Patricia Roberts-Miller

Arguing with Trump supporters III: tone isn’t rationality

Kavanaugh yelling — https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/09/kavanaugh-opening-statement-angry/571564/

Just to recap: Trump supporters avoid taking on the responsibilities of rational argumentation by taking the position of a negative case even when they’re making an affirmative claim. They do so this through shifting the issue from Trump to various distractions: your emotionality (“Why are you so upset?”), your sense of humor (“You just can’t take a joke”), your supposed biases (“Snopes is a liberal site”), your identity (“Typical Social Justice Warrior bullshit”), whatever the latest fear-mongering distraction-of-the-moment whaddaboutism is that pro-Trump propaganda is promoting (her emails, Benghazeeeeee, abortion, socialism, immigration, a prayer blanket found in the desert, the caravan, ISIS, Biden will kick in your door and take your guns), and by what amounts to a version of sealioning (setting themselves as the arbiter of truth).

Sometimes, they make claims, but they rarely engage in argumentation—at this point, they even rarely engage in pseudo-rational argumentation. Since maybe they still are, and just not in places I hang out, I’ll go ahead and explain how it works and why it’s hard to argue with. Pseudo-rational argumentation is neither rational, nor argumentation, but it has surface features that people (fallaciously) associate with rational argumentation, so it can look like it’s rational.

We too often characterize rational argumentation by surface features and, paradoxically, our visceral response. As far as the surface features, we’re tempted to call something a rational argument if it has: a calm (or “matter of fact”) tone, what are sometimes called “rationality markers” (words like “because,” “therefore,” “it necessarily follows”), appeals to external knowledge (“everyone knows,” “everyone agrees,” “obviously,” “clearly”), data, appeals to expert opinion (citing reliable experts, or people with apparently expert information). Finally, a lot of people think (because they have been taught) that a “rational” argument will “make sense”—it resonates. That’s the visceral response part. Let’s call an argument that fulfills these criteria but not the criteria of rational argumentation pseudo-rational argumentation.

Such arguments appear to be rational, as long as we judge on the basis of superficial traits of the argument and the person making the argument (and how we’re cued to judge the argument and person).

Tone is not an indication of the ir/rationality of an argument
Pseudo-rationalism plays on the common misunderstanding of rationalism as not emotionalism (a relatively recent want to think about emotions v. reason). In this world, a person is rational if they are not emotional, and an emotional person is not rational. In fact, that someone appears unemotional might mean all sorts of things, such as that they’re just good at suppressing their expression of emotions, they’re not an empathetic person, they don’t understand the situation, the person judging whether someone is emotional is a bad judge of emotionality (this last is pretty common, I think).

Being emotional doesn’t necessarily mean that one has an irrational argument. One of the things Rando might do (especially if Chester is female) is first deliberately outrage Chester, and then accuse Chester of having an invalid argument (or being unable to argue) because they are emotional. (This is a classic strategy of abusers). What this does is shift the stasis (that is, the thing about which we’re arguing) from Chester’s argument to Chester’s emotional state.[1]

This is one instance of Rando’s (the nickname of Random Internetasshole, the hypothetical interlocutor of Chester’s) favorite strategy—throw the burden of proof onto Chester, and, ideally, to things Chester can’t prove. (How do you prove you’re not emotional? That’s proving a the presence of an absence, and it’s notoriously hard to do.) And it doesn’t matter. That Chester is now emotional doesn’t mean their argument is irrational. (The “you have no sense of humor” accusation is another instance of this strategy—trying to make the argument about your feelings).

We have a tendency to think about arguments in terms of identity—a good person makes a good argument; a rational person makes a rational argument; an expert makes an expert argument. Good people do not necessarily make good arguments. (By the way, I’m often misunderstood as rejecting the notion of identity politics—I’m not.) Identity politics is an acceptance that different policies have different impacts on various identities—that we are not the same. Good v. bad people is not a useful way to think about identity, especially since neither guarantees the ir/rationality of the argument a good or bad person makes.

A slight variation on this muddle about rationality is the notion that a rational person is in control (of their emotions, themselves). It was this sense of rationality and control being connected that meant that women and non-whites were prohibited from rationality—they (we) weren’t allowed to control anyone. Thus, for someone who believes in this pseudo-rationality, a woman or POC can’t argue because we’re too emotional; if we appear not to be emotional, we’re hiding it, or—worse yet—we’re trying to control them. Then, oddly enough, it’s okay for them to get angry.

Later, I’ll get back to how to respond to these moves in pseudo-rationality (all of which you can see in Trump supporters). Here the point is simply that a person appearing to argue calmly is not necessarily someone making a rational argument.

To judge the rationality of the argument, we have to look at the argument. Pseudo-rationality tries to pretend that we can infer the rationality of the argument from the tone of the arguer. We can’t.

Something else that I’ve noticed tricks people into thinking an associative argument is rational argumentation is the use of what linguists call “metadiscourse” (especially “rationality markers” and “appeals to external knowledge”). “Metadiscourse” is the term used for the language that tells the reader about what you’re telling them. That’s a weird sentence, but it’s a useful concept. Imagine the claim, “Bunnies are fluffy.”

I might say, “Unfortunately, bunnies are fluffy,” “Thankfully, bunnies are fluffy,” “Obviously, bunnies are fluffy,” “It’s well known that bunnies are fluffy,” “Bunnies are generally fluffy,” or “I think bunnies are fluffy”—those are all sentences with that same predicate (“bunnies are fluffy”), but with metadiscourse that tell you how I want you to consider the claim.The first two tell you how I feel about bunnies being fluffy. The third and fourth are “appeals to external knowledge”—they’re saying that this claim about bunnies isn’t just my opinion, (and the “obviously” is what is called a “booster” in that it boosts the strength of the claim). The fifth and sixth have “hedging” in which I’m restricting the claim (the opposite of boosting). “Rationality markers” are words we use to signal that it’s a rational argument—often words like: because, therefore, thus, in conclusion.

The tendency to infer that the presence of a lot of those sorts of words and phrases means the argument is rational is connected to our tendency to think associatively. As I’ll explain when I get to the issue of data, “Bunnies are fluffy because 1 + 1 =2” is not a rational argument. It doesn’t matter how much metadiscourse I add, or how calmly I say it. It’s a sentence that has two logically disconnected claims. “Bunnies are fluffy because bunnies are mammals” has two claims that are more associated (they’re both about bunnies) but they’re still logically disconnected. People are likely to read them as logically connected simply because of the word “because.” We’re particularly likely to make this mistake if we believe both claims to be true.

Boosters and appeals to external knowledge are likely to persuade some people of the truth of the claims (even though they aren’t evidence, let alone proof) because we too often conflate certainty and credibility. That is, a lot of people assume that decisiveness, rhetorical clarity, and certainty are signs that someone has a perfect and complete understanding of a situation. They aren’t.

The calm tone, rationality markers, and signs of certainty are all surface qualities of a text that persuade people who mistakenly believe that those surface features are indications about the rhetor being a reliable person—rational and knowledgeable. Instead, we have to look at the argument they’re making.

[1] Since this is my blog, I get to put forward some of my crank theories. One of them is that a lot of people who say they are opposed to valuing rational argumentation have been traumatized by people in their lives who use pseudo-rational argumentation as a weapon to abuse and often gaslight them (particularly the move of deliberately upsetting someone and then condemning that person for being “emotional”). I think their experience of pseudo-rational argumentation as a kind of abuse is important to keep in mind.

Arguing with Trump supporters II: an unpersuasive negative case isn’t proof of the opposite claim

Arguing with Trump supporters is frustrating because they can look like they’re engaged in argumentation, but they aren’t. They’re using a very old trick of doing everything possible to avoid the burden of proof—that is, the rhetorical responsibility of supporting your claims. They’ll engage in sham outrage if their interlocutor won’t support their claims (or engages in fallacies like ad hominem), and that’s interesting. It’s striking how often a Trump supporter blasts into an argument with insults and then is on the ground crying and screaming if someone insults them. They’re very fragile.

I think there’s something else going on. They really can’t win an argument on an even playing field—one on which everyone is held to the same standards of argumentation—and so they do everything they can to make sure it isn’t level. They evade the responsibilities of argument as though they’re running from a vindictive ex, through sham outrage, motivism, deflection, distraction, and, most of all, trying to position themselves as making the negative case.

Argumentation has two cases—proposing a solution or case, and critiquing the case someone else has made. That is, affirmative (making a case) or negative (saying they haven’t made their case). People get confused as to what a “negative” case is—it isn’t a case saying something is bad; it’s saying that something hasn’t happened. And here’s what people have a lot of trouble understanding: the success of a negative case is not the proof of an affirmative claim. If I fail to prove to your satisfaction that Chester is a bunny, it’s fallacious for you to conclude that Chester is a duck. He might be neither; he might be a bunny, and I put forward a bad case; he might be a bunny, and I put forward a great case, and you aren’t open to persuasion. A successful negative case just that shows that this argument is inadequate.

If Chester says that Trump is a bad President, and Rando destroys that argument, Rando hasn’t shown that Trump is a good President.

“Trump is a good President” is an affirmative case—that’s the case his supporters have completely stopped defending through rational argumentation. Defending that case through rational argumentation would mean that his supporters engage the smartest critics of him while following these rules.

If any Trump supporters read this post, they’ll respond by listing what he’s done that they like (which he may or may not have actually done—they’re strategically misinformed), motivism, straw man, and nutpicking. Not through rational argumentation. That would be proving my point.

In my experience, Trump supporters often make one or more of four moves. First, as I’ve been saying, they can’t rationally defend “Trump is a good President,” so they don’t try—they insist that his critics take on the burden of proof, and they take the stance of a negative case. (And his critics tend to take on that burden, for really interesting reasons—that’s a later post, and if anyone is that interested, and I forget to write it, nag me.)

Second, they often set their own persuasion as the standard of a good argument. I have to say that every person who has done this latter move to me is a white male. Can we cay privilege? [1]

Third, having declared the opposition argument inadequate (because they are unpersuaded), they declare an affirmative victory. They never made an affirmative case, so they can’t have won it.

The fourth move isn’t necessarily the last one (sometimes it’s the first one they make, and they don’t make the others)—it’s to say that the Democrats are bad (you get to abortion and socialism on this road very fast). But Democrats being bad doesn’t mean he’s a good President. He might also be bad.[2] After all, if A is bad, that doesn’t mean not-A is good (that a gorilla is a bad pet doesn’t mean that a lion is a good one). But I think a lot of people really have trouble understanding that absence of proof for one affirmative case is not proof for the opposition affirmative case. Logic is not zero-sum.

Supporting Trump is sloppy Machiavellianism—anything, any argument or any action, that supports him is assumed to be good because their goals are supposedly good. Neither are good, and neither are rationally defensible.

[1] Speaking of privilege, being an actual Professor of Rhetoric, with a specialty in argumentation, means I have some cred when I say that whether a person is or is not making a good argument is something I am better qualified to determine than they are. But, arguing in my actual identity means making it clear that I’m a woman, and I can tell you that white males with no more research than asking their own brains what they think often feel fully qualified to tell me that I am wrong about rhetoric and argumentation.

And here we get back to whether the rules are applied equally. If Rando not being persuaded means the argument is bad, does my not being persuaded by his argument mean his argument is bad?

It doesn’t, of course. But if you ask him that, the two neurons he can get to fire short out. It’s kind of entertaining to see the response. Here again, if Rando is claiming to be Christian, it’s useful to point out that he is failing to do unto others as he would have do unto him.

[2] “He’s a bad President but he’s better than Biden” is not the same claim as “he’s a good President,” nor is it even evidence for that second claim.

Arguing with Trump supporters: when Machiavellianism tries to pretend it’s grounded in principles

gaetz shouting — Image from: https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/10/politics/donald-trump-impeachment/index.html

I mentioned elsewhere that it’s hard to argue with Trump supporters[1] because many of them have openly embraced having a political position that is rationally indefensible, and they are proud of it. Supporting Trump was rarely the consequence of rational argumentation (as far as I can tell they stopped trying to support him through rational argumentation over a year ago) but it now seems that openly admitting their commitment to blinkered loyalty is considered a virtue. I said, for those reasons, it’s a reasonable strategy to refuse to argue with them at all. But, someone asked me, what if you want to?

I think it’s useful to start with explaining why it’s so hard to argue with them. In my experience, at least for the last two years, Trump supporters have simply been repeating talking points they’re hearing in various places (which is why they sound so much alike). There are two different kinds: the “haha we’re winning” response (which is more or less an admission that they have no rational argument for supporting him); talking points that look like rational argumentation but are neither rational nor argumentation. I think a lot of those talking points have been created by people who are consciously designing talking points that feel good to repeat, and that confound the libs. And it’s true that a lot of the arguments are hard to refute, but that’s just because they don’t actually make any sense.

It’s as though we are playing chess at your house, and I beat all the pieces into little bits with a hammer, set your house on fire, and then declare myself the winner. While it’s sort of true that you can’t respond to what I’ve done with a chess move, that doesn’t mean I won the chess match.

And what does it mean to “win” a political argument by refusing to engage in argumentation? Perhaps a more apt analogy would be if we were disagreeing about whether a building was fire safe, and I denied there was such a thing as fires, said you’re responsible for all the fires anyway so the solution is to ignore you, and insisted that fire hoses just transport water and so do straws and therefore we can prevent fires by throwing straws all over the place. You would have a very difficult time proving me “wrong” (especially about whether you’re really responsible for fires), not because my arguments are so good, but because they’re so bad.

I think they’re deliberately bad because it’s actually harder to refute really bad arguments–you end up having to explain how argument is supposed to work.

That will take me several posts to explain, and it’s easier to explain if I give examples, so let’s imagine Random Internetasshole (call him Rando) and Chester are arguing about something. In general, Rando’s strategy is to make a bunch of absurd and unsourced assertions and then, when pushed to defend them (or even make them coherent), he deflects. Rando’s whole strategy is to keep the disagreement away from his argument—to try to make Chester support claims, provide sources, and generally behave like the adult in the room. Rando has to keep attention away from his argument because he’s trying to pretend it’s a good one, and it’s actually a big hot stinking pile of shit. Rando has to keep attention off of how bad his argument is by shifting to Chester the burden of showing it’s a bad argument rather than Rando’s taking on the responsibility of showing it’s a good argument. That’s how Trump supporters argue.

So, if you want the short version of these many posts, the best strategy is to keep the burden of proof on Rando. Insist he show he has a good argument. He’ll resist like a cat being put into a bath because he doesn’t have a good argument, and he doesn’t know how to defend the claims he’s loyally repeating—his talking points didn’t include that page. He’ll deflect.

I’ve often wondered (when arguing with some people) why they’re trying to engage in argument at all, since they’re just making themselves look stupid to people who understand how argument works. I think the argument about replacing RBG is going to bring out the worst aspects of their already bad ways of arguing because it’s pure Machiavellianism (any and all means are good if they lead to the success of the Trump Administration). Machiavellianism is, by its nature, never rational argumentation. Rational argumentation says that there are standards that apply equally to all interlocutors. Machiavellianism says that no standards apply to us.

The rhetorical problem for Trump supporters is that a lot of them don’t like thinking of themselves as irrationally supporting a Machiavellian Administration. So, they talk as though their political agenda is grounded in consistent principles and can be defended through rational argumentation, but neither is true. That contradiction (an unprincipled policy agenda indefensible through rational argumentation) is the handful of steaming shit from which the talking points are supposed to distract us.

Briefly, here’s how the current pro-Trump talking points work (or don’t):

• they claim that each political action is driven by a principle that would appear to transcend faction, but they appeal to contradictory principles (for instance, elections that the GOP wins are mandates from the people about how Congress should behave, but elections they lose aren’t—so there isn’t really a principle about elections being mandates).
• they justify this Machiavellianism by saying that they are committed to a higher principle, but it gets weird when they try to articulate that “higher principle”—they aren’t committed to small government, anti-corruption, law and order on principle (they’re fine with big government if it’s surveillance of Trump critics, Trump’s grifting the government, police forces above the law). So, they like to think of themselves as “principled” but what they mean by that is inflexible loyalty to the group.
• because, I think, even they feel some cognitive dissonance (many of them claim to follow someone who said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” after all), they have invented the hobgoblin of abortion in the hopes of making it the principle to which they are committed. Criminalizing abortion is not a rational strategy for ending abortions (oddly enough, many of these same people believe that criminalizing activity doesn’t reduce it when it comes to gun violence—they advocate praying away gun violence, but they want to ban abortion), and they refuse to do the things that would reduce abortion. It doesn’t end abortion—it just ends safe ones —and it isn’t the most effective strategy for reducing them. [2]
• they believe that criminalizing abortion makes them good people, and therefore anything they do is justified. In other words, they’re Machiavellian. (Thus, every argument, if it goes on, will have them say at some point, “Well, Dems are pro-abortion” when Dems have a better plan for reducing abortion than they do).
• except they aren’t principled (see the first).
• in other words, they are proud that they will make any argument or use any tactic to get their way because they are rigidly committed to what they think of as a principle (they want to criminalize abortion), and yet they want the legitimacy of making a rational argument in support. (And just to be clear, they don’t even have a rational argument when it comes to abortion—it’s all ethical theatre.)
• or they reject argumentation entirely and just want to win, and they think they are.

The final point I’ll make is that this is all profoundly anti-democratic. Many of his supporters openly want a democracy of the believers—that is, a “democracy” in name only, in which only people who agree with them get to hold power, influence decisions, or vote.[3]

Again, since none of this adds up to a rational argument, and Trump supporters have abandoned rational argumentation, a lot of people choose not to argue with them, and that’s fine. But someone asked, and so I wanted to write something about what to do if you do choose to argue with them. It’s turned into a long analysis of pseudo-rational argumentation (which is far from unique to Trump supporters), so that will be a series of posts much of which will repeat things lots of people have said (including me on this blog).

[1] I’m saying Trump supporters, and not Republicans or conservatives, because I think there is an odd (and even disturbing) conformity in Trump supporters’ arguments specifically—in my experience, they’re largely repeating the same arguments. I don’t see the same level of conformity among people who self-identify as conservative or Republican and aren’t especially supportive of Trump. (I don’t just mean Lincoln Project–some of whose arguments are non-rational at best–but a kind of person who isn’t in the Trump cult. What I haven’t watched enough is whether people in the Trump cult can make good arguments when they’re on topics other than Trump–that would be interesting to see.

[2] I think many political strategists don’t want to solve abortion because, if they did, they wouldn’t have it as a political rallying point. If they overturn Roe v Wade, they’ll have to find something else—a war on illegal abortions or attacks on birth control. Either of those will have unfortunate political consequences, since a lot of people do want access to birth control, and do want abortions for them and people like them.

[3] You find people like this all over the political spectrum—people who are eliminationist in their politics. I think it’s interesting that so many of these people are obsessed with sharia law–it’s clearly projection.

Outrage, inside dealing, and pissing in public; aka, how hating on “government” enables corruption

books about demagoguery

At one point, when I was living in an overwhelmingly Republican area (there were often no Democrats on the ballot for many of the offices), there was a scandal, and the community was outraged, and a public official was removed from office. There was another event around the same time that the media tried to make a scandal, but the community (and my neighbors) treated it as a trivial event that happens because people are people. In both scandals, as far as I can tell, everyone involved was Republican, so this wasn’t a question of partisan irrationality.

Here were the two issues. One: there was a plan for a new events center, and someone connected to the board (or perhaps even on the board) bought, in one of those complicated short-term ownership agreements, land that insider information let them know was going to be bought by for that center, and made a killing. There were articles in the local paper about how dodgy all this was.

Two: there was a sheriff had too much to drink at a wedding, and so walked home. On the way, he stopped to piss by the side of the road. He was arrested (that’s a sex crime in Texas).

It seemed to me that the self-dealing was a bigger deal than pissing in public. Pissing on the side of the road hurts literally no one. The self-dealing is corruption at its most obvious. My die-hard Republican neighbors had no opinion about the events center issue, dismissing it as “politics as usual,” but they were outraged about the sheriff.

And that’s when I understood how some people think about political decisions and corruption. They are so “anti-government” that they think it’s great if someone profits off government decisions–because profit is good.

My neighbors claimed that they were concerned with fiscal responsibility in government, but they must have known that the land deal meant that the county paid a lot more money for that land than it would have if there hadn’t been that inside deal. What they valued more than fiscal responsibility was somebody getting money out of the government. What they saw was someone using their position of power to maximize their personal profit, and that is what they valued–that’s what they thought power was for.

The government corruption generated profit. And my neighbors admired anyone who generated profit. And they didn’t admire someone who pissed in public. (The sheriff was also accused of sexual harassment, but that wasn’t something that outraged my neighbors.)

I’ve seen this a lot in people who describe themselves as “conservative.”[1] They are outraged about government bloat except when an individual profits tremendously through grift, graft, and self-dealing. As I said, that’s what they think power is for–to help yourself and your friends and hurt your enemies. And that’s one reason that so many people openly admire that Trump is using the government as his personal checking account.

The (conservative) author Jonathan Haidt has said that people who self-identify as conservative value loyalty to their ingroup whereas people who self-identify as liberal don’t. Haidt tries to make that valuing loyalty an admirable and simultaneously morally neutral quality, but it is neither.

It isn’t that my neighbors valued loyalty as a principle (in which case they would admire loyalty in Democrats); it’s that they value loyalty to their group. Had the people involved in that shady land deal been Democrats, my neighbors would have been outraged.

The GOP outrage machine (one of these days I’ll post about various other outrage machines) has for some time been engaged in a logically vexed anti-government demagoguery in which “government” is liberal.[2] They have also been promoting political success as nothing more than “stigginit to the liberals” and upsetting media. Once you’re drinking that demagogic Flavoraid, then there is no such thing as Republicans grifting the taxpayers.[3]

Republicans should care that Trump is grifting the government. But they don’t really care about fiscal responsibility; that’s just a phrase to make them feel better about their own corruption. The government does have bloat (every big institution does) and the government doesn’t do things in the way that makes the most sense to me (no big institution does). As I said in another (much too long) post, big institutions make bad decisions. But they also make decisions that aren’t bad–they’re the best decisions within the various constraints, or good enough decisions within the constraints. If we spend our lives outraged that the university, or city, or government isn’t enacting the policies we believe to be right, then we’re spending our lives in the pleasurable orgy of outrage. We aren’t doing good political work. Knee-jerk anti-government outrage enables the kind of grifting my neighbors admired.

[1] They aren’t conservative. They’re Randian neo-liberals.

[2] By its very nature, government is always conservative, but that’s a different post. And the GOP outrage machine isn’t about conservatism–Trump isn’t conservative–but about supporting whatever the political agenda of the GOP candidate for President happens to be at this moment.

[3] It isn’t just conservatives who have an irrational and knee-jerk hostility to the government. But, regardless of the voting pattern of the person engaged in trashing government, that position helps neo-conservative/neoliberals dismantle necessary services.

“Trump is going to win in a landslide”: Supporting Trump is now openly irrational

Recently, I’ve noticed that, when people post something critical of Trump, Trump supporters don’t even try to argue with the criticism. More and more, I’m seeing Trump supporters say, “Trump is going to win in a landslide.”

In other words, Trump supporters are admitting three things, any one of which makes them look really bad: 1) they don’t care whether their candidate is corrupt, dishonest, incompetent, destructive, as long as he’s winning (that is, if his setting them on fire makes “libruls” too hot, they’re happy); 2) that it’s impossible to defend him through anything within three city blocks of rational argumentation; 3) that they repeat the talking points they’re given without thinking them through at all. As I said a year ago, Trump supporters have given up arguing for him or his policies.

I don’t think the left v. right binary (or continuum) is a useful way to describe our political landscape. It’s used because it’s more profitable for media to present things in simplistic and proto-demagogic ways. And so I think it’s fueling demagoguery to characterize the GOP (let alone Trump supporters) as “conservative.” They aren’t. The GOP hasn’t been conservative since Eisenhower. From the moment of FDR’s success, the GOP has been reactionary—its whole identity has been not-Democratic. There are slogans—small government, low taxes, freedom—but they’re ignored or abandoned at any given moment for an election. Even the two rallying cries (abortion and immigration) are deliberately not actually solved. If the GOP were to solve either of those issues (and they could) those buttons would no longer be hot. So, the GOP has policies that will definitely not solve them.

Granted, every political party will make exceptions on its principles, but as Tim Alberta recently put it, for the GOP, these principles “have in recent years gone from elastic to expendable.” As Alberta says, “If it agitates the base, if it lights up a Fox News chyron, if it serves to alienate sturdy real Americans from delicate coastal elites, then it’s got a place in the Grand Old Party.” In that same article, Alberta quotes the GOP consultant Brendan Buck as saying that the GOP is now all and only about “owning the libs and pissing off the media.” The response I mentioned above, “He will win in a landslide” is exactly that way of thinking about politics.

In 2016, there were arguments for Trump. He would hire the best people, as a successful businessman he would negotiate effectively, as a Washington outsider he would break the low-level nepotism and corruption of government politics. I’m not saying whether or not those arguments were true—I’m saying that his supporters aren’t even making them any more. That’s interesting. It’s as though even they are acknowledging that supporting him is rationally indefensible. They’re not even trying.

They also aren’t willing to look at anything critical of him, and that’s significant too. They’re like little kids pretending they aren’t afraid of what’s under the bed, and that’s why they take a running jump to get into bed. They aren’t getting near that thing they aren’t afraid of.

This kind of fearful blustery partisanship is hard for a lot of critics of Trump to respond to, since many people who are interested in politics care about policies and arguments—and those are both off the table. Our impulse is to go to the data about him, but there are two problems with that approach. First, their attachment to Trump isn’t vulnerable to data because they won’t look at information that disconfirms their beliefs (they reject it as “biased,” showing they don’t understand what that word means, or how bias works). Second, and related, since they only get information from “trusted” media (that is, sources biased toward Trump), they have a lot of data to support their notion that he’s doing a great job and is not responsible for anything. (The research suggests they’ll only change their mind if they know someone personally who gets sick. )

So, what do you do about someone in your world who says, in response to your post critical of Trump, “He will win in a landslide!”?

I think you don’t argue with them, unless you just want to see exactly how far they’ll go with their nonsense (in other words, if you’re the sort of person who touches paint if there is a “wet paint” sign and pokes fire ant nests, just to see what happens). But I think it can be useful to point out that “He will win in a landslide” isn’t an argument, and that they’re admitting they don’t have an argument. I think it can be helpful to refuse to argue, while making a point that the person isn’t worth arguing with.

Pro-Trump rhetoric has long been all about projection, and it’s worth remembering that his major projection is how “sad” or “pathetic” someone is. I think that’s significant—they’re afraid that they’re sad and pathetic. And whether they are is something I don’t know, but their defenses of him are very sad and very pathetic. And they know it. Sort of.

John Muir, the Hetch Hetchy Valley, and a bird: or, how I’ve spent the last forty years, and will spend the next as-long-as-I’ve-got

One spring, when I was a child, my family went to Yosemite Valley in Yosemite National Park. My family mostly tried (and failed) to teach one another bridge, and I wandered around the emerald valley. Having grown up in semi-arid southern California, the forested walks seemed to me magical, and I was enchanted. One evening, my mother took me to a campfire, hosted by a ranger, who told the story of John Muir, a California environmentalist crucial in the preservation of Yosemite National Park. The last part of the ranger’s talk was about Muir’s last political endeavor, his unsuccessful attempt to prevent the damming and flooding of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, a valley the ranger said was as beautiful as the one by which I had been entranced. The ranger presented the story as a dramatic tragedy of Good (John Muir) versus Evil (the people who wanted to dam and flood the valley), with Evil winning and Muir dying of a broken heart. I was deeply moved.

I’d like to say this story so moved me that I became active in environmentalism, but that wouldn’t really be true—I could distinguish a pigeon from a seagull, and that was about it. Muir’s story did, however, stick with me as an odd story about rhetoric. Why could someone who, according to the ranger, have been so persuasive and moving on so many points—preserving Yosemite Valley, creating the national park system, valuing the High Sierras, starting the Sierra Club–have failed to persuade people on the one point that the ranger presented as so starkly simple? Why do people with the better cases so often lose arguments? And later it came back to me.

I went to Berkeley for my undergraduate degree, and became entranced again; this time by rhetoric.

The Berkeley rhetoric department emphasized the teaching of persuasive argumentation, something which must be distinguished from what many people experience as argument. I don’t want to get into the ways that was both right and wrong, so much as point out that it taught that rhetoric is always relational, and the kind of rhetoric we teach and practice signifies, models, and reinforces the kind of relationship with have with our interlocutors. Thus, a definition of rhetoric—whether we define rhetoric as getting others to do what we want or the ability to understand disagreements—is not just a theory of discourse, how we communicate to someone else, but a theory of community. A limited conception of rhetoric leads to a limited way of interacting with others, and the limited success we get from that interaction confirms our sense that rhetoric is limited.

Until I went to college, whenever I had been taught argumentation I had been required to have a confrontational thesis which was stated in the beginning (usually after a funnel introduction), and which was supported by three reasons (which were themselves stated at the beginning of each paragraph and before any evidence). Each “proof” paragraph had one piece of evidence to support its point. In the penultimate paragraph, I was expected to summarize and then contradict (or concede, but declare as trivial) some opposition argument. The conclusion would restate my thesis, and typically end with some rousing generalizations.

It is difficult to describe how frustrating I found this form. I certainly found it unpersuasive. That isn’t to say I’d never changed my mind; even in high school I was well aware that people did change their minds, but the texts that I’d found persuasive never followed this narrow structure. For one thing, the texts that changed my mind on things were often narratives—whether a fictional narrative like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter that made me think differently about the role of gossip and identity, or a non-fiction narrative like Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem that made me think differently about loyalty and duty.

It especially bothered me that the writers whom we were taught to admire and told to emulate—such as Martin Luther King, Jr., George Orwell, Virginia Woolf–did not write the way that we were required to write (thus making the recommendations to admire and emulate them more than a little confusing). On the contrary, their conclusions tended to be after their evidence, they tended to summarize their opposition early (often as early as the introduction), their theses were generally at the end of their texts, assuming they even had a thesis stated explicitly in the text at all. The experience of reading them was completely different from reading something written in the “tell ’em what you’re gonna’ tell, tell ’em, then tell ’em what you told ’em” form that always felt to me as though I was sitting in a small chair being yelled at, while reading people like King made me feel that I was walking along with the author who was pointing things out along the way.

Although we were presented with King, Orwell, and Woolf as rhetors to be admired, and told to emulate, we were graded down if we did. In other words, the explicit rules for good rhetoric—what my teachers said I had to do—were wildly at odds with the implicit rules for good rhetoric—what the ideal writing actually did. Thus, the teachers’ explicit instructions—write this way, and write like these authors—were actually in conflict.

This conflict within our explicit instructions for students—that we give them rules that are actually contradictory—is not particular to my teachers, and is a problem within the history of teaching writing. The contradiction comes about, I’ll suggest, from universalizing about rhetorical strategies and relations, and the number of concepts muddled in the term “effective.” This is another one of the themes to which I will return: what do we praise in rhetoric, what is effective in rhetoric, what do we say people should do, and how are those three at odds with each other.

At Berkeley, in the rhetoric classes, there was not as much conflict between the explicit and implicit rules for writing. The papers we wrote were supposed to be written for an intelligent and informed opposition (not at or about them) and were supposed to be structured in a movement from what we had identified as common ground with that opposition through our evidence to the conclusion.
But, this kind of writing is hard, and, one day, tired and frustrated with a paper assignment, I found myself walking by a coastal lagoon in an area far to the north of Berkeley. I had driven along the Northern California coast for days, and parked near the marshy water in order to give myself a chance to wander. But as I moved through the high grass, I startled something that took off with a surprising splash and whoof of sweeping wings. It was an elegant blue grey bird the color of the sky on an overcast day with a neck that seemed to me as long and majestic as a flamingo’s. What impressed me most was the grace, beauty, and power of the sweeping stroke of its wings as it flew over me and out of sight. I discovered I had been holding my breath.

I had never before been much impressed by birds.

I tried to find some places closer to Berkeley where I might watch birds like these. With high hopes, I went to a place called “Shorebird Park” only to discover that it had a neatly mown lawn, picnic tables, and dogs. While it was a friendly and inviting place for people, even able to accommodate large groups at picnic areas, it was useless for most shorebirds. The carefully tended lawns and rampaging dogs precluded any nesting habitat for birds; the ubiquitousness of garbage attracted seagulls who chased away any other species. I didn’t go back there. After some exploring, I discovered a marsh near a freeway, and another at the end of an access road near the airport, each of which provided habitat for egrets, red winged blackbirds, avocets, and stilts. There was something charming in watching the different birds–the way the avocets skittered, the red winged blackbirds flashed a ruby spot when they flew, the egrets endlessly looked gracefully ungainly. I was disturbed to discover that both of these marshy habitats were proposed for development.

I decided to try to use my experience seeing the grey bird (called a Great Blue Heron) as the common ground in order to move my audience toward the conclusion that the marshes I had visited and other like them should not all be turned into hotels or industrial parks, nor made into parks as sanitized and bereft of wildlife as the unintentionally ironically named “Shorebird Park.” Instead, at least some should remain wilderness areas in the middle of an urban environment so that everyone could have the breath-taking experience I did of seeing a Great Blue Heron.

I began with a description of seeing the heron, and then moved to bemoaning the tragedy of people in the city not having access to wildlife areas close to home. My instructor characterized the resulting paper as “an impressive effort, but unsuccessful” because it would not persuade an intelligent and informed opposition audience. That is, my common ground was not shared with my opposition (who were unlikely to see the flight of the heron as terribly important), and I had not really effectively incorporated or answered the kinds of concerns they were likely to have (such as the potential economic benefits of developing wetlands). Most important for the instructor was that the logic of my argument that preserving wilderness in urban areas would benefit people because it would provide them with opportunities to see a wider variety of wildlife was subtly circular.

There is a lot of disagreement in rhetoric as to what we should call that kind of discourse, and it is often called “epideictic,” from Aristotle’s tri-partite division of rhetoric. I have not found Aristotle’s taxonomy very useful, for various reasons. Here I simply want to mention that this kind of rhetoric—that looks as though it is persuading an opposition, but is actually confirming those who already agree—can happen anywhere, in political assemblies, schools, public areas, books, movies.

There are advantages to this kind of rhetoric, but one problem with it is that we don’t always recognize it when we see it. That is, we often use the word “persuasive” to mean “I like it” and describe a text as “persuasive” or “effective” when we mean that it confirmed beliefs we already have, rather than that it changed our views. This will be, perhaps, the most consistent theme in these lectures—the tremendous difficulty we have in describing the impact of rhetoric, both individual texts, sets of texts, and even a realm of texts.
For instance, in regard to the paper about the birds, I had shared the paper with fellow tutors at the Writing Center, with friends, with classmates, and with just about anyone I could persuade to read it, and all had praised it highly. It had seemed persuasive to them.

The teacher was right, of course—I hope that is clear—but none of us could see what she did because we, granting the premise that experiencing non-urban wildlife is valuable, could not imagine anyone not granting it. We could not shift our perspective to someone who disagreed.

Rhetoric, then, is a cognitive process, a way of thinking.

Or, at least, persuasive rhetoric is.

So, at this point, the question for me became whether I would find an enthymeme that would work with people who did not value the environment, and that led me back to John Muir and the Hetch Hetchy debate. Was there something he could or should have done that would have produced a different outcome? Could Muir, a man whose writing many still find persuasive, have found a rhetorical strategy that would have worked with his audience? Was Muir’s failure to prevent the damming and flooding of the Hetch Hetchy Valley a rhetorical failure? Is there something he should have done?

I decided I would write my senior thesis on this topic, and I could figure out what he should have done. I didn’t. So I decided I would get an MA, and figure it out. Then I thought I needed a PhD to solve this problem, so I decided to get one. (But I wasn’t going to be a professor.) And what I found was that, when people disagree about the environment, it’s because we disagree about God. So, how do you disagree productively about policies that affect a lot of us when you don’t share premises? I spent 40 years working on that problem.

I intend to spend my retirement working on it. I’ll get it this time.

And it all goes back to John Muir, a ranger who knew how to tell a story, and the way my soul still sings when I see a Great Blue Heron.

Grammar Nazis and deflected/projected racism

My mother, who was very racist but sincerely believed herself to be not racist, said that she was not personally opposed to intermarriage, but she was opposed to it, on the grounds that it was so hard on the children. In other words, she supported a racist practice (social shaming of “intermarriage”) while still feeling herself not racist because she could tell herself that her racist practice was necessitated by the racism of other people.

Teachers—all teachers, at every level—are far too often my mother. We teach in a racist way, all the while claiming that we, personally, aren’t racist, but our racist practice is necessary because of the racism of others. We do it when it comes to teaching “standard Edited American English” (a particular dialect) as though it is better than other dialects.

English has a lot of different dialects, and many of those dialects are grammatically different. Standard Edited American English (SEAE), for instance (a dialect no one speaks), prohibits the comma splice (The cats ran, the dogs barked), but Standard Edited British English doesn’t. In spoken English, sentence fragments are fine, and are also fine in much published writing (depending on formality), but generally prohibited in very formal writing (except resumes or cv, where they are required). It would be inappropriate for someone to use full sentences in a resume, and therefore equally inappropriate for someone to mark a resume as “wrong” for using sentence fragments. Sentence fragments aren’t therefore “worse” than complete sentences–they’re appropriate or not; that’s how language works.

However, in any language there are dialects that are stigmatized for racist, classist, historical, or various other bigoted reasons. They’re stigmatized as “bad” English (or French, or German, or whatever). In American English, one use of the double negative is stigmatized and the other accepted because one is associated with Black English. “She don’t know nuthin’ about nuthin’” is a perfectly clear sentence, but “The argument is not unclear” takes math to understand. Yet, it’s the first that gets called “bad English.” (Which is funny, if you think about it–calling something “bad English” is itself an instance of using the wrong term, so it’s “worse” English than a double negative.)

So, it’s important to separate out two kinds of grammatical errors: a violation of a dialect from within that dialect (such as someone trying to write SEAE who violates rules of that dialect, such as the muddled Black English of The Help), ones that are correct usage within that dialect but not accepted in the dialect a reader is expecting. (A third category would be uses of language that aren’t grammatically incorrect at all, but people think they are–ending a sentence with a preposition, for instance.)

Here’s what I mean by the second kind of error. It would be bizarre for someone to chastise someone speaking German for ending a sentence with a preposition—that’s how German works. (It’s also how English works, but that’s a different post.) It would also be sheer bigotry to say that French is better than German because French doesn’t allow ending sentences with prepositions. Dialects and languages are all equally good at communicating; none is better than another.

I’ll mention something about the first toward the end of this post, but, for the most part, I want to focus on what we do about stigmatized dialects. The problem is that, since, for instance, Black English is stigmatized, and Standard Edited American English is rewarded, should teachers require that their students learn Standard Edited American English?

The advice for years (ever since the National Council of Teachers of English and Conference on College Composition and Communication issued the Statement on Students’ Right to Their Own Language”) has been to advocate code-switching. To say that a student should know SEAE because it’s useful, not because it’s better, is like saying that it’s useful to know French if you intend to live and work in France. From within this model, German is no better than French (nor is French better than German), and a student might be speaking perfect German in a French class. A person shouldn’t give up German, but add on the knowledge of French. Students should learn SEAE as an additional dialect that is useful under some circumstances.[1]

Unfortunately, too many teachers and professors and employers and people in power use the language of code-switching in order to enforce the message that Black English is inferior.

A few years ago I found myself in an argument on the internet with a white teacher in a predominantly African American school who banned Black English in her classes. She was proud that she told her students that Black English would hold them back. She wasn’t racist, she insisted; she was helping them. There’s what might seem like a subtle difference between what she was doing and what “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” advocates, but it’s an important one. She was clear that SEAE was better than Black English, that Black English was something they should be shamed for using. I then noticed that I often had the same problem with training people in the teaching of writing—they made a bigger deal about perfectly clear uses of stigmatized language than they did about about grammar problems that interfered with communication. They did so, they said, because other people would be racist.

It’s my mother opposing “intermarriage” because other people would be racist. That’s racist.

Granted, we’re in a racist world, and using a stigmatized dialect will hurt a person in terms of job or housing applications, getting good scores on standardized tests, or dealing with racist teachers who deflect their racism onto others who might be racist. So, I understand, and still support, the idea that we should teach code-switching, but if (and only if) we give students the ability to choose whether they want to learn to code-switch, we do so by making it absolutely clear that no dialect is better than another, and we make a bigger deal about violations of grammar and usage within (rather than across) dialects. I don’t know that we can do the second, and if that’s the case, then teaching code-switching is racist.

I mentioned that violations within a dialect are worth looking at carefully, largely because they can signal issues with thinking. For instance, mixing metaphors can indicate that we haven’t decided on the underlying model, or that we’re appealing to troubling models, or that we just aren’t thinking. I once heard a facilitator say, “We’re on a fast train flying out of the box.” She was describing a train wreck, as far as I could tell, but I think she meant it as a good thing. I don’t know. Had she said, “We ain’t done nothin’ about nothin’” I could have understood her perfectly.

Unclear pronoun reference can mean we haven’t really decided how causality works. For instance, if I say, “There are bunnies eating kale in the backyard, which is weird,” it isn’t clear whether the weird part is that there are bunnies, that they’re eating kale, that they’re doing it in the backyard.” In other words, it isn’t clear what “which” is referring to. What’s interesting to me about these sorts of errors (predication error or mixed construction is another one along these lines) is that “correcting” the error means first figuring out what I’m trying to say. These are interesting and significant errors.

Whenever I get into this topic (or when it comes up even on scholarly mailing lists), people advocating my position (the position of most if not all linguists, btw) get accused of thinking that anything goes, and that we shouldn’t care about clarity or correctness of any kind. That isn’t what I’m saying. I’m making four points. First, no dialect is better than any other (it might be more useful, inappropriate, effective under certain circumstances). Second, what grammar Nazis worry about are often not “grammar” issues at all (but style preferences, hypercorrectness, misunderstandings of rules, misapplications of rules), and are almost always not issues of clarity, but are class or race markers (e.g., comma splices, double negatives, subject-verb agreement, ending with a preposition). Third, we should worry about certain issues of usage, but it should be the ones that are violations within a dialect, especially ones that signal muddled thinking. Fourth, the conventional wisdom among experts for years has been that we should teach code-switching (that is, the ability to switch between dialects), but that’s still racist unless we do so in a way that makes it clear that we aren’t privileging one dialect over another, and we offer it as a choice to students.

[1] Another way to put this is to say that prescriptivism is perfectly fine, as long as it’s taught qua prescriptivism.

Holding out for a Hero: The Far-Right Canonization of Kyle Rittenhouse

Guest post by Jim Roberts-Miller

Painting of St. Michael — Image from here: https://www.patriciarobertsmiller.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=2586&action=edit

On Tuesday, August 25 Kyle Rittenhouse drove from his home in Illinois to Kenosha, Wisconsin. Kenosha was roiled by protests over the police shooting of Jacob Blake. That night, Rittenhouse shot three people, killing two.

He is becoming a folk hero on the racist right. And not just on Twitter (which, as is often correctly pointed out, isn’t real life). As of this writing, at least two right wing pundits, Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter, have come out decidedly in favor of the shooter, claiming he was acting in self-defense and setting his defense of private property as superior to the “lawlessness” of the protests.
The racist right is in desperate need of a hero after a summer of protest in which their usual tricks of attacking the victim, sympathizing with the tough job of police, and exaggerating the usually mild property damage that often comes with angry protests were, for various reasons, simply not working.

Despite their standard calls for “civility”, so-called support for “peaceful protests, not violence”, support for Black Lives Matter not only held steady, but actually went up. Corporations felt the need to make explicit their support of the BLM movement. Confederate monuments which survived recent protests were removed, in some case overnight. City governments began looking to lower police budgets, shifting that money elsewhere. In a least a few cases, city governments have actually done this. The right’s normal paladin, Donald Trump, seemed not only unable to move the rest of America with his typically harsh rhetoric, but watched as his popularity went down and the electoral lead of his opponent Joe Biden climb into the double digits, at least partially thanks to Trump’s ham-fisted efforts to violently put down what were seen an legitimate protests, walling off the White House and using tear gas to disperse protestors so he could hold a Bible upside down outside of a church.

A vast, if incomplete and imperfect, reckoning with the structures of white supremacy began to percolate through American society. The hysteria with which this was met on the right is extreme.

On the internet, you never more than two or three clicks away from a racist right wing alternate universe of (black and brown) wild-eyed leftists bent on burning down the suburbs and replacing the (white) social structures of peaceful law-abiding (white) Americans with their (black and brown) socialist agenda for robbing the productive so they can live off welfare. And in this universe, the fear, confusion, and anger over the failure of the rest of decent (white) society to get angry over the lawlessness and disrespect being shown to the normal (white) power structures was palpable.

But the racist right has only one play. And that is to keep pushing the narrative that the protestors are not only misguided and wrong, but that they are (black and brown) violent and greedy and actively coming for you (decent white person). They pushed that narrative with the Portland protests, but it wasn’t working out. Kenosha was another chance.

And then Rittenhouse, who broke several laws just by being present in Kenosha with an AR-15 (thus proving the Racist right’s problem isn’t really lawlessness, but who is breaking the law), shot three people. Unconsciously or not, the racist right realized that they could not allow Rittenhouse’s crimes to hijack the news the way the murder of Heather Heyer did in Charlottesville. To do so would once again wreck their narrative of leftist (black and brown) violence endangering good hard-working (white) folks. And so he couldn’t be written off as an aberration, or someone who made a mistake.

No. Rittenhouse had to be a hero. A young man who idolized the police, law and order, and who selflessly came to Kenosha to protect the property and society of ordinary (white) people from a ravening (black and brown) mob. That is their story. That is their desperate need. For them Rittenhouse is a hero, a martyr, a (white) man literally pursued by a mob who, in his extremity, was forced to kill to defend himself. And that is the story they will be pushing at all costs, because it all they have and they have to get enough (white) people to condone the violence needed to put the mob (black and brown people) back in their place and re-elect Donald Trump.

You must not let them do this. Rittenhouse deliberately chose to break several laws to go to Kenosha Wisconsin, gun in hand, expecting to shoot people. He got his wish. This is not heroism.

So someone said, “Check your privilege”

people arguing — From the cover of Wayne Booth’s _Modern Dogma-

It seems to me that white males get more upset about being told to “check your privilege” than do women or POC. (And, yes, POC do sometimes get told to check their privilege because privilege is complicated—Ijeoma Oluo has a nice chapter on checking her own privilege.) “Check your privilege” is upsetting, I’ve been told, because they understand themselves to have been told that their opinion is irrelevant purely because of who they are.

And I think women and POC have had that–being told our opinion is worthless because of who we are–happen so often that it’s nothing new. If anything, being told that my opinion is invalid because I’m speaking from such a place of privilege that my view is distorted is a much more valid reason than many others I’ve been given over the years. (My favorites remains the time that a man shouted at me that, because I’m a woman I couldn’t possibly understand logic.) After all, there are ways in which my coming from a place of privilege does make my opinion worth less (and sometimes worthless).

For instance, when I went to graduate school, it wasn’t possible—let alone necessary—to buy a personal computer, tuition was low, and housing close to campus was available and affordable. Therefore, although the stipend was low, it was possible to make it through the program with very little debt. Since I came from the kind of family that paid for my undergraduate education, I started graduate school with no debt at all. That I was so privileged means that any advice I might now give to students considering graduate school is worth less than the advice of someone closer to them in experience.

I give a lot of advice about writing, and, although I try to incorporate advice that others with different experiences have given, ultimately, what I say is going to be from my perspective. And my perspective is shaped by the advantages I have and I’ve had (such as low or nonexistent debt) And therefore it won’t be good advice for some people. They should ignore my advice.

If you tell me to check my privilege, you’re telling me that you think I’ve forgotten my epistemic limitations. You think my privilege means that my advice or judgment isn’t valid, or, at least, much more limited than I seem to realize.

What people who get defensive when told to check our privilege don’t understand is that your saying “Check your privilege” to me isn’t changing our relationship. You’re just naming it. It’s just a verbalized eyeroll. If you hadn’t said it, you would still have thought it.

So, the best response is to ask for clarification. In the days before people said, “Check your privilege,” there were other ways of making the same point: “You’re just saying that because you’re….” “I think you’re forgetting about…” “From my perspective…” “Someone from [this background] would look at it really differently…” and so on. And I think we’ve all had someone point out that our advice or judgment really was seriously limited by not having thought about it from another perspective. And it was useful.

It’s particularly hard to see how our perspective is limited by privilege because power comes into play. When I had people from prestigious and well-funded institutions give me career advice that was seriously limited by their privilege, it was hard for me to say, “Yeah, that won’t work for me” because they were powerful, and I needed their support. I didn’t say anything. But neither did I try to follow their advice because it didn’t make any sense—I didn’t have a TA to do my grading, a research assistant to help with clerical work, an administrative assistant to help with program administration. They hadn’t thought through how their advice was coming from a place of privilege, and was useless for someone like me.

This isn’t to say that someone who says, “Check your privilege” is always right. Sometimes people have a lot less privilege than it might appear, sometimes we’ve misunderstood how power works in a particular setting, sometimes people misunderstand what privilege means. Sometimes when people say, “Check your privilege” they want to talk about it, and they’re willing to explain in more detail. But sometimes they don’t want to, and that’s fine too. Almost always, it will take some time to think about whether and how privilege may have affected our judgment and what we should do about it.

Socially acceptable racism; Or, how “new” racism isn’t new

A lot of people make the point that there was a kind of racism—called “old” racism—that was openly biological/genetic, and openly hostile. Then, at a certain point, racist discourse shifted to become more genteel. That distinction between old and new racism isn’t entirely accurate, and the way it’s inaccurate is important. There have always been “genteel” racisms—what might be called “racism with a smile” or “some of my closest friends are…” racism. And those “nice” (that is, socially acceptable) racisms enable the kinds that openly advocate violence, expulsion, and extermination.

In this post, I want to talk about one of them—one that was tremendously popular in the twentieth century. This view accepted that there were “races,” that they were essentially (even genetically) different, that these differences manifest themselves in external characteristics (looks, behavior, cultural practices), but that all of these differences add to the richness of human life. This kind of racism celebrated the essential differences of human races. (Sort of. I’ll get to that.) People advocating this kind of racism often explicitly set themselves off from a similarly biological racism (they weren’t racist) on the grounds that they weren’t that bad.

Take, for instance, Dorothy Sayers, the mystery novelist. In Whose Body (1923), the villain kills a perfectly nice Jew out of spite with a non-trivial amount of antisemitism. The hero expresses no antisemitism, not even when his friend indicates a desire to marry into a Jewish family, and the narrator has nothing negative to say about the victim or his family. In fact, everything we hear about the victim and his family appears positive. He is very good at playing the stock market and therefore wealthy, but not showy in this wealth (for instance, because he doesn’t have a chauffeur, he travels alone to the meeting the murderer has set up). He dotes on his wife and daughter, and is a good family man. He is kind to people.

This all appears positive—he’s smart, successful, modest, and a family man. This characterization is, however, simply the “positive” side of the same coin of rabidly antisemitic rhetoric. For those groups, Jews are: parasitic capitalist, money-grubbing, cheap, tribal (“clannish” is the word sometimes used), and kind becomes “pacifist” or “cowardly.”

Antisemitic rhetoric in groups like the Nazis stuck close to the producer/parasite dichotomy that runs back through readings of Paul’s prohibition about usury. Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons have a useful description of how that dichotomy plays into toxic populism. The short version is that toxic populism presents some group as producers, and the other as parasites, or, in Paul Ryan’s more recent rhetoric, “makers” and “takers.” The in-group is always makers. For many populists, people who make money off of money—financiers, people who play the stock market—haven’t really created wealth (such as through owning land). They’re parasites.

Nazis were populists (authoritarians almost always are, even though their policies actually screw over most of the populace, and especially the middle and lower classes). The notion that Jews were always financiers and stock market geniuses (and bankers) was one of the most important aspects of Nazi antisemitic propaganda. It’s a theme in Mein Kampf, fercryinoutloud. Real money, so this argument goes, comes from agriculture, or perhaps small manufacturing. Being good at the stock market, for Nazis, is a smear.

Similarly, the negative stereotype of Jews was that they can never really be patriots, because they always favor their family rather than their country (for Hitler, an “Aryan” putting his family first is putting the country first). And the stereotype of Jews as cheap was another piece of antisemitic rhetoric. In other words, Sayers, even if her portrayal of a Jew appeared sympathetic (i.e., she was trying to be “nice”), reinforced exactly the stereotypes that resulted in the Holocaust: Jews are good at finance (capitalist parasites), modest (miserly), family lovers (clannish), non-violent (pacifists and cowards). It was racism with a smile.

She was far from alone. After Wyndham Lewis’ enthusiastic paean to Hitler (1931) didn’t go over as well as he’d expected, and his insistence that Hitler was “a man of peace” showed him to have been very wrong, he tried to get back in the good graces of the public with his Jews: Are They Human? (1939). His answer is that they have their own virtues—they’re very loyal to one another and family-loving (clannish), careful with money (greedy and miserly), and so on. Like Sayers, he put it in positive terms, but it was still endorsing the notion that Jews have an essential set of characteristics.

Lewis took Hitler’s claims of wanting world peace at face value, but it’s interesting that he didn’t take Nazi antisemitism at face value. I think it’s because he didn’t really object to it all that much. Lewis and the Nazis didn’t disagree as to the basic character of Jews; they just disagreed as to what should be done about it. So, for Lewis, Hitler’s antisemitism wasn’t especially notable—it was something he could dismiss as a little bit of an overreaction.

What has been a little surprising to me in working on demagoguery, especially when it leads to extreme policies about the cultural out-group, is the number of people who consider themselves “moderate” who endorse the basic narrative behind the demagoguery about the out-group. They just don’t think it should be taken too far.

Germans who agreed that there should be a quota for Jewish doctors, Americans who agreed that integrated schools were just a little too much, Brits who wouldn’t want their daughter to marry one—they could all see themselves as “not racist” (or, at least, not unreasonable in their attitudes toward Those People) because there was some other group less nuanced, less reasonable in their hostility. And, when push came to shove, they might raise an eyebrow at the people who did go “too far,” or perhaps mutter some criticism, but that’s about it. They were often allies, and rarely enemies, of the people who went “too far.”

Thus, that we now have people who say “I’m not racist, but…” isn’t a sign that there is a new kind of racism. It’s an old form, and a very damaging one.