods commonly used to teach English to foreign language speakers would be equally useful for native speakers of English, whose understanding of “grammar” was presumed to be deficient, and that’s why they were “bad” writers.

In other words, there are people who are “Good Writers” and they produce “Good Writing” which uses “Good English,” so, we can transform “Bad” Writers into “Good” ones by drilling them in “the rules of grammar.” But what does that mean?

excessively complicated way of describing what each part in a sentence does

Look, for instance, at this half-page from a nineteenth century handbook on grammar, when they had that same (false) narrative about “grammar” and “good writing” and college. The dominant pedagogy presumed that people couldn’t produce good writing unless they knew the rules of good grammar, and so students were taught to memorize the rules, through drilling and punishment. Interestingly enough, there wasn’t (and isn’t) perfect agreement about what those rules were or are.

There was agreement, however, that people who had “bad” grammar should be shunned and shamed and bemoaned. Doug Hesse directed me to these quotes:

“Everyone who has had much to do with the graduating classes of our best colleges has known men who could not write a letter describing their own commencements without making blunders which would disgrace a boy twelve years old. –Adams S. Hill, Harvard 1878

“It is obviously absurd that the college—the institution of higher education—should be called upon to turn aside from its proper functions and devote its means and the time of its instructors to the task of importing elementary instruction. —Report of the Committee on Composition and Rhetoric, to the Harvard College Board of Overseers, 1892

I also like this passage, from a 19th century book on correct speaking:

Two people being snobs about grammar and accent

Here’s one more example from another 19th century grammar book.

What you may notice is that most of these sentences seem fine. To the extent that there are errors, they are very minor, and don’t interfere with our ability to understand the sentence—except for the “or” rather than “nor” in the first one, it seems to me that most are about what preposition one should use in an idiomatic expression.

So why did this book make such a big deal about idiomatic expressions? One of the important functions of grammar books in the nineteenth century was to reify and justify the stigmatizing of certain dialects, thereby strengthening and rationalizing various existing hierarchies, especially class, ethnicity, region, and race. That approach to teaching grammar and composition enabled a caste system to pretend it was a meritocracy. Insistence on “grammatical correctness” can be profoundly unethical.

When I was in Kansas, there was a controversy over a notification sent out by a water company, informing its users that there were harmful chemicals in the water. The notice was grammatically correct, but deliberately incomprehensible, so that water users wouldn’t panic and demand changes. Grammatical correctness doesn’t guarantee clear communication.

It often, however, signals in-group membership, as in grammatically correct but meaningless mission statements about leveraging synergy.

Trump’s 2020 January 6th speech is grammatically pretty good—I was surprised by that—but only makes sense to people who already agreed with him. It signalled–and inflamed—in-group membership. Grammatical correctness doesn’t prevent demagoguery.

Here’s my point: there is far more disagreement about the conventions of “correct” English than many people realize, and using “correct” English doesn’t necessarily guarantee that the writing is clear or ethical.

When people in my and related fields make this argument, we’re often heard as arguing that we should abandon all conventions, but that isn’t possible. What we’re advocating is that we not assume that there is a thing—“good English”–, let alone that using that “good” English has necessary and necessarily good consequences. What we’re saying is that it has to be up for argument. A lot of people don’t like that attitude because it means that uncertainty is inevitable when it comes to writing, and teaching writing, even about very specific sentence-level choices.

Take, for instance, citation conventions. In some fields, the convention is to list authors in order of prestige rather than degree of contribution; that convention means that the “First Author et al.” convention obscures the contributions of junior scholars, who are often already underrepresented in academia. That convention makes them invisible, which is not necessarily the intention of the individual who writes “et al.”—they’re just trying to stay within a word limit, or finish the damn bibliography. The convention itself has consequences.

So it’s interesting that the rules of citation in many fields have changed—some journals and citation methods require that all authors be listed by name. That’s a rule that changed for ethical reasons. There is debate right now about the convention of citing authors by first initial and last name, and what it does for people with common last names. That’s a good argument to have. We need citation conventions, and we need to argue about them.

The history of any language, including English, is a history of people disagreeing about what the conventions are and should be—and that’s fine. I don’t think we can abandon prescriptivism; calling for banning all forms of prescriptivism is itself a kind of prescriptivism—prescribing and proscribing certain language. But we can argue about what we want to prescribe and proscribe, and stop talking in terms of proper and good. Conventions have consequences, and so they have to be up for argument.

We can, and really should, argue about these questions at conferences, in journals, at Faculty Council meetings, at workshops on teaching writing, but it’s a question a writing consultant faces every time they see a paper that uses a double negative.

In other words: what this Writing Center teaches is that while there are conventions, they are far more variable than people think—by discipline, genre, region, context, era—they have consequences, they must be up for argument, and we should argue about them in terms of whether their consequences are ethical. And authors can make choices about those conventions.

There are two other points I want to make about what happens in a writing center.

I think the most common thing I hear a writing center consultant say is something along the lines of, “I’m not sure what you’re saying here. What do you mean?” At that point, typically, the consultee says something pretty clear, and the consultant says, “Write that down.”

I think that’s interesting.

A friend and colleague refers to “the narcissistic pleasures of the first draft,” and sometimes that’s what happens. But not always. Here’s an early version of a Robert Caro manuscript.

Page from an early version of a Robert Caro book, heavily marked up

I don’t think he felt a lot of narcissistic pleasure. Sometimes writing the first draft feels like pulling one’s own teeth with rusty pliers. I’ve often heard writers say that first draft is just trying to get our ideas outside of our own brain; the second is when we try to make it say what we mean; the third is when we think about it from the perspective of a reader. Note that that isn’t the “outline, draft, polish” chain that is often taught as “the writing process.” And I think, for most writers, it isn’t necessarily a linear process, or only involving one draft at each stage. I tend to have a draft, critique, redraft, critique, revise process that loops back on itself.

For instance, here’s a page from a book that was eventually published, and what you can see is that I spent a lot of time fiddling around at the sentence level before realizing my problem was the argument was wrong. The solution to the sentence-level problems was to go back to “higher order concerns” and rethink my argument.

In other words, just as the “rules” for “grammar” are much more context-dependent than many people seem to think, or “grammar” books say, and in many cases there really aren’t rules, but preferences, guidelines, hacks, and canards, it’s the same with writing processes. There aren’t rules, but practices, and we write better when we’re faced with difference.

An idea for a piece of writing can seem so clear while in the shower, or walking a dog, and then we try to put it into words, and it starts to get mucky. Our ideas, when we look at them in writing, often don’t seem quite as brilliant as they sounded in our head, often depending on whether we’re writing for ourselves or imagining an audience. What we say to someone else is often different from what we say to ourselves.

But, sometimes we do fall in love with our own writing, or at least think it’s clear, and then someone says, “I’m not sure what you mean here.” In a way, what Writing Centers provide is what every writer needs—a well-meaning reader who isn’t us, someone who doesn’t already agree with us, but who also isn’t particularly invested in what we’re writing. A well-meaning, but not invested, other person won’t necessarily make the logical jumps or associative slides that we don’t even notice in our beliefs, and so they draw attention to those jumps and slides.

At its best, difference makes us think better because it makes us think about what we take for granted.

This is going on a bit, so I’ll just mention one more aspect of Writing Center practice that’s important. People often want a Writing Center to be a proofreading service, and the good Lord knows I’d love if there were a place I could drop a piece of writing and have someone correct it for me, but that isn’t an educational practice. And, as I said at the beginning, UT is committed in institutional, financial, and geographic ways to a Writing Center that serves the educational mission of the University.

What consultants do is ask questions—that is, instead of telling a consultee about their paper, they’re curious. When asked a question, they’d google the information, show students how to use the library chat function to get help from a reference librarian, get up and check a resource, ask another consultant, get me or Alice—they didn’t present themselves as knowers, but as seekers. They model curiosity.

So, how have Writing Centers changed? They started in geographically marginalized spaces, and at their worst, were seen as temporary fixes oriented toward assimilating deficient people into the good practices of the in-group by teaching and enforcing strict and timeless rules. And they are, and this one is, now central to the University mission, geographically, bureaucratically, institutionally, and financially.

What they teach is that there are conventions, and those conventions have consequences, and they change over time, and we have to think, and argue, about what they do; the uncertainty is inevitable, that difference is not a necessary evil, but an active good—that, as one former director of this writing center likes to say, we think better when we think together–, especially if we think differently. And they teach that curiosity is a virtue, and a skill, that should be nurtured.

My area of specialization is train wrecks in deliberation; what is more formally called “pathologies of deliberation.” And sometimes people have expressed surprise that I would direct a Writing Center, since that seems unrelated to my scholarly interests. But what I believe, and have tried to suggest in this talk, is that the culture and practices of a writing center are the ones that enhance democratic deliberation. Scholars of democracy, and I’m thinking here especially of Jan-Werner Muller, emphasize that “Democratic Rules” as he calls them in his latest book are cultural—they’re practices rather than timeless legal dicta. And crucial for democratic hope are several that I’ve said are part of Writing Center culture: comfort with uncertainty, diversity and pluralism as valued and nurtured qualities, open-ness to new practices and conventions. He favorably quotes Claude LeFort who said that democracy is “founded upon the legitimacy of a debate as to what is legitimate and what is illegitimate—a debate which is necessarily without any guarantee and without any end” (184). And I’m saying that’s what Writing Centers do. Muller says that “democracy dwells in possibility.”

So does this Writing Center. Because of y’all.

What the 431 BCE “Debate at Sparta” can show us about “identity politics” v. “politics of identity”

According to the Greek historian Thucydides, during the “Debate at Sparta” (431 BCE), an un-named Corinthian tried to persuade the city-state of Sparta to get involved in a fight Corinth was having with another city-state, Corcyra.

Why?

Corinth was fighting with Corcyra about yet another city-state, Potidea. Athens and Sparta were the dominant city-states in the Hellenic region. So, both Corinth and Corcyra were trying to get one of the big players to intervene, and the “Debate at Sparta” includes a speech by a Corinthian speaker trying to get Sparta to takes its side. But, if either Sparta or Athens got involved, it would not remain a proxy war–they’d go to war with each other. That war was unnecessary and would be unpredictable–while Sparta was far superior in land troops, the troops couldn’t be gone too long (they feared a slave rebellion), and they were far inferior in terms of naval strength.

The Corinthian speech is important for people now because it exemplifies how a rhetor can use demagoguery to persuade a community to opt for an unnecessary and highly destructive war.

We are in a culture of demagoguery, when normal policy disagreements are treated as battles in an existential war, and we’re in that situation because it’s profitable for media to give rhetors like the Corinthian air time. And ambitious rhetors can get air time by using that kind of demagoguery.

But, back to the debate.

Presumably, here’s the plan: If the Corinthian could get Sparta and Athens to go to war, then Athens would be too busy to take Corcyra’s side (which Athens was seriously considering) if Corinth and Corcyra went to war. It’s as though I wanted to get in a fight with Chester, but I’m afraid that you’ll take Chester’s side and the two of you will kick my ass. If I could get Hubert to start a fight with you, then you won’t be able to get involved in my fight with Chester.

But, here’s the Corinthian’s rhetorical problem. He has a really weak case, so weak that the standard moves of policy argument (what Aristotle would later call “deliberative” rhetoric) wouldn’t work. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War is largely a book about rhetoric and decision-making. And the admirable leaders, generals, and rhetors in the book all make a similar argument about argument: when we are arguing about policy, we shouldn’t make the issue about the character of our opponent (what Aristotle calls “epideictic”), or the justice or injustice of the situation (appropriate for a courtroom).[1] Deliberation should be about expediency—what are our goals, and what policy(ies) are most likely to enable success?

Here I’m going to get into the weeds a bit, but the important point is that the Corinthian can’t make a reasonable argument claiming that Sparta is faced with an imminent threat from Corcyra, Athens, or Corinth losing its conflict with Corcyra.

Here’s the weeds. It isn’t expedient for Sparta to take Corinth’s side. There’s no particular gain for Sparta, and neither Corcyra nor Athens present an imminent threat to Sparta. Corcyra could win the conflict with Corinth, and it would make no difference for Spartan security. Athens is quite some distance away, not threatening to invade Sparta (which would be improbable). The two were useful allies during the most recent Persian invasion, and they’re oddly balanced—Sparta has a better infantry, and Athens has a better navy. Most important, the Hellenes (what we call the Greeks) only repelled Persia because Athens and Sparta allied against them. Were Athens and Sparta to go to war, Persia would benefit, as it would improve the likelihood that Persia would succeed with its next invasion.

So, since the Corinthian can’t make the argument in reasonable policy terms, he shifts the stasis[2]—that is, he tries to reframe the issue in a way that might enable him to persuade Sparta to make a decision both unnecessary and very risky. What the Corinthian does is make it an issue of implacably opposed identities, an existential battle, rather than a pragmatic question about savvy policy.

He says that the real conflict is not Corinth’s entirely self-serving goal of getting Sparta and Athens to go to war so Corinth can beat Corcyra, but a grand, existential, and inevitable battle between Sparta and Athens. He doesn’t argue that Athens’ actions present an imminent threat (he couldn’t, since they didn’t), but that its identity does. He doesn’t argue that Athens’ policy of expanding threatens Sparta (since it didn’t), but that Athens’ identity as an expansionist city-state did. So, in both cases, he shifts the stasis from actions to identity.

This shift from actions (expanding) to identity (expansionist) is a relatively common rhetorical strategy. It’s a particularly common move when rhetors would have trouble persuading an audience of their case through deliberation. We can deliberate about actions, since we can have evidence about what someone did or didn’t do, and we can use those actions as evidence about what they might do in the future. We can talk usefully about goals (especially if a person or party has said what they are), since stated goals are evidence about what someone will do.

But neither previous actions nor stated goals are proof of what someone or some group will do. People and groups don’t always behave in the same way, and so we often have to figure out which of the past actions and statements are relevant to what they will do now. There are a lot of ways that people try to make that determination, and I’ll mention two.

One is what my father (an expert on arteriosclerosis) called “hardening of the categories.” By that, he meant people who believed that every aspect of the world can be put into a Linneaus-like (or Ramistic, if you know your rhetoric) tree of discrete and binary categories. A person (or group, or nation) is either pacific or aggressive, rational or irrational. If you think of individuals or groups this way, then you look at what they’ve done and try to put them into the pacific or aggressive box, and then make your policy decisions. You’ve decided that they’re really aggressive or passive or whatever, and all the disconfirming data can be dismissed. This strategy of prediction doesn’t make the situation any less uncertain, but it can give people the feeling of certainty because it makes the situation more stark. It deflects or hides the inherent uncertainty to any political act.

The other method I want to mention says that people have tendencies, but context matters. They tend to be aggressive under these circumstances, not under those. This way of predicting behavior is more complicated than the first, and it includes rather than deflects uncertainty–that the relationship between Athens and Sparta is a conflict of essential identity.

The Corinthian makes the first kind of argument. The Athenians are, he says, aggressive, brave, risk-takers. Like many demagogues, he includes a little shaming. Spartans have declined to get involved in Hellenic issues (probably because of the problem their version of slavery brought them), and he says they procrastinate. It’s a politics of identity, in which city-states make decisions not because of advantages, disadvantages, policy options, contextual constraints, compromises, but because behavior is determined by identity.

If you know anything about policy argumentation, then you know that rational policy argumentation first means identifying the “ill.” What is the problem we’re trying to solve? So, what is the problem for the Corinthian?

It’s the war with Corcyra. That isn’t a compelling problem for Sparta, so the shift to identity enables the Corinthian to redefine the problem. It also redefines the solution. If the problem is the identity of the Athenians, and it’s their essential identity, then the Corinthian is advocating a war of extermination.

This is a politics of identity. This is always a politics of extermination.

[1] This point is a major part of the speech Diodotus gives in a debate about genocide. Diodotus is almost certainly a fabrication of Thucydides.

[2] “Stasis” means place or hinge. What some people now call “stasis theory” is a modification of something Cicero said, and it’s one way to categorize stases. It’s much less useful and accurate than it might appear. It isn’t what I mean.

Sapphira the blue-eyed dragon

I often say that dogs are a lesson in unconditional love, and cats are a lesson in very conditional love.

Having pets in your household can mean a lot of things, and it does not necessarily mean having pets in your family. It can mean having beings who make you feel good about who you are because they love you so much.

Then there are Siamese cats.

My first and second cats were Siamese, and I loved them. They were just cats. One of them was very talkative, and had a particular way of telling me that he wanted a glass of water. (There was lots of water available, but he liked me pouring him a glass of water. That seemed reasonable to me. When I went off to college, my mother was not happy about his expectations.)

When we moved into this house we’d lost a couple of cats because of asshole neighbors in Cedar Park who let their dogs run free—those dogs killed cats and small dogs. Those dogs killed two of our cats. If St. Peter really is a gatekeeper to heaven, and really does ask that we explain why we deserve to go to heaven, I will point out that I did not take a baseball bat to the owner of those dogs.

We moved to a house on a busy street, and one of our cats was one-eyed, so we wanted to keep them inside. Jim built a catio (we didn’t know that was a thing)—a way for the cats to go outside and yet be in an enclosed space. (If memory serves, he initially used a structure he built so that I could try to grow kale and keep it from squirrels.)

After we moved here, our munchkin and I wanted a third cat. Around this time of the year in 2006 (or 2007?), we went to various cat rescue places to get a cat. Turns out that this is not a time of year when there are a lot of kittens up for adoption, but there was a Siamese of indeterminate age. (Definitely not more than a year, but how far under that was unclear.) She was affectionate, and just absolutely beautiful. I was puzzled as to why anyone would give her up. Our munchkin had been reading the Eregon series, and so she was named after a blue-eyed dragon.

And she was a Siamese, the kind I’d never had. She hated being picked up. She liked being around people, while in her own space. She would, at her will, come over to someone and get petted, perhaps even climbing onto a lap. Then, she was incredibly affectionate, as long there was no move made to hold her. When she wanted affection, she asked for it. Otherwise, she was not to be touched. As the catio got more elaborate (it now has three stages), she was clear about what part of it was hers.

When we moved to this house, we decided our cats would be purely indoor. We live on a busy street, a short distance from a creek that is a coyote highway—it’s just too dangerous. Every once in a while—because our house is built on clay that’s on limestone—the house shifts in such a way that doors don’t really close. That happened after we got back after seeing a play one evening, so it was late (for us). We realized she’d gotten outside. We caught glimpses of her behind the ac unit, and then in some bushes, and spent over 45 minutes crawling in bushes, trying to chivvy her to an open door. At some point, while crawling around, one of us looked up and saw her sitting in a window watching us, mildly interested. She was on the inside of the window. She’d long since taken advantage of one of the open doors.

Her space was the porch. A friend gave us a beautiful Morris chair, and we put it on the porch. She claimed it. When we went onto the porch (which we do a lot), she’d come and get scritches, and then go back to her chair, once she’d gotten what she wanted. She went blind about two years ago, and she stopped joining us for morning cuddles, but otherwise behaved no differently. She still went into her catio, made her way to the litterbox, checked in with us (as though she was granting us the pleasure of petting her) when we were on the porch, chivvied dogs off of any space she wanted, and was just the cat she wanted to be.

Shortly after we got her, I felt bad, and thought maybe we were the wrong family for her. I imagined that maybe her ideal home was a little old lady who had her as their only cat, and that we were failing her because there were other animals. I eventually came to think we were the perfect family for her. No one fucked with her. She got affection when she wanted it, hung out on the catio watching birds and squirrels when she wanted, claimed the most comfortable chair in the house.

I came to admire her clear sense of boundaries, her ability to ask for what she wanted, her clear sense of dignity, and her treating blindness as a minor issue. She really was a blue-eyed dragon.

Recent curriculum vitae

January 2023

Patricia Roberts-Miller, Professor Emeritus

Department of Rhetoric and Writing, University of Texas at Austin

patriciarobertsmiller@gmail.com

patriciarobertsmiller.com

Scholar of pathologies of deliberation—that is, how communities persuade themselves to make decisions they later regret, although they had all the information necessary to make better decisions (e.g., demagoguery, propaganda, racism).

Education: University of California at Berkeley, Rhetoric PhD (1987), MA (1983), AB (1981)

Selected Books: Speaking of Race: How to Have Antiracist Conversations That Bring US Together (2021), Rhetoric and Demagoguery (2019), Demagoguery and Democracy (2017, First Year Book University of Maryland), Fanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus (2009), Deliberate Conflict: Composition Classes and Political Spaces (2004), Voices in the Wilderness: The Paradox of the Puritan Public Sphere (1999).

Selected Recent Articles and Book Chapters

“The Only Thing That Stops a Bad Guy With Rhetoric is a Good Guy With Rhetoric.” Rhetoric and Guns. Eds. Nathan Kreuter, Ryan Skinnell, Lydia Wilkes. University Press of Colorado. 2022. 19-31.
“Afterword.” The Rhetoric of Fascism. Ed. Nathan Crick. University of Alabama Press. 2022. 241-245.
“Rhetoric, Pedagogy, and Demagoguery.” Teaching Demagoguery and Democracy: Rhetorical Pedagogy in Polarized Times. Ed. Michael Steudeman. Intermezzo. 2021. https://manifold.as.uky.edu/projects/teaching-democracy-and-demagoguery
“Who Says What Is…Always Tells a Story”: White Supremacist Rhetoric, Then and Now” Nineteenth-Century Activist Rhetorics. Eds. Patricia Bizzell and Lisa Zimmerelli. MLA. 2021. 279-289.
“How to have more productive conversations about racism: Stop focusing on individual intent.” Salon (February 15, 2021) https://www.salon.com/2021/02/15/how-to-have-more-productive-conversations-about-racism-stop-focusing-on-individual-intent/
“On Not Bullshitting Yourself, or Your Teaching.” Composition Studies, 48:3, 129-131, 2020.
“Demagoguery, Charismatic Leadership, and the Force of Habit,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 49:3, 233-247, 2019. DOI: 10.1080/02773945.2019.1610638
“Ocasio-Cortez Exploited as Clickbait and Outrage Porn Magnet.” Washington Spectator April 2, 2019. https://washingtonspectator.org/roberts-miller-aoc/
“Trump’s Demagoguery.” Washington Spectator March 11, 2019. https://washingtonspectator.org/roberts-miller-deconstructing-trump/
“Charisma Isn’t Leadership” Faking the News: What Rhetoric Can Teach Us About Donald J. Trump. Ed. Ryan Skinnell. Societas, 2018.

Forthcoming/In Press

“Interchapter.” Rhetoric and Religion in the Twenty-First Century. Eds: Michael-John DePalma, Paul Lynch, and Jeff Ringer. Southern Illinois University Press.
“Democratic Deliberation, Identity, and Information.” Lippmann/Dewey and the Problematic Public in the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Kristian Bjorkdahl. Pennsylvania State University Press.
“The Mask of War and War of Masks.” Javnost—The Public

Selected Recent Invited Lectures/Presentations/Podcasts

Lithub KeenOn (1/31/2022) https://lithub.com/patricia-roberts-miller-on-an-objective-examination-of-racism/, Rhetoric Society of America (co-leader of seminar on “Rhetoric in Dark Times,” 2021), University of Georgia Athens (2020), University of Pennsylvania Law School (2020), “Unbecoming a Democracy.” Open Mind (2/10/2020) https://www.pbs.org/video/unbecoming-a-democracy-tibzpy/, University of Maryland College Park (First Year Book 2019), Penn State University (Kenneth Burke Lecture, 2019), “Demagogues are More Common Than You Think.” Democracy Works (May 20, 2019) https://www.democracyworkspodcast.com/category/patricia-roberts-miller/, Pardubice University, and Clemintinium National Library, Czechia (2019), University of Nevada-Reno (2019), Scranton University (2019), University of Denver (2017) https://mediaspace.du.edu/media/Democracy+and+the+Rhetoric+of+Demagoguery/1_mrjqnni5

Referee/Reviewer (presses and journals): Canadian Journal of Political Science, CCC, College English, Composition Studies, JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Journal of the History of Rhetoric (formerly Advances in the History of Rhetoric), Lexington Books, Oxford University Press, Penn State University Press, Political Studies, Praxis, Profession, Review of Politics, Rhetorica, Rhetoric Society Quarterly; Routledge, Southern Illinois University Press, Texas A&M University Press, University of Alabama Press, University of Pittsburgh Press

Reviewer (promotion and tenure): Arizona State University, Cal State Los Angeles, Carnegie Mellon University, Florida State University, Iowa State University, Michigan State University, Simon Fraser University, Syracuse University, Temple University, Texas A&M University, University of Georgia, University of Illinois, University of Kansas, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Oregon, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, University of Texas San Antonio, Wayne State University

What is happening with the GOP and the Speaker election isn’t just karma—it’s causality. And it’s bad for everyone.

Bill O'Reilly claiming there is a war on Christmas — from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToLdVCb1ezI

The GOP has been setting fire to democratic norms since the 80s. That isn’t a hyperbolic insult I’m throwing at them. It’s what Gingrich said he wanted to do. He said, quite openly (and still says), that he wanted to make government dysfunctional so that people would vote for the anti-government party, which would be the GOP. The GOP persuaded its base that they should abandon democratic norms and treat politics as war.

Let’s stop there for a second.

In the 80s, there was an internal GOP conflict among three kinds of elites. There were (and still are a few) Eisenhower-style conservatives who wanted a prosperous and stable nation, containment as a foreign policy, a moderate social safety net, and a reasonably protected working class (essentially the 1956 GOP platform), an end to de jure segregation. Then there was the group that had long dragged the Democratic party into the muck: a kind of toxic white evangelical populism that was rabidly racist, in favor of a social safety net only as long as didn’t threaten segregation, and committed to theocracy (that is, they believed that the government should promote and fund their very narrow notion of “Christianity”). The third group was neoliberal, Randroid, and selectively libertarian.

Two of those groups were Machiavellian.

Machiavellianism is often misunderstood. Psychologists use it to mean what used to be called sociopaths—that is, people who have no empathy, are amoral, and only look out for themselves—but that isn’t what Machiavelli advocated. He didn’t advocate a world free of ethical considerations, or amorality. He was deeply concerned with moral leadership, but morality, he and others argued, has two parts. There are means and ends. It is moral, he argued, to engage in actions we would normally consider immoral if those actions enable us to achieve a moral end.

He argued that the ends justify the means. That is, if you’re trying to do a right thing, there are no constraints on how you get there. (In other words, an important plot point of every action movie.) Thus, the only ethical consideration is whether your “ends” (your intention) are good. You can still think of yourself as an ethical person, even if you do or endorse actions that violate the ethical norms you claim to value, because you’re doing so for a good cause.

The easiest way to get people to behave like Machiavellians is to persuade them that they are threatened with extinction—there is an Out-Group that is trying to destroy Us. Then, they (we) will give ourselves moral license all the time feeling that we are the moral ones.

And that is the turn that pro-GOP rhetoric and pro-GOP demagogues (like Rush Limbaugh) took in the 80s. They weren’t the only rhetors who made that rhetorical choice. The claim that there is some “they” who is at war with “us” is a tiresomely popular rhetorical move. The argument that we must now abandon rhetorical, legal, ethical, and constitutional norms because we are faced with Evil is always present, and it’s always a bad argument.

And what’s happening with the GOP speakership shows why.

The choice that many pro-GOP politicians made in the 80s—and again, Gingrich is open about this—is that government itself was the Evil. So, the GOP made the government dysfunctional because they believed that it would gain power for them. I can’t say they’re wrong. It’s long been amazing to me how many GOP voters I’ve known who say, “Why should I pay taxes? There’s a pothole on my commute. We should cut taxes even more.”

In other words, cut resources to something (such as public schools or infrastructure), then, when those schools and infrastructure are crappier, mobilize the anger that people feel about the now crappier schools or infrastructure to argue for cutting taxes even more—because, clearly, the government can’t do a good job.

In the 80s and 90s, the GOP discovered that demagoguery worked to mobilize voters and support. As I’ve argued elsewhere, demagoguery isn’t specific to any place on the political spectrum, but it isn’t equally distributed. Demagoguery depends on the actively false notion that our complicated, nuanced, contextual, and uncertain realm of policy options can be reduced to a binary (or continuum) of two groups.

When a group (it’s never just an individual) decides that they will engage in demagoguery to gain or maintain power, they always do so by imagining an in-group, and then declaring that that in-group is already at war. This war is one already declared by The Out-Group (which is a fantastical nut-picked monstrosity of a villainous straw man) , and if you don’t realize it, you’re not really in-group.

Because The Out-Group is determined on our destruction, we are justified in anything we do, and breaking any norms. We can do the things we condemn The Out-Group for doing, while still claiming the moral high ground, because we have good intentions. We become Machiavellian.

Here’s one rhetorical problem. Imagine that you’re a media personality, ambitious political figure, Machiavellian with a lot of money, or person or industry that wants a specific policy. If you know that you couldn’t possibly succeed at getting your policy passed if you had to advocate in a realm of reasonable disagreement, then what you would do would be to demonize reasonable disagreement. You would say, “THEY are at war with us, so you should stop asking for reasonable disagreement and instead commit yourself to the policies that purify our community of Them.”

That’s what authoritarians do.

That’s what authoritarians with shitty policies do.

Deflecting the question of whether this policy is a good one (does it solve the need as reasonably narrated, is it the most reasonable in light of other options) to whether it means a win or loss for The Out-Group is always authoritarian.

If “conservatives” (who claim to be the “real Americans”) are threatened with extinction—the narrative of the GOP for forty years—then the correct response is to stand firm and reject all the democratic norms. That’s been the GOP rhetoric for forty years. The problem they’re now facing is that their rhetoric was persuasive. In other words, the GOP is now facing the logical and rhetorical consequences of its own rhetoric.

What is happening with the election of the Speaker of the House is a fight about exactly how to abandon democracy. And the fight is between two ways of thinking about authoritarianism: competitive authoritarianism (what McCarthy advocates) or a sloppy out-right authoritarianism (what Boebert advocates).

GOP candidates and pro-GOP media have spent years saying that Democrats/liberals/socialists (aka, anyone not purely committed to whatever the GOP happens to be advocating at that moment) are determined on the extermination of the in-group. Therefore, there is no such thing as a legitimate policy disagreement—every question, from whether you wear a mask to whether you are opposed to Russian hegemony of Europe, is not a policy question, open to policy argumentation, but an opportunity to demonstrate your determination to exterminate the “liberals” who want to exterminate Us.

As much as it may be pleasurable to watch Republicans in disarray, this is not a good situation. This is various levels of terrible. They are in disarray only because they disagree about what, exactly, constitutes the people of purity, and what, exactly, they should do to exterminate the unpure—that is, anyone who disagrees, in or out of the party.

Various powerful people in various times have thrown fuel onto the fire of a demagoguery they thought would benefit them.

That kind of demagoguery is never a controlled burn.

Arguing like an asshole: the fantasy that history has obvious lessons

Prime Minister Chamberlain announcing "peace for our time" — From here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SetNFqcayeA

The first mistake that people make about politics (and people all over the political spectrum make this mistake, albeit not equally) is to think that our world of policy disagreement is actually a fight between two identities: people who are good, and people who are various degrees of evil.

In the previous post, I criticized Chomsky (and I will in this one too). But, Chomsky has made some good arguments—and, as a scholar of rhetoric, I want to be clear that there is a difference between a “good argument” and “an argument with which I agree.” Democracy requires that we make that distinction. Not all arguments with which we agree are good arguments, and we should have a world of arguments that are good enough[1], many of which we think are wrong.

There are two weak arguments at play in regard to Ukraine: first, that Clinton “provoked” Putin by threatening to expand NATO (and Chomsky isn’t the only one making that argument); second, that Obama was at fault for not responding more aggressively to what Putin did in regard to Crimea. Oddly enough, I’ve seen people make both arguments. They’re contradictory. Appealing to contradictory premises, or making contradictory claims, is a sign that we’re not making a rational argument—we’re just saying whatever will enable us not to think about the problems with our position.

They’re also arguments that can’t be supported by history. They’re both claims that the example of appeasing Hitler shows are deeply flawed.

A lot of people like to quote Santayana who said, “Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.” Ironically enough, they thereby show they don’t know the history of that quote. He wasn’t talking about global, but personal history. He didn’t think that history was a set of facts that anyone could know, but that’s a different post. In fact, in the section of that same book where he talks about history, he doesn’t present it as something easy to know.

It’s common to say that the political figures who appeased Hitler were fools, and should have responded more aggressively. They posit counter-factuals: he would have backed down [if people had responded aggressively here or there], or there would have been a military coup [at this or that moment].

One of the important counter-factuals is the remilitarization of the Rhine. People argue that an aggressive response then would have forced Hitler to back down, and…at this point the counterfactuals get a little vexed. Some people argue that there would have been a military coup. I think those counterfactuals are all contradicted by what happened when France and Belgium responded aggressively to Germany’s defaulting on reparation payments. They occupied the Ruhr.

The French and Belgian occupation of the Ruhr radicalized many Germans (it comes up a lot in narratives about why people became Nazis, in both Abel and Merkl); had France, Belgium, and the UK responded aggressively to the remilitarization of the Rhine, that action might well have had the same consequence as the occupation of the Ruhr. It might well have radicalized even more Germans. Hitler thought France might respond aggressively, and he was prepared for that outcome. It’s therefore dubious that a coup would have been successful.

It definitely wouldn’t have kept him from his goal of another world war—nothing would.

But, had the UK or French governments responded aggressively to the remilitarization of the Rhine, they would have been condemned, not just as war mongers, but as people repeating what was seen as the error of WWI—responding with excessive aggression to an incident that didn’t directly threaten any nation. Any government that did so would have lost the next election.

Neither the UK nor France could have gone to war to prevent the annexation of German-speaking regions of Czechoslovakia without losing the next election. Going to war over the invasion of Czechoslovakia would have been both politically and militarily implausible. Given the difficulties of getting supportive troops there, it’s hard to imagine it would have worked any better than the invasion of France. It might have—my whole point is that counter-factuals are various degrees of guesses–but from a rhetorical perspective, it’s clear that it would have been a difficult case to make. Even Churchill had to persuade his cabinet not to make a treaty with Hitler. It would have been much, much harder in 1939 to get support for a war. Should people have supported going to war over Czechoslovakia? Yes. Absolutely. Should people have supported more aggressive responses to Hitler? Yes. Absolutely. But they didn’t, and had Britain effectively stopped Hitler through aggressive action, the political figures would have been condemned as warmongers.

This post isn’t about military consequences, but rhetorical. Had they prevented Hitler from invading other nations, then their aggression would have seemed unnecessary.

Is Putin trying to get back the USSR boundaries because of security concerns? Maybe. He probably thinks so. But that doesn’t mean his concerns are reasonable, nor that they should be honored by other nations. Everyone striving for regional or world hegemony does so out of “security concerns.” Hitler was trying to get Nazi hegemony for all of central and eastern Europe, and exterminate or subjugate various “races,” out of sincerely held security concerns. The US invaded Iraq and got into Vietnam out of sincerely held security concerns. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor out of security concerns. Britain refused to capitulate to Hitler out of security concerns, and the US declared war on Germany for the same reasons. Ukraine is at war with Russia because of security concerns.

Having security concerns—whether or not sincerely held—doesn’t guarantee that what a nation does is right, necessary, or rational. Sometimes it is, but not always. That a country or leader is acting out of security concerns doesn’t necessarily mean they can be appeased, that they were provoked, or that their concerns should be assumed, without argument, to be reasonable positions in policy negotiation.

Had any President responded more aggressively to Russian violations of sovereignty, such as in 2014, voters would have punished him, just as voters would have responded (and, in the case of France, did respond) to aggressive attempts to constrain Hitler.[2] Am I saying that Putin is Hitler? No, arguments that situations are analogous in specific ways are not claims that the situations are identical in every way. [3]

I’m making three claims: first, that appeasing Putin means granting that Russia can have all the territory the USSR had (exactly what appeasing Hitler meant in terms of “German” lands); second, that a more aggressive response earlier might have been ineffective, but would definitely have been politically disastrous; third, that the argument that Putin was provoked is non-falsifiable because it’s grounded in a post hoc ergo propter hoc motivism.

Here’s what I mean about the third. One could argue, just as plausibly, that Clinton moved to include more nations in NATO because he knew Putin was planning on annexation. Both arguments appeal to similar levels of speculation, deflection, and motivism.

It’s interesting that even this defense of Putin assumes him to be trigger-happy and irrational. That’s hardly a defense. And it certainly doesn’t excuse his invasion of Crimea, let alone war crimes.

But, and this is the point of this post. Had Clinton done nothing, or had Obama responded more aggressively, anti-Dem media—and Chomsky and followers, as well as Republicans, are in that category—would have flung themselves around in outrage. It’s failing to learn from history–from our own personal history–if we condemn a political figure for taking the course of action we advocated at the time, but now think was a mistake.

That’s the problem with anyone who condemns Obama for not having responded more aggressively. It’s the problem with anyone who condemns a political figure for behaving as we wanted them to at the time.

People argued for appeasing Hitler because aerial warfare would be, they believed, unbelievably destructive. Let him have Czechoslovakia. Many said, let him have Poland. But he was always going to take France, all of central Europe, and do his best to take the world. Aerial warfare was unbelievably destructive. For Germany.

[1] This is going to get technical, but the short version is: rhetors cite sources, admit when they’re wrong, and do unto others as they would have done unto them—that is hold others to the same standards by which they’re willing to be judged. Here’s the slightly more technical explanation. Rhetors implicitly and explicitly apply criteria that are externally and internally consistent (i.e., if we think that kind of evidence or way of arguing proves our point, then that kind of evidence or way of arguing can also disprove our point—if being able to cite Scripture proves I’m right, then an out-group member being able to cite Scripture proves I’m wrong); if challenged, rhetors cite their sources; if we are proven to have said something false, we take responsibility for having made a bad argument. In other words, behaving responsibly in public discourse means holding everyone to the same standards, and being able to engage in metacognition.

[2] And, in fact, Chomsky criticized Obama at the time for being too hawkish in regard to Crimea.

[3] Why is this so hard for people to understand?

Arguing like an asshole: Chomsky (aka: data isn’t proof)

little girl eating crackers with text saying "Once you hate someone, anything do is offensive."

As many folks know, I often say that I have spent a non-trivial amount of time drifting around the internet (and before that, Usenet) arguing with assholes. An editor said that would be a good title for a book, and I’ve often tried to write that book. But I can’t, because that title exemplifies what I keep saying is wrong with how we approach politics–that we make issues about who people are, rather than what or how they’re arguing. So, it isn’t that they’re an asshole (we’re all assholes to various degrees under various conditions), but that they’re arguing like one.

The second problem is that I think maybe writing about arguing like an asshole is better as an intermittent topic in blog posts rather than a book. So, here’s one of those posts. This one talks about two related mistakes that people make in argument: thinking that having data means one’s claims are true (that data is proof), and that confirmation bias means we treat the same data differently by attributing motives to actors in non-falsifiable ways.

I often taught Chomsky and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent, including in first-year composition classes. It’s a really good book for that course because my goal was to get students to understand what it means to do research in service of testing a hypothesis (which is very different from finding evidence to support an argument–their normal experience). The book lays out the various filters in such specificity that their argument can be falsified. I asked that students look at media coverage of various events—ones I picked. I gave students a list of topics to choose from that included political and cultural events, ones that a student could write about without divulging their political commitments. I also picked ones that I knew had been covered in media to which students had access, and which would oblige students to look at media from a relatively short period of time (a few days at most). Finally, I wanted ones that were open to interpretation—an ‘A’ paper could argue that the media coverage confirmed, contradicted, or complicated Chomsky and Herman’s hypothesis. There was no right answer.[1]

Chomsky, as everyone knows, has gone on to make claims about foreign policy, and he has his followers. He can support his claims. He can make a claim, and make other claims (many of which have data) that can be taken as confirming his argument. Just to be clear: Chomsky isn’t an asshole, and he doesn’t always argue like one, but he has his moments. He has been, for some time, arguing that American foreign policy caused/forced Putin to invade Ukraine because the prospect of expanding NATO threatened Putin. This is an argument about motive—Putin was motivated by the behavior of the US.

But, of course, Manufacturing Consent has a chapter arguing that reports of Cambodian genocide were fabricated, and he had data to support that argument. Providing supporting data is not the same as proving that your argument is true. (Even argument textbooks make this mistake.)

People who make the mistake of thinking data is proof get suckered all the time. There was a genocide–probably around 1.7 million people (about 20% of the population), and there were credible reports of it almost immediately. Chomsky dismissed the reports because he decided that the sources were biased–in fact, that’s the whole point of the chapter, that reports should be dismissed as biased.

Noting that people have motives, and that motives cause people to filter information is sensible. That observation is precisely what makes Manufacturing Consent such a useful book to use.

But, ironically enough, Chomsky’s dismissal of the Cambodian genocide shows just how prevalent those filters are. With his dismissal of Cambodian genocide, Chomsky proved himself prey to the error he condemns in others—that we filter information through ideological frames. Chomsky dismissed disconfirming evidence because, like the anti-communists he accurately criticizes, his position was non-falsifiable.

But, his data wasn’t proof.

Ironically enough, his defenders rarely mention Manufacturing Consent. They instead engage After the Cataclysm, which is itself problematic, and even their defenses argue that Chomsky dismissed the witnesses to atrocity (what his defenders call “atrocity stories”) because he believed they had bad motives–in other words, their defense admits that the problem is that Chomsky, too, is susceptible to filtering out information that disconfirms his beliefs, and that he does so through attributing bad motives to people who provide the disconfirming information. His defenders try to find all sorts of reasons that wasn’t a bad thing for him to do, and that argument too comes down to motive (but, in this case, good ones).

Having data to support a claim doesn’t mean the argument is logical, rational, or true, especially if the data is as vexed (and generally non-falsifiable) as assertions of motive. Chomsky’s argument about Cambodia was not logical, rational, or true.

Nor is his argument about Russia and Ukraine.

Chomsky can argue that Putin was motivated by the expansion of NATO, and he can give data to support it, mostly claims about motive. His argument isn’t falsifiable, and neither he nor his supporters are willing to acknowledge their own motives and biases. They seem to think that only other people have biases.

Acknowledging motives, like acknowledging other cognitive biases, doesn’t mean we’re landed in a morass of random attachments to beliefs.

It also doesn’t mean that we ask ourselves whether our perception is filtered by our motives (we never think it is), nor that we try to find some source of information who seems motive-free. That isn’t possible. Motives are the consequence of attachments, goals, aspirations, values. We all have motives. We all have biases. But we aren’t hopelessly trapped by them.

Chomsky says that Putin invaded Ukraine because of something Clinton did. Okay. There are two ways to think about this: Are people who make that argument making a falsifiable (aka “rational”) claim? What evidence would prove them wrong? And I think the answer is: nothing.

Second, so fucking what? If Clinton screwed up (and I loathe the man, so I’m willing to say he screwed up a lot), does that mean that Putin was right to invade Ukraine? Are we supposed to say, “Oh well, this is all our fault, so we’ll stand by and weep”? It’s plausible that the Khmer Rouge benefitted from the US bombing of Cambodia, but that doesn’t make what they did right. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wrong, that it’s being conducted through torture, kidnapping, mass killings just makes it worse.

Motivism is a fallacy that depoliticizes political issues. It takes problems out of the realm of “what policy should we follow” into questions about the relative morality of political actors. Whether Putin has good or bad motives, or was motivated by what Clinton did, doesn’t change that Russia is engaged, as was Cambodia, in mass killing. And that’s bad, no matter who does it. Chomsky bungled this kind of issue once; he’s bungling it again.

[1] This confused some students, who’d say, “but this paper that you’re showing us is really good is making the same argument I did, and I didn’t get a good grade.” That led to a really useful conversation.

Why “You ain’t got nothin’ to do but count it off” is in my email signature

Great Dane mix (Chester) with the red ball

This explanation begins, as many of my explanations do, with Chester Burnett, aka, “Howlin’ Wolf.” He was an extraordinary blues singer, and a gifted guitarist. One of the enraging aspects of white musicians’ appropriation of blues songs, melodies, riffs, and so on was that so many of them did nothing to ensure that the artists they were plagiarizing got any credit, let alone money (*cough* *cough* Led Zeppelin). Some, however, leveraged their fame to draw attention to the artists whom they admired. And that’s what happened in the “London Sessions.”

Eric Clapton, Charlie Watts, Steve Winwood, and Bill Wyman played with Howlin’ Wolf and his long-time guitarist Hubert Sumlin. For the most part, Wolf didn’t play guitar on the album cuts, but he’d show them how he played the piece.

On the album version, there is a cut called “Little Red Rooster, false start.” Wolf is showing how the guitar for “Little Red Rooster” is supposed to work, and someone, probably Eric Clapton, says he wants Wolf to play along with them because he isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do. “If you played with us, then we’d able to follow you better,” he says, going on to add, “I doubt if I can do it without you playing along.” Wolf says, and I quote, “Aw, c’mon, you ain’t got nothin’ to do but count it off.” And then he gives simple instructions about how to do what he’s doing.

The unintentional irony is that his simple instructions don’t match what he actually does. The instructions are simple, but he does something much more complicated. It might seem simple to him because he’s been playing that way for years, and it’s clearly in the realm of intuition. Perhaps he’s describing what he used to do, or how he thinks about what he’s doing, but it isn’t what he’s doing.

Perhaps Clapton just wanted Wolf on the recording, and so said he needed to follow. But it’s also possible that he genuinely wanted to follow because Wolf was doing something complicated and possibly new. Wolf is working with seasoned guitarists—they aren’t new to the blues, let alone to guitar playing—but it’s possible they’re new to the specific thing he’s doing.

It’s in my signature to remind me about advice. And I think it’s something we should all remember when giving advice.

One of the things about writing a dissertation, academic article, first book, or second book for the first time is that the people doing it are good writers.[1] They’re very accomplished at academic writing. After all, they are faced with writing a dissertation, or first book, or second book because they wrote well enough to get them to that somewhat new challenge. But they are new to this very specific thing they’re now trying to do.

And something I noticed was that advanced scholars often gave very “simple” pieces of advice that were tremendously well intentioned, but neither simple nor what that person actually did. “Just write” isn’t bad advice, exactly, but it’s along the lines of, “Just calm down” or “Just cheer up,” or “Just ignore it.” If a person could do it, it would solve the problem. But, if they could “just” do that, they wouldn’t have the problem at all in the first place.

Write for one hour every day, write from four to six a.m., never play music, always play music, never research while you write, write a rigid outline before your start, never outline…and so on aren’t exactly bad pieces of advice, but, like Wolf’s “You just count it off” and “You always stop at the top,” it’s simpler than what we actually do. And I think it’s useful to keep that in mind.

[1] Writing a second book is surprisingly different from writing a first one. I don’t know why.

How to respond the GOP’s plan for another civil war

(Jose Luis Magana / Associated Press) https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-01-07/capitol-violence-dc-riots-how-to-explain-to-kids

I’ve been worried about another civil war since 2003. I now believe that the GOP is dominated by people who actively want one, because they think they’ll win.

That probably sounds hyperbolic to people, so I’ll go through the longer version of how I got here.

The process of publishing a scholarly book in the humanities is (unnecessarily) slow. In 2003, I finished the book that would be published as Deliberate Conflict. It took another two years for the book to come out because of how slow academic publishing is, and it sat, finished, for quite a while. That book argues for the value of agonism, and I implicitly endorsed the narrative that the teaching of rhetoric made a bad shift when it went from being about debate to belletristic appreciation and/or expressive writing. Like a lot of others, I believed it led to problems in public discourse. In 2003 or so, iirc, a graduate student in a seminar asked, “Well, if things were so much better when the teaching of rhetoric was about debate, what about the controversy over slavery?”

So, I started looking into it. At that time, I had a smart, accomplished, rhetoric friend who got all their information from Rush Limbaugh, and it was odd to me that this really smart and very good person could be so wrong about basic facts. One of our first interactions was his claiming as a fact something about power plants in California that was simply wrong; since The Economist had recently had an article about the issue, I pointed out that he was wrong. He said, “Where did you get that? From [some lefty demagogue]?” I said, “The Economist.” He said, “The London Economist?” emphasizing London. He was shocked that I would read something non-lefty. (It’s liberal in the British sense, not American.) Clearly, he couldn’t imagine that anyone would read things with which they disgreed. He just relied on Limbaugh.

We had a lot of interactions like that. He’d repeat as a fact something he’d heard from Limbaugh that was completely false. I’d email him the actual clip from a speech, or studies from “conservative” sites, showing he was wrong. He’d admit he was wrong on that point, sometimes, but never stop relying on Limbaugh. The most striking was when he said that Obama claimed to have solved global warming, and I sent him the clip showing that Obama hadn’t said that at all. He emailed back, “Well, he’s still arrogant.”

This is a man who voted for George Bush, probably the most arrogant President until Trump.

This colleague was (and is) a good and smart person. He really tried to be fair in his dealings with colleagues and with the department; he worked to make the faculty more diverse; he gave good grades to students with whom he disagreed politically. But, when it came to his thinking about politics, it’s as though a switch flipped, and he became a person who was more engaged in believing than thinking. He believed what Limbaugh told him no matter how many times people like me (and I know there were several) pointed out to him that Limbaugh was lying.

2003 was a moment when the most arrogant President until Trump was deliberately lying to the US about Iraq. Even The Economist (which supported invasion of Iraq) said that the best case the Bush Administration could make—Powell’s speech to the UN—had some weak points. In fact, it was a very weak case, as could be seen at the time. But media, including mainstream media, presented Powell’s speech as though he had made his case. Instead of saying “Powell said” or “Powell claimed,” they’d say, “Powell showed.” Verbs matter.

More important, the Bush Administration was smearing its critics, and steadfastly, deliberately, and strategically deflecting any calls to deliberate about whether the policy of invading Iraq was reasonable. If you pointed out, as a general did, that their plan violated every principle of what it would take to occupy another country, you would be treated as hating America (smears which continued for over ten years). The Bush Administration, and its supportive pundits and media did everything they could destroy the credibility of critics of the proposed invasion without ever engaging their criticisms.

There were so many problems with the case for invasion, but advocates of invasion didn’t see them because people lived in informational enclaves. People who relied on Fox, Limbaugh, and various other sources literally never saw anything that even mentioned the weaknesses in the Bush Administration case. Many people lived in a world of shared emails that referred authoritatively to events that never happened, and urban legends about events that were about to happen that never did. They thought they were getting “objective” information, but they were in a partisan bubble. I found it impossible to argue with them because their whole case was grounded in claims and data they thought were true only because they’d been repeated so much. So, their beliefs weren’t grounded in anything open to disagreement.

Around that same time, I had to come up with a lower-division seminar writing course, and, given how things were, I decided to teach a course on demagoguery.

Back to the graduate student’s question. Because of that question, I had begun reading about the slavery debate, and pretty quickly what I found was that the dominant narrative—the Civil War happened because of fanaticism on both sides—was indefensible.

In fact, what happened was that, as early as the late 1820s, ambitious political figures in the slaver states figured out that demagoguery about slavery was a great way to mobilize support. Perhaps they really believed that slavery must be defended at all costs; perhaps not. The most effective Machiavellians lie to themselves first. But, what they did was make fanatical commitment to slavery the sign of white southern identity, especially white southern manhood. They moved the many issues related to slaver states’ commitment to slavery out of the realm of pragmatic deliberation into a question of loyalty to southern identity. Like the pro-invasion rhetors.

And they were able to do so because various shifts meant that people were living in partisan informational enclaves (specifically cheap printing and improved mail service). Media repeated and promoted reports of events that never actually happened—the AAS pamphlet mailing, the Murrell plot, poisonings, abolitionist conspiracies, and so many other urban legends.

Since I was teaching a course on demagoguery, and I was drifting around the internet (as I intermittently have for years), as well as reading pro-GOP sources, I got worried.[1] Our current media culture looked a lot like the antebellum media culture—one in which deliberation was actively dismissed as unnecessary and often actively demonized. People could inhabit a media enclave and never see any of the information that might complicate what they were being told.

In the 1830s, the slaver states and politicians declared that the situation was one of existential threat—the vast conspiracy of abolitionists were determined to destroy Southern (aka, slaver) civilization. The demagoguery of pro-slavery media insisted that, if any President were elected who was not actively pro-slavery, the Federal Government would abolish slavery. Pro-slavery political figures enacted a gag rule in Congress–silencing any criticism of slavery–and many started advocating secession. Like the Iraq invasion, this was was advocated as preemptive when it was actually preventive (that matters, and I’ll come back to it). When Lincoln was elected, the demagoguery was comparable to what happened when Obama was elected. The difference was that, when Lincoln was elected, slaver states began seceding.

Buchanan tried to negotiate with them, as did Lincoln. But the slaver states wanted war, and nothing could have stopped them from getting their war. That’s important. You can’t appease people who are determined on war.

From the 1830s on, there were a lot of people in and out of the slaver states that were engaged in what scholars in International Relations call “defensive avoidance“–they didn’t like any of their options, so they did nothing, and hoped it would solve itself. There were people who didn’t own slaves, objected to slavery in their area (often for racist reasons), but who didn’t really care about what “the South” did, since they thought it didn’t affect them, and so didn’t want to do anything to “provoke” slavers. Some people really objected to slavery, and especially the “Slave Power”—the way that slavers, although a numerical minority, could silence criticism of slavery, force “free” states to institute proslavery “black codes,” and enable the enslavement of free people through the Fugitive Slave Law. But even some of people who resented the Slave Power were hesitant to “provoke” slavers.

And that’s interesting. There were violent anti-slavery actions, ranging from Bloody Kansas to John Brown’s raid, but there was no public discussion about the need to keep from provoking abolitionists. And, really, that’s how concern about “provoking” violence works–people worry about “provoking” authoritarians, but no one worries about policies that might “provoke” other groups. Violent protests help authoritarians, whether the protests are pro- or anti-authoritarian.

Another form of defensive avoidance was to declare that “both sides are just as bad.” People who just wanted to avoid war thereby enabled and ensured one. Again: it is pointless to try to placate people who are determined to use violence to get what they want. You aren’t preventing violence, but just delaying it.

The slaver states always had the pretense of being democratic, as did the segregationist states (which weren’t just in the “South”), but it was a democracy of the faithful. Like the USSR or GDR, which also claimed to be democracies, it was a democracy of people who remained within a limited realm of disagreement. It was “law and order” only insofar as the law wasn’t applied equally. It was the notion of justice that Plato famously criticized: justice is helping my friends and hurting my enemies. Jesus also criticized that notion of justice, but neither slavers nor segregationists cared very much about Jesus.

Nor does the current GOP. The GOP has gone full authoritarian and anti-democratic; “law and order” doesn’t mean holding everyone equally to the law (why did Clinton have to testify before Congress, but not any of Trump’s appointees?), but of using the power of the law to protect the in-group and punish everyone else. And they’re justifying their exempting themselves from following democratic norms and the law on the grounds that this is war–so, like Bush, and like the slavers, they’re engaged in preventive war (trying to keep Democrats from gaining power) while claiming it’s a preemptive (Democrats are about to kick down your doors and take your guns).

Slaver states were determined to get a war in order to have a nation purely and completely committed to slavery. After about 1850, there was probably no way to stop them from starting that war. What could have been different, and what might have prevented a Civil War was if the various people who didn’t support slavery, and didn’t want a war for it, had been more openly committed in their opposition to slavery. There was no way to placate slavers. In the antebellum period, there were a lot of political figures whom the proslavery media and rhetors called “doughfaces.” They were political figures whom the proslavery media and rhetors could force to say anything they wanted.

The doughfaces were mostly out for their own political careers, but, like all careerists, they might have told themselves it was for the greater good. They could have prevented the war. They didn’t. The current doughfaces, who are going along with what they know to be lies about the 2020 election, need to stop thinking about their careers and think about democracy.

We are in a situation in which Trump has already once tried to incite his base to violence in order to force a coup. He almost succeeded. The GOP has decided to back his play, but in ways that aren’t quite as crude—they’re moving to allow state legislatures to assign electoral candidates different from how the popular vote would suggest, for instance, or find ways to inhibit or disempower non-GOP voters. People who care about democracy need to stop that–regardless of your political party.

Here’s Trump’s plan. The 2022 elections will be all about getting a GOP majority in Congress and control of enough state legislatures to shift the US to “competitive authoritarianism” (when there are elections, but it’s systematically impossible for any but one party to win most or all of them). First, there will be a constitutional convention (so much for originalism). Second, SCOTUS will rule that state legislatures can override the popular vote. Third, state legislatures will override the popular vote. If, for some reason, there is resistance to his election, or resistance to any part of his plan, he will sic his storm troopers (and I mean that) on anyone who disagrees.

There is nothing that will stop Trump or his supporters from violence. Nothing. That’s their plan. So, there is no reason to keep from doing the right thing because it might provoke them.

As I hope is clear from this post, I’m interested in how various rhetorical practices have worked out historically[2]. And I can say that reasoning deductively (this practice will work because it should work) is exactly the wrong choice. We need to look at what has worked in the past.

There are actions that might alienate the hand-wringing people engaged in deflective avoidance. There are people who don’t like Trump, but don’t like the Dems, or who don’t like Trump but like tax breaks, or who think politics doesn’t matter. Violent protest alienate them. And, to be honest, violent protest helps the “law and order” crowd. It shouldn’t but it does. It doesn’t mobilize allies, and it alienates potential allies. (That’s a historical claim—if anyone wants to show times that, in the US, violent protests have helped non-authoritarian policies, I’m open to it.)

We can’t find a rhetoric that will persuade his fanatical supporters that they’re wrong. There is none. They’re in a cult. But, there are actions that have worked in the past to topple dictators, and that’s what we should be engaged in now: holding him and his supporters (whether our state rep or our drunk uncle) accountable, non-violent protesting, making common cause with other opponents, voting, giving money and time to his opponents, boycotting his supporters, being willing to violate norms of politeness with his supporters, telling stories that complicate what he’s saying.

Trump and the GOP fully intend to use the police, mobs, a GOP Congress, and GOP-dominated state legislatures to force him into the Presidency. We need to stop that.

[1] In 2003, I started writing a book about demagoguery; since the proslavery book was my first concern, the ms. wasn’t done until 2013. It was rejected by the press. (One reviewer said it was a dead issue.) But, Martin Medhurst had published an article of mine about demagoguery, although the readers were unanimous it should not be published. He published it, and their responses in 2004 or so.

In 2016, when people were interested in demagoguery, that article was one of few things out there, and so I was asked to write a short book about it. I did. That generated interest, and so the rejected ms. was accepted by SIUP and published in 2017.

I mention all this simply because I think it’s a cautionary tale about how the unnecessary delays in scholarly publishing virtually ensure the irrelevance of our work. We should be faster. No one actually takes six months to read an ms.

[2] Every once in a while, I run across someone who says I can’t be an authority on history because I don’t have a degree in history. Meanwhile, they make claims about rhetoric, without any degrees in rhetoric. As it happens, I took two classes as an undergrad and two as a graduate student on the rhetoric of history (not offered by the history department at Berkeley). Two of my committee members had degrees in history, another had a degree in American Studies (from Yale), and my director was a student of Kuhn’s. The other member was a Romanticist, which mattered since I was writing about John Muir.

Trump, Toxic Populism, and Authoritarianism

It’s common for people to talk about how, in our polarized world, everything gets politicized—whether you wear a mask, a red hat, if you have “impossible” burgers in your buffet. But that’s actually wrong. What’s wrong with our world right now is that everything gets depoliticized.

Instead of deliberating, arguing, negotiating, and so on about what policies we should adopt, in a culture of demagoguery, everything is about being loyal to Us and hating on Them. Demagoguery looks like political discourse—it’s about “political parties” and their candidates, after all—but it isn’t. The wide array of policy options is reduced to what the demagogue advocates and the stupid shit The Other proposes (or is doing). And the demagogue’s proposal isn’t argued at any length; it’s hyperbolically asserted to be obviously right, just as the demagogue’s own personal history is hyperbolically asserted as a long string of almost magically effective and decisive actions. The hyperbole is rhetorically important, since it gives the demagogue and their supporters the ability to deflect criticism.

When a rhetor speaks hyperbolically, they are shifting away from the issue to the rhetor’s own passionate commitment. The “issue” is no longer about the policies that might solve the problem, but the conviction of the rhetor, their complete (even irrational) loyalty to the in-group. Hyperbole is about belief, not facts. Thus, hyperbole enables the deflection of policy discourse practices—it depoliticizes political issues.

Demagoguery is all about deflection. It’s especially about deflecting rhetorical responsibilities (especially of accuracy, consistency, and fairness), and accountability (for past and future errors, failures, lies, incompetence, corruption). Hyperbole enables deflection because it is a figure of speech, much like metaphor or simile. If I say, “He got so mad he just charged in there like a tiger,” it would be weird for you to say, “He isn’t a tiger; he’s human.” You would be showing that you don’t understand how simile works.

Hyperbole enables the demagogue to make outrageous and mobilizing claims without having to provide evidence for them—in fact, if someone asks for evidence, or points out that the claims are false, that person looks petty. Hyperbole enables someone to lie without being seen as a liar. It also enables a rhetor to announce or advance extraordinary policies that are beyond criticism, because criticizing the policies would require taking them literally, and that would come across as a kind of humorless nitpicking. The demagogue offers a world of passionate commitment, clarity, triumph, and the pleasures of membership in a unified group.

To criticize the rhetor who has created that sense of immersion is to try to pull the discourse back to the uncertainty and frustration of policy argumentation, and so it’s enraging to people who enjoy the depoliticized world of politics as pep rallies.

And so that brings me to Trump’s July 26, 2022 speech at the America First Agenda Summit.

The speech is a great example of toxic populism, appealing to what the scholar of populism Paul Taggart calls “unpolitics,” and the political scientists John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse call “stealth democracy.” Taggart defines “unpolitics” as “the repudiation of politics as the process for resolving conflict” (81). Like Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, Taggart points out that many people believe that politics—that is, arguing and bargaining with people who disagree—is unnecessary. Those people (call them toxic populists) believe that there is no such thing as legitimate disagreement; for every problem there is a straightforward solution obvious to regular people. We are prevented from enacting that obvious solution by an “elite” who deliberately slow things down and obstruct problem solving in order to protect their own jobs, line their pockets, follow pointless rules, and get lost in overthinking and details. Toxic populists can be all over the political spectrum, and people can be toxic populists about non “political” problems (health, business, personal finance, institutional practices)—what’s shared is their perception that we should just stop arguing and act. We should put in place someone who will cut through the crap and get ‘er done.

In other words, we should put in place someone who will violate all the norms, the checks and balances, the restrictions; we need someone who will not listen to what anyone else has to say.

And people think that will work out well. It never has. The checks and balances are there for a reason.

But, back to the speech. Trump lies a lot in it, as he generally does, but they’re the kind of lies that his base likes. He says, for instance, that in 2020,
“we had a booming economic recovery like nobody’s seen before, the strongest and most secure border in US’s history, energy independence, and even energy dominance, historically low gas prices, as you know, no inflation, a fully rebuilt military and a country that was highly respected all over the world by other leaders, by other countries, highly respected.”
He doesn’t even try to give the numbers that would support any of his claims, probably because there aren’t any. Every single claim is untrue. But it would look like humorless nitpicking to point out what’s wrong with each one, and involve explanations and require thinking. I’ll point out just one. In 2020, the pro-Trump media was engaging in alarmism about the southern border of the US, using “invasion” rhetoric (they’ve been doing this every election year for some time). Here’s one example. So, either Trump was lying in 2022, or he and supporting media were lying in 2020.

When it’s pointed out to Trump supporters that he lies, they tend to respond in one of two ways. The most common is, “All politicians lie; I just care about whether they get things done.” The second most common, in my experience, is, “Well, here’s a lie that Biden said.” The second is just deflection, but the first is more interesting. It looks pragmatic and reasonable, but it’s neither. If Trump lies about everything, and his media repeats his lies, how do you know whether he’s really getting things done? The only way to know is to step out of the pro-Trump bubble, and check the numbers, but I have yet to meet a Trump supporter who will even look at any information from sources anything less than fanatically supportive of him.

So, what they’re actually saying is, “I like Trump lies.” As I said, that’s neither pragmatic nor reasonable.

The most concerning aspect of toxic populism—regardless of where on the political spectrum it is—is the always implicit and sometimes explicit authoritarianism. “Authoritarian” is one of those words that people use to mean nothing more than “someone who is trying to make me do something I don’t want to do.” It’s always solipsistic; there are no in-group authoritarians—our leaders are decisive, but theirs are authoritarian. That’s a useless way to think about authoritarianism.

Authoritarian regimes are ones in which “no channels exist for opposition to contest legally for executive power” (Levitsky et al. 7); and there’s reason to believe that Trump is openly advocating a version of it: “competitive authoritarianism.” But I’m more interested in authoritarianism as an ideology. Authoritarian ideology is best understood as at one end of a continuum with pluralism on the other side. Imagine a person who is a dog lover—the more authoritarian they are, the more they will believe that everyone should be forced to love dogs, and that people who don’t love dogs should be exterminated or at least expelled. The more pluralist they are, the more they will believe that not loving dogs is also a legitimate position, and that it’s actively good to have people who disagree about dogs.

The more authoritarian someone is, the harder it is for them to understand what it means not to be authoritarian. They can’t imagine having a belief or behaving a particular way without forcing others to share that belief and behave that way—they think that’s how everyone thinks. For instance, authoritarian “complementarians” understand allowing “gay marriage” to be forcing people into such marriages—that they don’t want such a marriage must mean not letting anyone have it. A pluralist complementarian would believe that their marriage is complementary, but not everyone wants that kind of marriage or should be forced into it.

Authoritarians never see themselves as authoritarian, because they think they’re forcing people to do what’s right, and authoritarianism is forcing people to do what’s wrong. So, when it comes to political authoritarianism, they think that bypassing all the constitutional checks and balances in favor of an authority forcing his (it’s almost always “his”) will on everyone is a great idea.

And that’s what Trump is advocating—no constraints, on police officers (13-19), prosecutors, and, most of all, on himself:
“To drain the swamp and root out the deep state, we need to make it much easier to fire rogue bureaucrats who are deliberately undermining democracy, or at a minimum just want to keep their jobs. They want to hold onto their jobs. (01:09:28)
Congress should pass historic reforms, empowering the president to ensure that any bureaucrat who is corrupt, incompetent, or unnecessary for the job can be told, did you ever hear this? You’re fired? Get out. You’re fired. Have to do it. [inaudible 01:09:49]. Washington will be an entirely different place.“
What he wants, and what a GOP Congress will give him, is the power to fire any person in government who tries to hold him accountable.

That’s authoritarianism. That’s dangerous.