The Just World Model, faith in the will, and institutional racism

Mural of George Floyd
Photograph by Omer Messinger / Sipa / AP

Why do some Libertarians have so much trouble with the concept of systemic/institutional racism?

Why can people who believe complicated conspiracy theories not believe that a little bit of racism on the part of a lot of people adds up to a lot of racism? Why can people who believe that government regulations are oppressive refuse to think that oppression might have valences? Why can people who believe that big institutions do everything wrong not think that they might also get issues of race wrong?

The contradiction is particularly troubling when it comes to Libertarians, since, in my experience, they strive to be consistent and logical in how their policies relate to their beliefs (unlike, for instance, Trump supporters). And Reason talks about institutional racism as a problem, so it isn’t that Libertarianism is essentially hostile to recognizing institutional racism.

Libertarians say that the basis of their belief is that individuals should be fully free in order to achieve what they can. Obviously, a person born into poverty isn’t as free in terms of the possible achievements as someone born into wealth. So, were Libertarians genuinely committed to a notion of a system that made sure all individuals are equally free, they would fully support systems that levelled the playing-field, so to speak, of the rich and poor, the abled and disabled, the stigmatized and the privileged.

In this post, I want to talk about the Libertarians who refuse to support such policies, and that isn’t all of them (in other words, #notallLibertarians).

These Libertarians like the strictures of birth that make sure the game is rigged, but they don’t like the strictures of government that try to make sure that individuals are free to achieve their best. They don’t want a fully free system, in which all people are equally free to achieve all things; they want a system in which they can thrive without restriction. They argue that help from the government creates dependency, while accepting the help they’ve gotten from their birth hasn’t. That doesn’t make sense. If accepting help creates dependency, then they’re dependent on their birth.

I have spent a non-trivial amount of time arguing with this kind of Libertarian, and my experience is that their entire way of arguing makes no sense unless you assume the just world model, and engage in a non-trivial amount of “no true Scotsman.” When pushed on the point that they can’t actually defend their position, they start the whaddaboutism. I’ve also never met a Libertarian who knew much of anything about the economic history of the nineteenth century, but that’s a different crank theory.

I like Libertarians. In my experience, they’re logical af. Thus, unlike people on various other points on the political spectrum (it isn’t a binary or continuum), most of them are consistent regarding their major premises. They follow their arguments out. I admire that. They take unpopular positions because those positions logically follow from the premises they value. They reason deductively.

That they are true to their principles makes them very different from a lot of people with whom I argue, and I think they should praised for that consistency. The problem is that some Libertarians reason from the premise that all individuals should be equally free to achieve, while some reason deductively from the just world model and faith in the will. Let’s call this latter kind of Libertarian Just World Libertarians.[1]

The “just world model” says that people, products, and ideas that are good will succeed. As a corollary, the most successful people, products, and ideas are the best.

The “just world model” is one of those models not smart enough to be wrong. Its adherents (they’re all over the ideological spectrum) can find data to support the just world model, but arguing with them always reminds me of Catholic arguments for the virgin birth (involving parrots and light through glass). They refuse to name the data that would prove them wrong. The just world model supportable, but non-falsifiable. They almost always end up in the “no true Scotsman” fallacy or Gnosticism.

There is an old joke: someone says, “All Scots like haggis,” and Joe says, “I’m a Scotsman, and I don’t like haggis,” and the person responds, “You don’t count. You aren’t a true Scotsman.” That’s how the “just world model” works—it’s an Escher argument, in which each claim disappears into the premise that can’t be falsified.

The second non-falsifiable principle to which Just World Libertarians are committed is that if an individual wants something badly enough, they can get it. It’s still “no true Scotsman” because an individual who doesn’t achieve their goals can be dismissed as not having enough will.

Libertarians are far from alone in reasoning about politics in this way—they have premises that they refuse to consider rationally. Were I Queen of the Universe, I would dictate that instead of talking about a binary or continuum of left or right, we would map the spectrum of political affiliations in terms of how people reason about politics, rather than what their politics are. Thus, people who refuse to look at disconfirming data, read opposition information, or identify what would make them change their mind would all be grouped together, regardless of how they vote. Unhappily, I am not Queen of the Universe.

What matters in a democracy isn’t what your political affiliations are. Democracies can manage a lot of very different political affiliations. What matters is our commitment to democracy. It doesn’t matter if media would say that you’re “left” or “right” or “centrist.” If you aspire to a one-party state, if you think your policy agenda is obviously right and people only disagree with you because they’re deluded or corrupt, if you refuse to look at information that contradicts what you believe, if you don’t worry about whether your argument is rational, you’re opposed to democracy.

The two premises of Just World Libertarianism—people get what they deserve, and an individual can achieve whatever he wants with sufficient will (the gendered pronoun is deliberate)—are confounded by African-American men being stopped more often, searched more often, charged more often, and getting harsher penalties than white men. If our system doesn’t treat African American men in the same way it treats white men, and therefore African-American men are not equally able to achieve whatever they want, then the major premises of Just World Libertarianism are wrong.

And they are. Racism isn’t the consequence of individuals who deliberately choose to engage in racist actions out of hate or fear. Racism is a system that ensures that people of variously imagined stigmatized “races” are held to different standards from others, given diminished options, and perceived as deserving their diminished status because that they have a diminished status is proof that they are worse.

And that’s why Just World Libertarianism is racist. The adherents of that ideology are, in my experience, non-falsifiably committed to exactly the premises that fuel institutional racism. Of course, it isn’t only Just World Libertarians who are irrationally committed to the just world model and faith in the will—so are American fundagelicals.

And that is why fundagelicals fling themselves around like over-tired two-year olds when anyone talks about institutional racism: because if institutional racism is a plausible explanation about how the world works, then the basic premises of their political agenda are flawed. It is, and they are. And they’re racist.



[1] In my experience, the self-described Libertarians who consistently vote GOP are in this latter category. So I suppose someone could say, “Not real Libertarians.”

Demagoguery is not specific to democracies

Theodore Bilbo

Every once in a while I find myself arguing with people about an apparently pedantic, but actually very important, point about demagoguery. People I respect and think are very smart insist that demagoguery is a condition unique to democracy.

I think that this argument comes from several sources. One is Mortimer Adler, who argued that the Athenian empire collapsed because of “too much democracy.” (It didn’t.) Another is sloppy inference from morphemes. Demagoguery and democracy share the “dem” after all.

Although pedantic, this argument is also really troubling, in that it implies that the solution to demagoguery is to abandon democracy, and/or that only the masses are susceptible to demagoguery, a solution that also implies some degree of authoritarianism.

It’s not only pedantic, but wrong.

Were Adler right, then the elites in Athens would have been right in their decisions, and the problems would have come from bad decisions on the part of the “demes” (the small landowners). Alcibiades was elite; he was a jerk out for himself. There’s no reason to think he was only supported by the small landowners. And that term—the demes, small landowners–is the linguistic source of demagoguery and democracy. Demagogues were leaders of the small landowners—the demes. Democracy is a system that includes them.

Alcibiades was an example of what was toxic in Athenian democracy, but his success had nothing to do with too much inclusion. It was about too much factionalism on the part of oligarchs and demes.

What happened is that what had been a neutral term for the leader of a political party (the demes) became a term for an unscrupulous rhetor, largely as a consequence of anti-democratic elitists like Plato and Plutarch.

Thucydides used the term in a neutral way, meaning the leader of the party of the demes. So, his use of the term is like someone saying “the leading Libertarian” or “the leader of the Republicans.” His hero Pericles was a leader of the demes, a demagogue. One of his villains, Cleon, was a leader of the demes, a demagogue. Alcibiades was a disaster, and not a leader of the demes, and another disastrous leader, Nikias, was not a demagogue.

What made Cleon, Alcibiades, and Nikias disastrous leaders wasn’t that they were demagogues (only Cleon was) but that they didn’t have Pericles’ combination of good judgment and rhetorical skill. Thucydides wasn’t making a point about democracy, but about rhetoric and judgment.

Aristotle (whose understanding of demagoguery is pretty interesting) says that a demagogue—that is, a populist politician—can gain power when the rich so oppress the poor that the poor are desperate. Then, the rich get worried about the agitation of the poor and so support a tyrant. And democracy ends.

Plato and Plutarch both took up the issue of demagoguery, and both were profoundly elitist, thinking that the demes should have no part in politics. Plutarch’s narrative about politics was that there are two groups: the rich (basically reasonable) and the poor (completely driven by emotions). Poor people are basically irrational, and easily roused to authoritarianism. A good government gives more power to the rich, but also gives the poor a way to express their concerns that the rich can consider. (This is a misunderstanding of what happened in Athens, by the way.)

The Founders were strongly influenced by Plutarch. And, therefore, their ideal was not the Athenian democracy, but the Roman republic. They believed the republic solved the problem of rich v. poor. And they knew that the Roman republic had its demagogues. So even the Founders understood that demagoguery was not just a problem of democracies—it arose in republics.

Thomas Hobbes translated Thucydides because he was worried about the presence and damage of demagogues, and he lived in a monarchy. His horror of demagoguery was the consequence of his seeing the devastation created by the Thirty Years War and the English Civil Wars, neither of which happened in a democracy or republic.

It would be difficult to claim that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is not demagoguery, and it was created under an authoritarian monarchy. Hitler’s rhetoric began in the conditions of democracy, and remained the same under fascism. Did he stop being a demagogue March 24, 1933 when he became dictator? Stalin’s rhetoric (not a democracy) is exactly like Father Charles Coughlin (democracy). But only Coughlin’s is demagoguery? If people have the same rhetorical strategies, shouldn’t we characterize their rhetoric with the same term?

Insisting that demagoguery is a condition of democracy means that we say that the Founders and Hobbes were wrong to worry about it, that Hitler stopped being a demagogue March 24, 1933, that neither Castro nor Stalin ever engaged in it, that there was never demagoguery about Jews, Slavs, Africans, and…well, this list is way too long, except in democracies.

Really? Is that a claim anyone wants to defend? That the rhetoric that blamed Jews for the plague was not demagoguery? Even if it was exactly like the demagoguery during the Weimar democracy that blamed them for Germans losing the Great War? So, exactly the same rhetoric is not the same just because of the governmental system under which it happened?

Pedantic much?

Demagoguery is not a form of rhetoric that only arises in democracies.




What happens next: arguing (or not) with people who still support Trump

vivien leigh raising an eyebrow
Image from here https://belldora.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/vivien-leigh-vii.jpg

As I said a long time ago, a lot of Trump supporters stopped trying to defend him through rational-critical argumentation fairly early on in his Administration. I’ve read defenses of him, ranging from your high school friend to scholars. It’s either fallacious zero-sum demagoguery–non-Trump supporters are SO bad that nothing Trump can do is something I will condemn– or, more commonly, charismatic leadership. A lot simply refuse to engage, and those who do try to engage in argumentation are kind of impressive in terms of how many fallacies they can fit into a few words.

Trump supporters (and not just Trump supporters) believe our political spectrum is a binary, and so believe “fairness” is saying that “both sides are just as bad.” So here I should say, “both sides” are not just as bad because there aren’t two sides. Politics isn’t a binary or continuum. More important, while there are people who can’t defend their position through rational-critical argumentation who have all sorts of affiliations, I haven’t run across a Trump supporter who can in a long time.[1] So, much of what I’m saying applies to people who aren’t Trump supporters but are irrationally committed to Paleo, Brittney, Obama, single-payer health care, Santana, hating Santana, and, well, everything.

And here I should explain why I use the term “argumentation” rather than argument. An argument is a claim. That you can make a claim and support it with data from a reliable source doesn’t mean that you’ve supported your claim rationally, nor that your commitment to that claim is rational.

But a lot of people think that a claim “supported” by a piece of evidence from a reputable source is a good argument. That the best-selling argument textbook endorses this view has made me ragey for years.

When you arguing with someone whose commitment isn’t capable of rational defense, and you point out that 1) they don’t believe their own major premise (explained below), 2) and/or their claim is contradicted by other sources, 3) and/or they’ve put forward a fallacious argument, or 4) and, the most important point, that the way they’re deliberating about politics is a way they would never make decisions in their own area of expertise, in my experience, people respond in one of three ways.

  1. A fair number of people never get your point. It isn’t about whether they can find evidence to support their position; it’s about whether they’re willing to think about how they’re thinking. They just get confused when you talk about major premises and non-falsifiability. These people aren’t uneducated. My most recent failures to get someone to understand that their way of reasoning about Trump is a bad way to reason include an anesthesiologist and mechanical engineer.
  2. Some people (in my experience, this is less common than it used to be) will say, now that you’ve shown their position is completely irrational, that everyone’s position is irrational. That’s just projection, and the kind of universalizing that comes from being in such a position of privilege that they’ve never had to listen to others. This response is deflection–instead of defending their inability to engage in rational argumentation, they just declare that no one engages in it.

    It’s motivism. The problem for them, of course, is that there are lots of examples of people engaging in rational-critical discourse and thereby changing their minds about an issue. But they won’t look at those examples because being a Trump supporter means refusing to look at any disconfirming data. They’re in a vicious circle of irrationality.

    They believe that what they believe is true, and they so much believe that it’s true that they refuse to look at evidence that it isn’t true. If they are presented with evidence that their beliefs aren’t true, they reject that evidence on the grounds that it’s biased, since it says their beliefs aren’t true.
  3. They say that they aren’t really engaged in good faith argumentation—they’re just teasing libruls. They seem to think that their admitting to be unable to defend their position rationally is a virtue.

    I’ve said elsewhere that it’s like when cats get entangled in the blinds and pretend they meant it, but it’s actually worse.

Not all extremists are Trump supporters, but, in my experience, all Trump supporters are extremists in that they refuse to think about how their commitment might be wrong. What has happened, as always happens in demagoguery, is that their sense of themselves as good people has gotten attached to the claim that supporting Trump was/is a good choice. They believe that admitting that their support was mistaken would be shameful submitting to anti-Trumpers. They live in a world of demagoguery in which there are two groups: the good and the bad. They think that admitting that Trump was bad means admitting that they are the bad group.

Everyone makes bad decisions. Imagine that you decided to invest in a Redball, Inc project that claimed it would eternally keep squirrels from the redball, and it went bust. Does that mean you’re a bad person, that what the squirrels said was right?

No. It means you made a bad decision. And making better decisions means understanding why investing in Redball, Inc seemed like a good idea. Having gotten suckered doesn’t make you a bad person, but a person who has reasoned badly. If we think about decision-making as good or bad people, then we’re in a world of demagoguery. If we think about decision-making in terms of better or worse ways, then we have ways of agreeing with wildly different people. We’re in the world of democracy.

The problem is that Fox, a completely demagogic site, is trusted by 40% of people because it is demagogic. Fox, Limbaugh, and various others are completely anti-democratic. They’re authoritarian populist. And that’s why people like them. People like hearing that their point of view is the only legitimate one, that they are the real people, and so only the political agenda promoted by someone who embodies real people is democracy (that’s how current GOP rhetoric says that their minority views are the real American views).

Because the premise of the pro-GOP propaganda machine is that only their political position is the real position of real people, then people advocating it can feel that they’re the realists, arguing from a real position. It isn’t real in terms of being falsifiable; it’s real in terms of feeling real. And it’s real because they can find evidence.

Fox’s talking points are derived deductively from whatever talking points will be most effective at supporting today’s GOP agenda. And their rhetoric is irrational (such as inconsistent appeals to major premises and refusal to look at disconfirming data, lame whaddaboutism).

What’s kind of genius about the rabid pro-Trump propaganda is that it is telling people, “Say this, and, then, when people point out that what we’ve told you to say is stupid, false, fallacious, and you can’t defend it, then say you’re just triggering libs.” They’ve found a way to transform the pro-Trump camp’s inability to support Trump rationally into a virtue.

I think this rhetorical strategy is an admission that the GOP political agenda—especially supporting Trump—is a fragile house of cards that can’t stand even the breath of rational-critical policy argumentation. I think that’s important. People with good policies can support them in argumentation. People with bad policies can’t. So, we should start with the observation that supporting Trump is rationally indefensible.

Supporters of Trump and the GOP are well-trained in deflection. If a critic points out that, for instance, Trump’s vacations not only cost taxpayers far more than the trips Obama took that had Fox pundits and viewers choking with rage, but a tremendous amount of that money went directly to Trump. If you point that out, though, you’ll get deflection, usually some version of whaddaboutism. The basic argument is that “Trump is good because Biden kicked a squirrel.” The impulse for critics of Trump is to take issue with the minor premise. We’ll try to show that Biden didn’t kick a squirrel, or it wasn’t a squirrel, or Trump has kicked more squirrels. If you want to do that (and I often do) go for it, but just be clear that it won’t work because Trump supporters don’t support Trump because of his behavior to squirrels. They support Trump. They then find reasons to justify their support. Their position isn’t rational.

Here’s a digression that won’t be interesting to most people, but, if you teach argumentation, you need to be able to follow this.

“Trump is good because Biden kicked a squirrel” is an enthymeme with an undistributed middle.

A is B b/c C did D.

A [Trump] is B [good] because C [Biden] kicked a squirrel [D].

Instead of arguing the minor premise (whether Biden kicked a squirrel), point out that the whole argument is fallacious. They might both be bad.

So, how do you argue with people who won’t (can’t) argue their case rationally, engage in deflection, and when, pantsed, will just claim to be trolling when they’ve made a fool of themselves argumentatively?

You can argue with them to see if you can get them to change their minds. (You can, but they’ll never admit to it, which is interesting–they think being closed to persuasion is a virtue. I find that very odd.)

There are, I think, three responses that sometimes work. First, if it’s possible, show them that their claims are refuted by in-group sources.

Second, show them that the way they reason about politics isn’t how they reason about their job. A doctor who had a commitment to a particular treatment and refused to look at any studies that showed his commitment might be wrong would be a terrible doctor. A citizen who does the same is a terrible citizen.[2]

Third, and the most effective, is refusing to argue with them unless they put forward a rational argument. Ask them: are your beliefs about Trump falsifiable? What evidence would cause you to change your mind about Trump?

If the answer is no, and nothing, then you say, “Fine, your beliefs aren’t rational, and we aren’t talking politics.”

They will try to make you defend whatever they think Biden believes, and you have several options.

You can say, “We aren’t talking politics. Have more pie.” You can also say, “If Biden is wrong, that doesn’t mean Trump is right. Are your beliefs about Trump falsifiable? What evidence would cause you to change your mind about Trump? If not and nothing, then we aren’t talking politics because your position isn’t rational.” You can be very loving in what you say, “I love you so much, and this topic makes us all unhappy, so let’s talk about cousin Dwerp winning a hokey-pokey trophy.” Some people I know have said, “You taught me to reason thoughtfully, and you can’t when it comes to Trump, and that makes me sad. Let’s change the subject.”

Stand your ground. Refuse to talk about politics. They will do everything they can to shift the burden of proof to you, but you can just refuse to take it on. They’ll engage in passive-aggressive swipes at Biden and Democrats. When they do so, raise an eyebrow like Vivien Leigh, ask them if they’re trying to talk politics, snicker, smirk, walk out of the room, take a careful assessment of your fingernails, offer them pie, ignore them, do complicated math problems in your head, but you are under no obligation to engage people who are engaged in demagoguery. If they won’t say that their beliefs are falsifiable and that they can name the evidence that would cause them to change their minds, then they aren’t open to argumentation.

They will explode like someone throwing a match into a fireworks stand. In my experience, they and their enablers will try to use norms of “let’s get along” to allow them to make their arguments while silencing you. You might have to leave. Authoritarian families will try to make you the villain, although the Trump supporter is the one who violated boundaries (in authoritarian families, only the asshole is allowed to set boundaries).

It is not your job to put out the fire they have started on themselves by supporting someone who is rationally indefensible. Trump appeals to authoritarians. Paradoxically, insisting on the authority of argument, which means a lot of walking away and refusing to engage, has far more impact than staying in the authoritarian space and trying to refute demagogic arguments point by point.

Change the subject, and, if that doesn’t work, walk away.

[1] I have run across figures who can defend specific actions of his. I’m not saying that they’re right, or that I agree with them–being right and being able to put forward a rational-critical argument aren’t the same thing.

[2] Here is another issue that makes me ragey. Propaganda is for free, since it’s paid for by groups that can profit from it getting out there. Being actually informed about politics is incredibly expensive.

Authoritarian populist demagoguery is never a controlled burn

wildfire
Photo from here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/severe-wildfires-raise-the-chance-for-future-monstrous-blazes/

As I’ve said so often that I’m certain the four people who read my blog regularly are really tired of reading, there aren’t two sides on any issue. The moment we frame an issue as a question of two choices, we have started clearing our political throat for demagoguery.

The reason I’m committed to what might be a crank theory about how to represent political commitments is that, if we realize those commitments are very specific when it comes to policy, then we have a world in which coalitions are possible. For instance, people all over the political spectrum support reform of the criminal justice system, especially bail reform. Some, but not all, conservatives support it. If we think of the issue of bail reform as a partisan issue, then, instead of being able to argue the policy merits of the policy of bail reform, voting about bail reform becomes performance of in-group loyalty.

One of many reasons I like the metaphor of political affiliation being a color spectrum (rather than, for instance, a continuum or matrix) is that it raises the possibility of talking about intensity. One of many fallacies of the left/right continuum model is that it suggests that centrists aren’t irrationally passionate—only the people at the extremes are. I’ve known some people who are extremist about the need for everyone to have “centrist” policies, and people who are mildly committed to policies labelled “far left” or “far right.” And the “extremes” get muddled—where on that continuum do we put people who are extremely committed to libertarianism, pacifism, whatever the GOP or Dems are promoting now, a strong safety net and humanitarian intervention, a strong social safety net and homophobic legislation, a strong social safety net but only for white people?

I think, from the perspective of rhetoric and persuasion, that the degree of commitment is among the most important variables. It’s far more important than where a person fits on some false continuum.

And I say this because of years of arguing with people all over the political spectrum, and also the non-political spectrum, and finding people who, whether it’s about raw dog food, immigration, if something can’t be called hummus if it has sugar, Santana’s guitar playing, Trump, whether Tolkien is racist, single-payer healthcare, and, basically, every issue:

1) insist that their advocated course of action is so right that anyone who disagrees with them is corrupt, stupid, or evil;
2) and they therefore frame the issue as a binary between their specific policy agenda (right) and anyone else (wrong);
3) since everyone who disagrees with them is wrong for disagreeing, they refuse to look at any sources, sites, or data that say they might be wrong, and they only rely on in-group representations of that evil group
4) and they have a monocausal narrative about the problem they are solving.

In my experience, there is no position on any issue–“political” or not–that doesn’t have someone who argues this way. So, this isn’t about political affiliation (left or right)–it’s about how people think about beliefs. I think that people who fit the criteria above are extremists, whether the argument is about the virtues of Ezra Pound’s poetry or the Kyoto Protocols.

Using terms like “evil” doesn’t necessarily mean that one is making an extreme argument. Condemning slavery as an evil and condemning anyone who advocates slavery as evil isn’t necessarily an extremist position. Condemning Nazism as evil isn’t an extremist position.

But saying that the only way to end slavery or Nazism is [X], and that anyone who doesn’t support [X] is just as bad as slavers or Nazis, that’s extremism.

And here’s the point I really wanted to get to: in my experience, people drawn to extremism propose monocausal narratives. I don’t know why, and I have no studies to support my claim. This is just my experience.

It doesn’t matter if they’re talking about dog training methods, immigration, hummus, riots, World War I, the Paleo diet, or whatever. Extremists say that immigration causes all problems, only the presence of tahini causes something to be hummus, since the British failure to signal clearly that they would go to war made the Germans feel confident in their war plans then the British caused the war, and so on.

But nothing is monocausal.

Kristallnacht was signalled and spontaneous at the same time. Goebbels announced that “the Führer has decided that … demonstrations should not be prepared or organized by the Party, but insofar as they erupt spontaneously, they are not to be hampered.” Thus, Hitler didn’t specifically call for that action at that moment, but his years of rhetoric of Jews as an existential threat made people feel that he wanted the violence to happen, that he approved of it. And he did. People were, in Ian Kershaw’s words, “working toward the Fuhrer” by making it happen. And, of course, there were people involved in it who were formally Nazis. So, is Hitler responsible for Kristallnacht? Yes. No historian doubts it. No Hitler, no Kristallnacht. But, can historians find a direct order from him? No.

Imagine that Y happened (a driver hit a cyclist), and we all agree it was a bad thing. What caused it to happen? Imagine that the driver was speeding, texting, and drifted into the bike lane, and the cyclist was listening to a podcast and so didn’t notice the car coming into the bike lane. Extremists, in my experience, find ways to make the in-group not responsible because there were other contributing factors. So, anti-cyclists extremists (and there a lot of them) will say that, since the cyclist could have prevented the accident by seeing that the driver was in the bike lane, the driver wasn’t at fault. The driver wasn’t the only cause of the accident, and therefore not the cause at all.

That’s the argument extremist Trump supporters are making about the attempted insurrection.

Trump extremists are trying to claim that since his January 6 speech wasn’t the only cause of the riots, he didn’t incite them. But, as even the Wall Street Journal says, the problem is his and his supporters’ “war rhetoric.” And that is the most important cause of the attempted insurrection—you can’t keep using war rhetoric, that liberals are out to destroy us and everything we value that there has never been a worse situation, and then not expect them to get violent. Either Trump has been deliberately inciting violence or he’s an irresponsible idiot.

Hitler set the stage for Kristallnacht, and he left himself plausible deniability if public reaction was bad. When it didn’t get the reaction he wanted, the official Nazi line was that it had been spontaneous. So, someone saying that there is no monocausal narrative of Trump having incited the January 6th failed insurrection is someone who would hold Hitler faultless for Kristallnacht.

They are reasoning badly.

Trump has been supporting the notion of violent insurrection for along time. If what happened wasn’t what he wanted to happen, he would have instantly condemned it and stopped it, and he didn’t. Because it was the desired end of his rhetoric.[1]

Trump could have stopped the attempted insurrection that he inspired and incited through his speeches (and he even named the date that he wanted it to happen), but he didn’t, and he didn’t do what a responsible person would have done to make it stop, such as answering Pence’s calls and sending in the National Guard. He didn’t.

Either he’s irresponsibly incompetent, or he didn’t have a problem with what was happening.

By his defenders’ argument, Trump engaged in rhetoric that—as experts on rhetoric said it would–persuaded people that he wanted a violent incursion and insurrection on January 6, and he didn’t stop it once it started, and only denounced it when he was facing impeachment. Thus, by his defenders’ case, Trump either wanted that insurrection, or he’s so irresponsible and incompetent that he unintentionally caused an insurrection he didn’t know how to stop.

Either option is impeachable.

But, more important, Trump really wasn’t the only cause of the attempted insurrection. He’s responsible, and he should be held responsible, and he isn’t the only one that should be held responsible.

People who tried to storm the capital in order to stop the Constitution from being enacted as it is supposed to weren’t people who, until 2016, had accurate and informed understandings of politics, who appreciated democracy as a pluralistic governmental system, and who saw difference of opinion as legitimate. They were authoritarian populists, and that’s why they supported Trump. Trump didn’t cause authoritarian populism—he just rode the wave that others’ rhetoric had created.

For years, talk radio and Fox have been promoting authoritarian populist demagoguery. It’s demagoguery in that they reduce every issue to us v. them, with “us” very narrowly defined, and “them” being everyone else who are lumped into the most extreme “them.” So, if you didn’t (don’t) support the political figure or agenda that they supported at that moment, you were (are) a communist or socialist. Limbaugh, Fox, etc., advocate populism in that what they say perfectly fits what Jan-Werner Muller defines as what populists do:

[T]hey tend to say that they — and only they — represent what they often call the real people or also, typically, the silent majority. Populists will deny the legitimacy of all other contenders for power. This is never merely about policy disagreements or even disagreements about values which, of course, are normal and ideally productive in a democracy. Populists always immediately make it personal and moral. They also suggest that citizens who do not share their understanding of the supposedly real people do not really belong to the people at all. So populists always morally exclude others at two levels: party politics, but also among the people themselves, where those who do not take their side politically are automatically deemed un-American, un-Polish, un-Turkish, etc.

Work like Muller’s shows why the left/right binary (or continuum) is proto-demagogic at least and irrelevant at best. If we’re going to try to shove figures into the left/right binary (which makes as much sense as shoving all religions into Catholic or Protestant), then there are “left-wing” populists like Chavez and “right-wing” populists like Trump, who have the same rhetoric. Whether they’re claiming to be conservative or socialist doesn’t matter—they’re neither. What matters is that they’re populist in a very damaging way.

They’re authoritarian in that they’re saying that the real people are so threatened with extinction by a system run by elites (Them—the elite is entirely composed of out-group members, which is kind of hilarious if you think about it) that we cannot hold ourselves to normal standards. This is war.

Authoritarian populist demagoguery is profitable for a media outlet. It’s stimulating, like a Two-Minutes Hate, but more like the 24/7 Hate. It is guaranteed to generate an audience who will refuse to look at other information (which advertisers love); since it is all about generating in-group loyalty, then advertisers also benefit simply from having ads in that outlet—they look like they’re supporting the in-group.

Authoritarian populist demagoguery is a powerful fuel for setting an audience on fire.

And it’s never a controlled burn.

[1] One of many things incredibly creepy for me is how defenses of Trump are exactly the same arguments that Nazis make to defend Hitler.




On not really objecting to Nazis

Hitler building a road
From the Berlin exhibit about Nazi rhetoric

In January of 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. On March 23, 1933, Germany voted to abandon democracy in favor of a Nazi dictatorship. In April of 1933, the out-going British ambassador to Germany, Horace Rumbold, wrote a five-thousand word telegram concerning what he believed to be Hitler’s goals and the German situation. There is something very disconcerting, if not actually enraging, about reading it, since it is so prescient.

Rumbold points out that, within a few months of attaining power, Hitler and the Nazis had criminalized dissent, brutally silenced all critics, and created an extraordinary propaganda system. Rumbold summarizes Hitler’s plans were openly stated in Mein Kampf and various speeches of his and other high-ranking Nazi officials. That plan was to claim to want peace all the while engaging in the complete ideological and practical militarization of Germany in order to start a war that will enable Germany to incorporate all parts of Europe that have German speakers, and expand into Russia and the Baltic States. Hitler is determined to get war, not just because of what it will gain Germany, but because of his commitment to seeing a nation as an organism which must fight for its existence or be “doomed to extinction” (5).

And, as early as April of 1933, Rumbold recognized that central to Hitler’s understanding of militarism and nationalism was the goal of a Germany without Jews, and that Hitler was rigidly committed to “the campaign against the Jews” (6). Rumbold summarizes Hitler’s plan for the immediate future: “Germany needs peace until she has recovered such strength that no country can challenge her without serious and irksome preparations [….] The aim of [Hitler’s] policy is to bring Germany to a point of preparation, a jumping-off point from which she can reach solid ground before her adversaries can interfere” (8). Elsewhere I (and lots of other people) have argued that anything other than appeasement was so politically and rhetorically unpopular that to advocate policies grounded in taking Rumbold’s prescience seriously would have been political suicide. Resisting Hitler was simply too unpopular.

While all the most effective anti-appeasement policies were unpopular, Hitler was not. On July 10, 1933 (so just two months after Rumbold’s telegram), the Viscount Rothermere (owner of The Daily Mail) published in that paper a piece praising Hitler and what he called “Naziland.” His argument is in his last paragraph (in bold and larger font):

“The world’s greatest need to-day is realism. Hitler is a realist. He has saved his country from the ineffectual leadership of hesitating, half-hearted politicians. He has infused into its national life the unconquerable spirit of triumphant youth.“

Rothermere claims to have carefully studied Germany and the Nazi movement for several years, so he would be well aware of the criticisms noted by Rumbold (and others): the abandonment of representative politics, persecution of all political opponents and even critics, openly-stated goal of eliminating Jews from the nation, and militarism. The assumption that many people make is that people in the UK who thought Hitler wasn’t that bad didn’t recognize him for what he was. Rothermere did. He liked it.

Rothermere liked fascism. He praised Mussolini and his “collaborators” because “Together they have made their country to best-governed State in Europe.” He says that “foremost” of Hitler’s accomplishments is “the liberation of [Germany] from the rule of the frowsy, down-at-hell German Republic, which was totally lacking in prestige, self-confidence, and even self-respect.” He acknowledges that there has been some criticism of how the Nazis have treated their opponents, but dismisses it as coming only from communist admirers of Stalin: “The plain, blunt patriotism of Hitler and his followers is highly alarming to our parlour-Bolsheviks and cultured Communists.”

In a section titled “Misplaced Horror,” he says that these communists
“Have started a clamorous campaign of denunciation against what they call “Nazi atrocities,” which, as anyone who visits Germany quickly discovers for himself, consist merely of a few isolated acts of violence such as are inevitable among a nation half as big again as ours, but which have been generalized, multiplied, and exaggerated to give the impression that Nazi rule is a bloodthirsty tyranny.”

Rothermere goes on to say that “the old women of both sexes” denounced Italian fascists’ “outrages” (which he has in scare quotes) when those actions consisted of nothing more than “the administration of a few doses of castor-oil to Communists” and, just as “the incidental extravagances of the early days of Fascism are forgotten,” “the minor misdeeds of individual Nazis will be submerged by the immense benefits that the new regime is already bestowing upon Germany.”

Italian fascists weren’t as obsessed with (or oppressive of) Jews as Nazis were and always had been, so someone might point out that the persecution of Jews (as Rumbold noted, one aspect of the Nazi platform to which Hitler was obstinately committed) meant the outrages were not the misdeeds of a few individuals, but an important point in the Nazi political agenda. It was, after all, in the open. And something that is tremendously important to understand is that the people who argued that Hitler wasn’t so bad, and, in any case, he was better than Stalin, didn’t object to his anti-Semitism. Like Rothermere, they endorsed it. In a section sub-titled “Alien Elements” Rothermere says,
“The German nation, moreoever, was rapidly falling under the control of its alien elements. In the last days of the pre-Hitler regime there were twenty times as many Jewish Government officials in Germany as had existed before the war. Israelites of international attachments were insinuating themselves into key positions in the German administrative machine. Three German Ministries only had direct relations with the Press, but in each case the official responsible for conveying news and interpreting policy to the public was a Jew.”
In other words, Rothermere supported and celebrated Hitler because he liked everything about Nazism. He was a Nazi.

On Republicans saying Trump went too far

Scene from Casablanca in which Renault pretends he didn’t know there was gambling


There are a lot of editorials from conservative sites admitting that Trump deliberately incited violence in the hopes that Pence would do something unconstitutional. And that is what Trump did. And it’s what Trump critics have been warning he would do since he was elected.

Even the Wall Street Journal has, in both its news and editorial positions, said that Trump instigated the violence at the capital on January 6, and did so deliberately. Since last spring, people had been saying that Trump would dispute the legitimacy of the election if he lost (and both he and the GOP thought he’d lose—that’s why they rushed through the appointment of Barrett, thereby violating the principles they said had made them refuse to certify Garland). Anyone who was paying even a little bit of attention to Trump’s tweets or his supporters knew that they were planning violence on January 6 (and they are for January 20—I’m seeing some stuff about January 17 and I don’t know why).

Various pro-Trump media are expressing shock at what he did on January 6—that is, incite violence. They’re either idiots, in which case, they should resign, or they knew he would. I think it was the second. I think everyone at Wall Street Journal now busy clutching their pearls, every GOP politico now saying he went too far, every FB friend saying it was antifa–they all knew that Trump would do exactly what he did and what he’s still doing. He’s trying to violate the Constitution in order to stay in power. It’s perfectly in line with what he’s always done. He doesn’t think it’s right for him to be constrained or accountable in anyway—by laws, morals, or conventions.

That’s who he is, and who he has always been, and anyone who knows anything about his time in New York knows that. His tax returns show that he was never successful at anything other than Celebrity Apprentice. Otherwise he had terrible judgment.

I’m working on a chapter about the appeasement of Hitler, specifically about why major political figures (like Chamberlain and Baldwin) kept giving Hitler what he wanted, as though that would avert war, and as though he wasn’t someone who had always said that he intended to engage in a war of conquest and extermination. There are lots of arguments as to why Chamberlain’s government engaged in appeasement, but I think it’s pretty clear: they did so because anything other than appeasement was rhetorically impossible given the beliefs of their base.

Once Trump became the GOP nominee, then criticizing him was rhetorically impossible because of the beliefs of their base—the beliefs the GOP had been drumming for years. Specifically, the pro-GOP media for years had been saying that only the GOP was right because Dems were so awful. Because Dems were/are so awful because SOCIALISM and ABORTION (and on neither point does the pro-GOP media have a rational argument), then the GOP is justified in anything it does.

For instance, the claim that there was massive voter fraud is not only irrational, but a great example of how people can mistakenly think that “I have seen the evidence for myself” is a rational way to assess an argument. Whether you can find data to support your claim doesn’t make your argument rational. There are three tests for a rational argument:

  1. Can you identify the evidence that would cause you to admit that you’re wrong? In other words, is your argument falsifiable?
  2. Do your arguments consistently appeal to the same major premises? This one is complicated, and I really wish that people taught syllogisms in argumentation classes. The short version is that if you say, “There was voter fraud because there were bunnies near the polling places” and “There was voter fraud because there were no bunnies near the polling places” then you don’t have a rational argument.
  3. Would you consider the way you are arguing a good argument if made in support of positions with which you disagree? Again, complicated because of how badly we teach argumentation, but a rational argument has a form that we would consider a good form regardless of the content.

No argument for massive voter fraud can withstand that test. As an aside, I have to say that I’d love were the results in Texas subjected to the level of scrutiny that Republicans want for Pennsylvania. Were the GOP pearl-clutching about Pennsylvania sincerely about the principle of voter fraud and not just another instance of not believing that people who vote against them should have their votes count, then the pearl-clutchers would welcome scrutiny about Texas.

Yeah, that won’t happen.

We are in a cultural moment that, for various reasons, assesses things (a CEO, product, political figure, athlete, diet, policy, movie) in terms of immediate outcome. If the CEO is getting great press, then they must be good, so we give them more good press, which proves they’re good. Since great press increases the stock value, then the great press is seen as great judgment.

It’s as though someone jumped off a cliff, and all the press was about how great they were for flying. They’re a great success, and should be admired. And then the hitting the ground is treated as an unfortunate outcome, as opposed to what was always going to happen.

That’s the issue with pro-GOP media that advocated a scorched earth demagoguery regarding Dems long before Trump started running for President. Rhetoric isn’t mere rhetoric. It has consequences. The pro-GOP media persuaded people to jump off the cliff.

What happened on January 6th (and what Trump was still hoping for on January 16th and 17th and maybe the 20th) was just one more instance of how Trump has always been. Trump has always lied. About everything.

Take, for instance, the argument that you have to be GOP if you think abortion is wrong. The Dems aren’t pro-abortion (no one is) but want to reduce abortion through the policies that are demonstrably effective at reducing abortion. The GOP has no response to that argument.

Instead, it falsely presents the Dems as pro-abortion. And here I’ll just say that, if you have to lie about what your opponent believes, then maybe you aren’t promoting democracy? But anyway, even assuming that the Dem plan for reducing abortion is bad, it doesn’t mean that the GOP is right. Both parties might be wrong. The GOP rhetoric about abortion is just demagoguery. It’s a false reduction of a complicated issue to us v. them, necessitating straw man representations of the opposition.

Trump engages in race-based demagoguery, and he always has, as far back as his advocating killing innocent men because they were Black. Trump’s rhetoric is:

  1. he is entitled to everything because he is a person above accountability, above rules, above norms;
  2. therefore, he is entitled to use any and all means to enhance his power, financially profit, and triumph over people who don’t support him;
  3. he will reward people who support him by enabling them to stand above accountability, rules, and norms;
  4. and he will punish anyone who doesn’t support him in every way he can.

That’s his rhetoric. That’s what his rhetoric has always been. It’s also what his policies have been since he’s been in office. These aren’t just rhetorical topoi he’s used, but the arguments he’s used for policies grounded in those beliefs.

That’s also the rhetoric of pro-GOP pundits, and has been ever since Rush Limbaugh started broadcasting. The only difference is that they begin with a different premise from Trump. Trump says (and probably believes) that he is entitled to those things and practices because of who he is, whereas pro-GOP rhetoric, since the 1990s, has been that the GOP (and whatever policies its advocating at this moment regardless of what it previously advocated) are entitled to those things because of how evil the Dems are.

So, just to be clear, pro-GOP rhetoric has, since the 1990s, been that we should abandon the rhetoric and practices inherent to democracy—that is, we should abandon democracy—because of how evil the Dems are. What we saw on January 6th was not just the consequence of Trump’s rhetoric, but the consequence of what Rush Limbaugh has been saying his entire career, what pro-GOP pundits have been saying for thirty years: that Dems are so bad that there are no restraints or constraints on what the GOP should do to win.

So, to those people who are now outraged about what happened on January 6th, I’d love to see them explain how what he did is not just one more instance of those four topoi, and how those topoi are not the logical consequence what pro-GOP media has been saying for over twenty years.

What we saw on January 6th was the direct consequence of what Trump said, and Trump is the direct consequence of what pro-GOP media has been saying for over twenty years.

Rejecting Trump, without rejecting that anti-democratic rhetoric and policy agenda, is just wishing the coup had been better managed.

The Enabling Act and the current coup attempt

nazi propaganda poster saying "death to marism"

On March 23, 1933, Adolf Hitler argued that what “the left” had done was so outrageous that Germany should abandon democracy and make him dictator. The elected officials did.

He was supported by the Catholic Party, all conservative parties, and the majority of Protestants. The only parties to oppose him were the Democratic Socialists and the Communists.

Since everyone other than socialists and communists supported Hitler, why is it a talking point among pro-Trump groups that Hitler was a socialist, and therefore a leftist? Because they want to rationalize engaging in exactly the same kind of coup that Hitler managed—we have to abandon democratic practices because “the left” is so bad—while pretending they aren’t doing exactly what Hitler did.

A lot of people reason by identity rather than politics. That is, they engage in the fantasy that good people, and only good people, will enact good policies. So, when trying to decide how to vote, just look for someone for someone who understands you, who is like you. That’s called “identification.” There’s a kind of narcissism in it—or maybe political solipsism is a better word. You just look out for yourself, and vote for someone who will look out for you, and….what, exactly, is supposed to happen? There can’t be a one-to-one relationship of identities (young, old, middle-aged, no kids, lots of kids, a disabled kid) between voters and political figures because there aren’t that many people in Congress (and voting on this basis always hurts the smaller groups). In addition, what are called social groups (not social in the sense of being about socializing, but group memberships that are important for a sense of self, such as having a child who gets accommodations in schools, having a a dog, or being evangelical Christian) don’t necessarily lead to policy affiliation. Not everyone with a dog wants off-leash dog parks, after all.

Good political figures should be able to look out for lots of different kinds of people; that’s what democracy requires. Diversity is a fact.

But a politics of identification assumes that identity is stable and monocausally determines policy affiliation. With unintentional irony, self-described “right wing” media figures throw themselves around about “the left” engaging in “identity politics,” yet that’s what they offer to their audience: the assumption that their identity (being “conservative”) necessarily leads to one political agenda (that is never clearly stated in the affirmative). It’s generally what’s called a “negative identity”—people are “conservative” just because they aren’t “liberal” (and vice versa).

What people call “right-wing” politics should be called reactionary toxic populist nationalism. It isn’t conservative. Conservativism is a political ideology that, although I disagree with it, even I will say is generally internally coherent and principled. Pro-Trump politics isn’t internally coherent or principled—it’s irrational factionalism. Using a private server is terrible, unless it’s a Trump family member. Pornography is terrible, unless it’s a Trump family member. A problematic charity is terrible, unless it’s Trump’s. There are no principles that are applied consistently across groups.

Supporting Trump comes from two sources. First, there’s charismatic leadership. He’s decisive and confident and (they think) successful. People drawn to Trump for this reason believe that politics isn’t complicated, that the right solution is obvious, and that politicians make things unnecessarily complicated because they’re doofuses. They believe that “regular people” (like them) are screwed over by our current political system, and that Trump understands them, and is looking out for them. They know he isn’t a doofus because he says things are simple, he’s confident he can solve them, and they saw him be decisive on a (scripted) TV show. He feels transparent to them.

They believe that because everything he says, and even the way he stands, shows that he is clearly a successful guy who gets them and who knows what needs to be done. And he’ll cut through the bullshit and get it done.

And they only pay attention to information that says that what they believe about Trump is true. They reject any criticism of Trump on the grounds that it is criticism. They believe what they believe is true because it’s what they believe, and anything that says what they believe is false must be false because it contradicts what they believe.

These are people, in my experience, who make the same mistake over and over, and who get scammed. A lot. They’re people who are often good and kind, and who believe that Scripture means what it seems to mean to them, and that people are who they say they are. That’s why they get scammed. They believe that the world is not complicated, but that bad people make it seem complicated, and so they like people who are decisive and confident. Con artists are always decisive and confident (so are a lot of badly informed people).

I have to digress and say that, since I’ve spent a lot of my life arguing with all sorts of people, this way of thinking about the world (it’s all really simple, and people just try to make it complicated, and we can solve this problem that no one else has solved by being thoroughly commitment to this simple solution that, for inexplicable reasons, no one else has ever adopted) is all over the political spectrum. It isn’t just Trump supporters (here, for instance, is a nice discussion of how it’s playing out right now among democratic socialists).

Second, many people support Trump in a purely reactionary way—he is NOT “libruls” (whom they believe to be the cause of all problems in the world. He will (and does) crush them, and, since they think libruls cause all the problems, crushing them will solve all the problems. It’s still toxic populism, in that it’s saying that there are some Americans who aren’t really American, whose views shouldn’t be represented (or even discussed), and who should be excluded from power.

Those two kinds of support—here is a strong, decisive person with excellent judgment who will cut through all the bullshit, and here is someone who will purge our government and culture of liberals and their influence—are the two kinds of support for Hitler.

Am I saying that Trump is Hitler? No.

Am I saying that the people who are supporting Trump would have supported Hitler? That is exactly what I’m saying.


The true spirit of Christmas

clay last supper

If you pay attention to scholars of Scripture, then you know that just about everything you thought you knew about Christmas is not in Scripture. It might not have been an inn, there was no taxation requirement that made everyone come back to their home town, there’s no reason to think that there were three magi, and the magi story and shepherd story don’t match up, it might not have been December 25, there almost certainly wasn’t snow, and “virgin” didn’t necessarily mean she hadn’t had sex.

But I have a lot of tolerance for people with various understandings of what Christmas means. In the early 80s, I was in a store in Baja California, and I fell in love with a representation of the Last Supper. In it, Jesus (on the cross) is at a table with people eating lobster, bananas, watermelon, and tortillas. Of course, Jesus didn’t eat tortillas and lobster at the actual Passover meal he had with his disciples, and he wasn’t on a cross at that dinner, and his cross wasn’t in cactus, but I love(d) that it was an understanding of Jesus in terms of their own lives.

I love the Staples Singers’ version of “No Room at the Inn,” which is about imagining Jesus’ birth in a segregated hotel, in which the bellboy, waitress, maid, and porter would have been welcome at his birth. That isn’t historically accurate, but it’s true to Jesus’ message of inclusion.

I love Auden’s Christmas “Oratorio,” which is factually wrong in so many ways, but, again, wonderfully true in many.

I think it’s important to understand that cultural variations and interpretations of the Jesus story are exactly that—interpretations. Many years ago, Sallie McFague said that the metaphors and parables of Scripture are like the green glasses that people wear in Oz. After a while, people become so comfortable with the glasses that they think Oz really is green, as opposed to looking green through those lenses. Jesus eating lobster while on a cactus cross is a lens; his being born in an inn staffed by African Americans is a lens. Representing Jesus as white-skinned and fair-haired is a lens.

One of many reasons that the “war of Christmas” is deliberate hokum is that it isn’t a “war” at all, and it isn’t even an implicit attack on what Scripture says about Jesus and his birth. Acknowledging that not everyone celebrates Christmas, let alone in a way that is very recent, and very culturally specific, isn’t an attack on anyone or anything. Feeling threatened by that acknowledging is taking difference as aggression. Scripture doesn’t give us the right to deny that we have a lens. But we can celebrate the many ways that people understand the story of hope and birth.

So, happy holidays!

“Support the police” and lay Calvinism

Calvin's commentaries on the Bible

A lot of American conservative Christianity is affected by Calvinism, not necessarily the most complicated aspects of John Calvin’s beliefs, nor even all of what he said, but what might be called a popular (or lay) version of Calvinism.

(As an aside, I’ll mention that’s pretty common—what actual people in the congregation believe is not necessarily what their sect is supposed to hold dear. I know a lot of Catholics who don’t believe that the host is literally Christ’s body, Lutherans who believe in “decision theology,” people who say the Nicean Creed on a regular basis but who don’t actually believe in the physical resurrection of the body, so that people would have a modified version of Calvinism isn’t a criticism. It’s just a fact.)

There are several ways in which lay Calvinism comes up, but here are the ones that are important for the question of what we should do (or not) about police violence:
• that humans are so corrupted by original sin as to be in constant danger of slipping into sin.
• that everyone knows what is and isn’t sin (right and wrong are not only in a zero-sum relationship, but, at any given moment, what’s right or wrong is absolutely clear).
• that sin is the consequence of giving in to sinful impulses (that we know to be sinful in the moment); that is, a lack of control. Therefore, only very controlling people can do the right thing, and only a culture of control can get people to behave well.
• that the world is divided into saints and sinners, and that saints are the ones capable of self-control.
• the only way to get sinners to behave is to punish them; if you punish them enough, they will behave well;
• that immorality and crime are (or should be) the same, because otherwise immoral people will not be punished and they will create a culture of immorality. Since immorality = crime, this failure to control the sinners will mean that everyone—including the faithful—will be punished with a high crime rate. A nation that is not following God’s obvious rules will be punished by losing its dominance. [1]

If you accept all these premises, and I think they’re a fair summary of what a lot of self-identified conservative Christians believe, then, it follows that we have to have a culture with a lot of punishment. Since immorality and crime are the same (people who are immoral will commit all the sins), then a culture that tolerates immorality will be a culture with a lot of crime. [2]

So, what many conservative Christians believe is that, if we want to have a culture that is moral (and with less crime), we must have mechanisms of social control because, if people are not threatened with punishment, they will fall into sin. People—all people–who are not threatened with punishment will sin. Therefore, we have to have a police force that can punish people—that’s the only way to have a culture without a lot of crime (other than massive salvation to their specific sect, but the Calvinist notion that the elect are few makes that problematic).

In my experience, conservative Christians who “support the police” don’t want the police to do what is actually their job: that is, arrest, and not punish, people. They want a police force that is empowered to punish in the moment. That stance, I think, has to do with their sense that the judicial system is too concerned with process, too likely to insist on fairness, and too “liberal” (in the old sense of the word). They think a police officer should be able to decide, in the moment, that a person is good or bad (saint or sinner), and act accordingly.

If you accept all the premises of this version of Calvinism—people are basically bad, they only behave well if punished, right v. wrong is obvious to good people—then you can end up with thinking that the police should be able to punish people.

Except for one problem. Police are people.

If all people are prone to sin unless threatened with punishment, then, if we give the police the power to punish people, some of them will use that power in a sinful way. That conclusion necessarily follows from the premises of this version of Calvinism.

So, were these conservative Christians consistent in their application of Calvinism, they would be strong advocates of punitive policies in place for police forces. They would insist that police be held accountable, and punished for misbehavior. They would want to make sure that the police who abused their power—since, as their model of human behavior says, all people will behave sinfully unless threatened with punishment says—are guaranteed to be punished. They would be as committed to punishing abusive police as they are to punishing any other criminal. They would advocate strong and powerful community control of the police, and criminal charges for abusive police.

But they don’t. When it comes to the police, suddenly people don’t need accountability or punishment. How interesting.

[1] As another aside, this is the weakest part of the lay Calvinist argument for social control. They have a tendency to cite stories, like those about Sodom and Gommorah, that are actually about saving the righteous. While there are Hebrew Bible passages that say that God punishes communities that have fallen, there are none that say that the righteous will be punished for being in a fallen community. God always protects the righteous. It’s also impossible to make a good faith argument that the history of triumphal civilizations is one of Calvinist v. non-Calvinist, or even “follow the rules that current conservative Christians believe are absolutely clearly right v. wrong.” It’s all no-true Scotsmen. When in-groups triumph, it’s proof that God prefers them, when out-groups triumph, it isn’t proof that God prefers them.

[2] Another aside, this is sometimes a circular argument—if you criminalize normal behavior, then it can look as though immorality and criminality correlate. You can break that correlation by decriminalizing immoral behavior, of course. The more important data would be whether decriminalizing “moral” behaviors—women speaking in church, for instance—correlates to civil crimes like murder. There’s no evidence to suggest it does.




Horace Rumbold’s April 1933 memo about Hitler

nazi propaganda poster saying "death to marism"

April 26, 1933, the British Ambassador to Germany (Horace Rumbold) wrote a long (5k words) telegram about Hitler. It was not only prescient about Hitler’s plans and strategies, but smart about authoritarianism. What follows are some excerpts.

The Chancellor has been busy gathering all the strings of power into his hands, and he may now be said to be in a position of unchallenged supremacy. The parliamentary regime has been replaced by a regime of brute force, and the political parties have, with the exception of the Nazis and Nationalists, disappeared from the arena. For that matter Parliament has ceased to have any raison d’etre. The Nazi leader has only to express a wish to have it fulfilled by his followers.

Hitherto I have dealt in despatches with the internal changes and the events of the moment. Now that Hitler has acquired absolute control, at any rate till the 1st April, 1937, it may be advisable to consider the uses to which he may put his unlimited opportunities during the next four years. The prospect is disquieting, as the only programme, apart from ensuring their own stay in office, which the Government appear to possess may be described as the revival of militarism and the stamping out of pacifism. The plans of the Government are far-reaching, they will take several years to mature and they realise that it would be idle to embark on them if there were any danger of premature disturbance either abroad or at home. They may, therefore, be expected to repeat their protestations of peaceful intent from time to time and to have recourse to other measures, including propaganda, to lull the outer world into a sense of security.

The new regime is confident that it has come to stay. At the same time it realises that the economic crisis which delivered Germany into its hands is also capable of reversing the process. It is, therefore, determined, to leave no stone unturned in the effort to entrench itself in power for all time. To this end it has embarked on a programme of political propaganda on a scale for which there is no analogy in history. Hitler himself is, with good reason, a profound believer in human, and particularly German, credulity. He has unlimited faith in propaganda. In his autobiography he describes with envy and admiration the successes of the Allied Governments, achieved by the aid of war propaganda. He displays a cynical and at the same time very clear understanding of the psychology of the German masses. He knows what he has achieved with oratory and cheap sentiment during the last fourteen years by his own unaided efforts. Now that he has the resources of the State at his disposal, he has good reason to believe that he can mould public opinion to his views to an unprecedented extent.

Dr. Goebbels is engaged on a two-fold task, to uproot every political creed in Germany except Hitlerism and to prepare the soil for the revival of militarism. The press has been delivered into his hands, and he has declared that it is his intention “to play upon it as on a piano.”

The outlook for Europe is far from peaceful if the speeches of Nazi leaders, especially of the Chancellor, are borne in mind. The Chancellor’s account of his political career in Mein Kampf contains not only the principles which have guided him during the last fourteen years, but explains how he arrived at these fundamental principles. Stripped of the verbiage in which he has clothed it, Hitler’s thesis is extremely simple. He starts with the assertions that man is a fighting animal; therefore the nation is, he concludes, a fighting unit, being a community of fighters. Any living organism which ceases to fight for its existence is, he asserts, doomed to extinction. A country or a race which ceases to fight is equally doomed. The fighting capacity of a race depends on its purity. Hence the necessity for ridding it of foreign impurities. The Jewish race, owing to its universality, is of necessity pacifist and internationalist. Pacifism is the deadliest sin, for pacifism means the surrender of the race in the fight for existence. The first duty of every country is, therefore, to nationalise the masses: intelligence is of secondary importance in the case of the individual; will and determination are of higher importance. The individual who is born to command is more valuable than countless thousands of subordinate natures. Only brute force can ensure the survival of the race. Hence the necessity for military forms. The race must fight; a race that rests must rust and perish. The German race, had it been united in time, would now be master of the globe to-day. The new Reich must gather within its fold all the scattered German elements in Europe. A race which has suffered defeat can be rescued by restoring its self-confidence. Above all things, the army must be taught to believe in its own invincibility. To restore the German nation again ” it is only necessary to convince the people that the recovery of freedom by force of arms is a possibility.”

Intellectualism is undesirable. The ultimate aim of education is to produce a German who can be converted with the minimum of training into a soldier. The idea that there is something reprehensible in chauvinism is entirely mistaken. ” Indeed, the greatest upheavals in history would have been unthinkable had it not been for the driving force of fanatical and hysterical passions. Nothing could have been effected by the bourgeois virtues of peace and order. The world is now moving towards such an upheaval, and the new (German) State must see to it that the race is ready for the last and greatest decisions on this earth ” (p. 475, 17th edition of Mein Kampf). Again and again he proclaims that fanatical conviction and uncompromising resolution are indispensable qualities in a leader.

Foreign policy may be unscrupulous. It is not the task of diplomacy to allow a nation to founder heroically but rather to see that it can prosper and survive. There are only two possible allies for Germany—England and Italy (p. 699). No country will enter into an alliance with a cowardly pacifist State run by democrats and Marxists. So long as Germany does not fend for herself, nobody will fend for her. Germany’s lost provinces cannot be gained by solemn appeals to Heaven or by pious hopes in the League of Nations, but only by force -of arms (p. 708).

Germany must not repeat the mistake of fighting all her enemies at once. She must single out the most dangerous in. turn and attack him with all her forces ” (p. 711). “I t is the business of the Government to implant in the people feelings of manly courage and passionate hatred.” The world will only “cease to be anti-German when Germany recovers equality of rights and resumes her place in the sun.

Hitler admits that it is difficult to preach chauvinism without attracting undesirable attention, but it can be done. The intuitive insight of the subordinate leaders can be very helpful. There must be no sentimentality, he asserts, about Germany’s foreign policy. To attack France for purely sentimental reasons would be foolish. What Germany needs is an increase in territory in Europe. Hitler even argues that Germany’s pre-war colonial policy must be abandoned, and that the new Germany must look for expansion to Russia and especially to the Baltic States. He condemns the alliance with Russia because the ultimate aim of all alliances is war. To wage war with Russia against the West would be criminal, especially as the aim of the Soviets is the triumph of international Judaism.

A number of the clauses of the original twenty-five-point programme have been abandoned as Utopian or out of date, but the campaign against the Jews goes to show that Hitler will only yield to energetic opposition even on comparatively unimportant points of policy. The brutal harshness with which he has overwhelmed his opponents of the Left and the ruthlessness with which he has muzzled the press are disquieting signs.

Not only is it a crime to preach pacificism or condemn militarism but it is equally objectionable to preach international understanding, and while politicians and writers who have been guilty of the one have actually been arrested and incarcerated, those guilty of the other have at any rate been removed from public life and of course from official employment. The Government are openly hostile to Marxism on the ground that it savours of internationalism, and the Chancellor in his electoral speeches has spoken with derision of such delusive documents as peace pacts and such delusive ideas as the “spirit of Locarno.” Indeed, the foreign policy which emerges from his speeches is no less disquieting than that which emerges from his memoirs. Even when allowance is made for the exaggerations attendant upon a political campaign, enough remains to make it highly probable that rearmament and not disarmament is the aim of the new Germany.

Representative government has been overthrown. Parliament has to all intents and purposes been abolished. A campaign of terror instituted by the authorities has not failed to have its effect on Democrats, Socialists and Communists alike. It is doubtful whether any real resistance would now be offered to a return to conscription. Still more serious is the fact that the resumption of the manufacture of war material by the factories can be undertaken to-day with much less fear of detection or denunciation than heretofore. Owing to the abolition of the press of the Left and the exemplary punishment of traitors and informers, it will be much easier in future to observe secrecy in the factories and workshops. I cannot help thinking that many of the measures taken by the new Government of recent weeks aim at the inculcation of that silence, or “Schwiegsamkeit,” which Hitler declares in his memoirs to be an essential to military preparations. In the introduction to my annual report last year I stated (paragraph 27) that militarism in the pre-war sense, as exemplified by the Zabern incident, no longer existed in Germany. I wrote (paragraph 29) that there had been a revival of nationalism, that nationalism, was not synonymous with militarism, but I added that, ” should nationalist feeling in Germany become exacerbated, it might well lead to militarism.” The present Government have, I fear, exacerbated national feeling, with the results which I anticipated.

Indeed, the political vocabulary of national socialism is already saturated with militarist terms. There is incessant talk of onslaughts and attacks on entrenched positions, of political fortresses which have been stormed, of ruthlessness, violence and heroism. Hitler himself has proclaimed that Germany is now to enter upon a ” heroic ” age, in which the individual is to count for nothing, and the weal of the State for everything.

They [German forces] have to rearm on land, and, as Herr Hitler explains in his memoirs, they have to lull their adversaries into such a state of coma that they will allow themselves to be engaged one by one. It may seem astonishing that the Chancellor should express himself so frankly, but it must be noted that his book was written in 1925, when his prospects of reaching power were so remote that he could afford to be candid. He would probably be glad to suppress every copy extant to-day. Since he assumed office, Herr Hitler has been as cautious and discreet as he was formerly blunt and frank. He declares that he is anxious that peace should be maintained for a ten-year period. What he probably means can be more accurately expressed by the formula : Germany needs peace until she has recovered such strength that no country can challenge her without serious and irksome preparations. I fear that it would be misleading to base any hopes on a return to sanity or a serious modification of the views of the Chancellor and his entourage. Hitler’s own record goes to show that he is a man of extraordinary obstinacy. His success in fighting difficulty after difficulty during the fourteen years of his political struggle is a proof of his indomitable character.

Herr von Papen, speaking in Breslau a few weeks ago, stated that Hitlerism in its essence was a revolt against the Treaty of Versailles. The Vice-Chancellor for once spoke unvarnished truth. Hitlerism has spread with extraordinary rapidity since the 5th March, and those who witnessed the celebration of Hitler’s birthday a few days ago must have been impressed by the astonishing popularity of the new leader with the masses. So far as the ordinary German is concerned, Hitler has certainly restored something akin to self-respect, which has been lacking in Germany since November 1918. The German people to-day no longer feel humiliated or oppressed. The Hitler Government have had the courage to revolt against Versailles, to challenge France and the other signatories of the treaty without any serious consequences. For a defeated country this represents an immense moral advance. For its leader, Hitler, it represents overwhelming prestige and popularity. Someone has aptly said that nationalism is the illegitimate offspring of patriotism by inferiority complex. Germany has been suffering from such a complex for over a decade. Hitlerism has eradicated it, but only at the cost of burdening Europe with a new outbreak of nationalism.