Hey all, I was on a fun podcast with Johanna Hartelius and Jason Micheli, talking about demagoguery and the most recent book.
Talking about Deliberating War on a fun podcast
People need to stop worrying about cursive
When we have taken time and trouble to learn something, we tend to value it—simply because it was a PITA to learn. So, when something gets taken out of the K-12 curriculum, people of a certain generation can have a gleeful “kids these days” moment. When I was young, memorizing the state capitols was dropped from the curriculum in a lot of places, and I remember hearing people bemoan the debacle that had come to be known as education. As it happens, when I’m bored, I will sometimes try to write the states in alphabetical order. If I’m really bored, I’ll then try to identify each state’s capitol. I usually fail. My life would be no worse had I not been taught to memorize the capitols.
[ETA, since, apparently, I was unclear on this point: I don’t remember the state capitols because, between fourth grade and until I was an adult in boring meetings, it was never a skill I needed. Something that you’re forced to learn that you then never or rarely learn is something you forget. That some people in some very specific fields might find that knowledge useful doesn’t mean that it should be a required part of K-12 curriculum.]
As it happens, I write in cursive a lot. It is useful for taking notes quickly, although nowhere near as useful as shorthand—which I was never taught. If we’re concerned about people being able to write quickly, then we should teach shorthand.
When I was teaching, I had some students who wrote exams in cursive, but very few It’s faster to write an exam in cursive, but not necessarily a good choice. Even I think cursive is harder to read, and rhetorically it’s a poor choice to irritate a grader by writing in a way that takes extra time to decipher.
A lot of students wrote in what amounts to italics, and that made a lot of sense (sloped and somewhat looped, but without special characters for letters like capital Q). It’s as fast as cursive, but doesn’t take any particular training to write or read.
The other argument I hear for taking class time to teach cursive is that people won’t be able to read historical documents. This argument puzzles me. Printed documents tended to be in block letters from the beginning of the 19th century. Books were in block letters long before that. Some documents are in cursive (especially proclamations), but not always the same cursive.
I read a fair number of historical documents, and I do get a thrill when I’m looking at an original version of something like the Magna Carta or Declaration of Independence. But it’s that it’s the thing, not that it’s in cursive. I’m not sure that a person understands the document any better if they read it in cursive rather than block letters.
And, in fact, what makes reading those documents difficult isn’t the cursive, but first and foremost the content. The historical context, references, genre. The language is often archaic, and usually invokes legal or philosophical concepts that are unfamiliar. To the extent that deciphering them is hard, it isn’t because they’re in cursive, but usually that the font is serif, and the kerning is confusing. And they aren’t always in cursive. For instance, knowing cursive doesn’t help someone read the Rhode Island charter.
So, really, people need to stop worrying about not teaching cursive. What we should really be getting upset about is that students aren’t being taught geology, sex ed, history, argumentation. I don’t care if it’s in cursive or not.
Deliberating War is published!
The e-book version of Deliberating War is available from Springer!
“Drawing on a rich collection of examples from ancient Greece to the present day, Patricia Roberts-Miller ably demonstrates the failure of political leaders to engage in deliberation when choosing to undertake, continue, or escalate war. Instead, they reframe the situation, deflect the real issues, demonize the enemy, and make themselves the victim, all to convince themselves that war already has been forced upon them and they have no choice. Sometimes wars are justified, but political leaders, specialists, and citizens will all benefit from this accessible work that shows what can happen when deliberation is an essential feature of the rhetoric of war.” (David Zarefsky, Northwestern University, Author of “Lyndon Johnson, Vietnam, and the Presidency: The Speech of March 31, 1968”)
“Deliberating War is a thorough, insightful, and well-written discussion of how people in the Western tradition deliberate about war and treat deliberation as war. In discussing various kinds of war, and various kinds of deliberating about war, Roberts-Miller illuminates how and why some of these are more dangerous than others. This book is a must-read for scholars in history, political science, and communication who care about war, democracy, and the relationships between them.” (Mary E. Stuckey, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences at Penn State University)
“Deliberating War takes rhetoric’s relationship to war out of the realm of meaningless metaphor and into the realm of real, critical, potentially cataclysmic importance. For millennia, debates about war have translated to the battlefield and events on the battlefield have translated into debates about who we are, what we value, and how we should act towards one another. Given how high the stakes are, Roberts-Miller demands that readers grapple with how politicians use rhetoric to drag people to war. But politicians don’t act alone, so she also demands that everyone learn to choose their words more wisely in matters of war, politics, and life.” (Ryan Skinnell, Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing, San José State University)
“Patricia Roberts-Miller’s Deliberating War is a probing study of the rhetorical dynamics that feed on political factionalism to displace deliberation and transform the trope of “politics as war” into real war. It is a sustained and close study of multiple cases of armed conflict that cross historical periods and involve an assortment of adversaries. Various rhetorical practices are insightfully analyzed for how they obstruct democratic deliberation, including how the call to arms is strategically framed, which fallacies typically are deployed, which issues are obscured and left unaddressed, and how the dynamics of the discourse can even carry adversaries into a war they wanted to avoid. Her critique of appeasement rhetoric is particularly acute, as is the point she makes about the militarization of politics in general, which reduces the spectrum of normal policy disagreements to political combat. This is an important work of scholarship on the consequences of literalizing the metaphor of war.” (Robert L. Ivie, Professor Emeritus in English (Rhetoric) & American Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington)
“In this incisive and necessary book, Patricia Roberts-Miller skillfully interrogates the political factors in the decisions made by nations to go to war and the critical lack of deliberation when making those decisions. Her analysis captures the enormity and the tragedy of governments choosing war without losing the humanity of those who must carry out those decisions. In addition to political rhetoric scholars, this book should be required reading within the halls of the U.S. Congress, inside the walls of the Pentagon, and in the classrooms of military academies and war colleges.” (Derek G. Handley, Assistant Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (CDR, U.S. Navy Retired))
[RSA talk III] Under which conditions is democratic speech (im)possible?
We were asked to do an epideictic speech, and one kind of epideictic is psogos: the blaming or condemnatory speech. And I want to condemn the biased/objective binary on the grounds it is necessarily and inherently authoritarian, and thereby makes democratic speech impossible.
The term “authoritarian” is vexed, so I’m going to use an old-school definition: an authoritarian system aspires to univocality, uniformity, asymmetric communication, and reified social policies, values, and relations. It assumes that the nation as a whole should be a rigid and ontologically grounded hierarchy of power and privilege, in which the people at the top decide for those below them; and all institutions within that nation are similarly constructed—the police, families, governments.
Authoritarianism presumes that the hierarchy is legitimate if and only if the people in positions of power are ones who either have direct and unmediated access to the truth (i.e., they are not “biased”), or who are following the dicta of those who do. Because of that direct access, good leaders can invent or enact the correct policy agenda in all realms. So, hidden is the presumption that there is no such thing as significant legitimate disagreement, and that, in every disagreement, there is a single “right” answer that good people can perceive.
A hierarchy’s use of violence, coercion, propaganda, exclusion, and extermination is seen as legitimate as long those actions are in service of preserving the purity of the community, rewarding and empowering good people (i.e., in-group), coercion or extermination of bad people (i.e., out-group); and all in service of forcing people to do and believe the narrow range of actions and beliefs that are “right.”
And it’s that phrase—narrow range of actions and beliefs that are right–that makes it clear how this hierarchy is not just one of power; it is epistemological, and the solution to every problem is to give unlimited power to who know what is “right”—that is, those who are not biased.
“Biased” sources and people are presumed to be ones that view the world from a narrow perspective; so, necessarily associated with the biased/objective false binary is the equally false binary of particular/universal.
As many others have pointed out, we don’t undermine authoritarianism by saying that we’re all biased, since that doesn’t end the hierarchy; it just makes it one of open and unconstrained violence. We end up with some version of Social Darwinism. The mistake is the term “biased.” It’s more useful to think in terms of “biases” (that is, cognitive biases) and perspectives, and to try to correct for the former and celebrate the latter.
[RSA talk] “Obscured Ends and Amoral Means: The Flickering Moralism of Machiavellian Approaches to Rhetoric”
This paper came out of my being puzzled by a paradox I kept running across in the various deliberative train wrecks I study—the intermittent moralism of Machiavellian approaches to public policy disagreements. “Machiavellianism,” only orthogonally related to what Machiavelli actually said, claims to treat means as morally neutral, often in service of some version of power politics or neo-Social Darwinism. But this amoralizing of means is both rhetorical and flickering—American intervention in Vietnam, for instance, was advocated on the grounds of moral necessity and amoral power politics, sometimes in the same document.
What I’ll pursue in this paper are some of the somewhat paradoxical rhetorical consequences of this disingenuous framing of means as amoral.
I’ll focus on US decision-making regarding Vietnam in August of 1964. August of 1964 is one of several moments of escalation, with attention generally on LBJ’s decision to lie in order to get the Tonkin Gulf Resolution passed on August 7. But I’m more interested in the chaotic debacle that was General Nguyễn Khánh’s not-quite month as Chief of State. I’ll start by discussing the objectives (ends) at the time, the necessary conditions for success, the actual conditions (as described by US decision-makers), the means they chose, and finish with how Machiavellianism played into it.
Ends In an August 10 “situation report,” Maxwell Taylor, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and recently appointed US Ambassador to the Republic of Vietnam said that the “Communist strategy” was not
“To attempt to defeat the superior Republic of Vietnam military forces in the field or to seize and conquer territory by military means. Instead, it is their announced intention to harass, erode and terrorize the population into a state of such demoralization that a political settlement favorable to the Communists will ensue.” (#306, 657).
Robert McNamara would later identify policies in 1964 as oriented toward “the objective of destroying Hanoi’s will to fight and its ability to continue to supply the Vietcong” (In Retrospect 152). In an important –strategy setting—document in August of 1964, McGeorge Bundy said we must “make it clear both to the Communists and to South Vietnam that military pressure will continue until we have achieved our objectives [….] leaving no doubts in South Vietnam of our resolve” (#313, 675). By persuading “the Communists” that the US would not give up Vietnam, it was hoped that “the Communists” could be persuaded that a divided Vietnam—much like Korea—was the best deal they could get, and therefore take it.
Necessary Conditions To achieve those ends—a Hanoi willing to agree to a divided Vietnam—certain conditions had to exist. RVN had to be an effective and largely victorious force, capable of exterminating the insurgency without alienating the populace. The “pacification” program was crucial for achieving several of the conditions—denying communist support for the Viet Cong, maintaining the morale of the populace, achieving military victories—and it depended on “clearing” certain areas of Viet Cong agents and supporters. South Vietnam had to have a competent, trusted, and stable government. The South Vietnamese people needed to support that government, and support the war (which could only happen were the first condition met). The US had to signal willingness to throw limitless resources at the conflict. These various conditions tended to be characterized as issues of “morale” (or its opposite—“defeatism”) in official documents, documents that admitted none of those conditions were present.
Actual Conditions In that August 10 “situation report,” Taylor acknowledged that the South Vietnamese military was weak, while trying to put a positive spin on it: “In the view of US advisors, more than 90 percent of the battalions of the army are at least marginally effective.” (#306; 661). The pacification program was “proving to be a most difficult one primarily because of the inefficiency of the ministries, their ineptitude in planning and their general lack of spirit of team play” (Taylor 659). In a memo ten days later, Taylor said, “that the present in-country pacification plan is not enough in itself to maintain national morale or to offer reasonable hope of eventual success.” But the worst was the government. The US had endorsed the November 1963 coup on the grounds that Diem was corrupt, incompetent, and tremendously unpopular. He had collaborated with the Japanese (unlike Ho Chi Minh, who fought them), was brutally persecuting Buddhists, and may have been considering a peace treaty with Ho. The hope was that replacing Diem would increase Vietnamese commitment to the war by putting in place a more popular, competent, and bellicose government. It didn’t work (as can be seen in the chart at the top.
Taylor said
The most important and most intractable internal problem of South Vietnam in meeting the Viet Cong threat is the political structure at the national level. The best thing that can be said about the present Khanh government is that it has lasted six months and has about a 50-50 chance of lasting out the year [….] It is an ineffective government beset by inexperienced ministers who are also jealous and suspicious of each other [….] However, there is no one in sight who could do better than Khanh in the face of the many difficulties which would face any head of government [….] The attitude of the people toward the Khanh government, mostly confused and apathetic since its inception, is only slightly more favorable than a few months ago. Despite considerable efforts, Khanh has not succeeded in building any substantial body of popular support. (657-658).
August 13, 1964, McGeorge Bundy presented a plan called “Next Steps in Southeast Asia, “a highly important document” (Logevall 217). McNamara would later say that “the memo and its derivatives became the focus of our attention and acrimonious debate for the next five months” (In Retrospect 151). The first sentence of the section, “Essential Elements in the Situation” is “South Vietnam is not going well” (#313, 674).
Taylor responded to Bundy’s “Next Courses of Action” (which he endorsed that one assumption behind Bundy’s proposal (which he believed to be correct) is:
The first and most important objective is to gain time for the Khanh Government to develop a certain stability and to give some firm evidence of viability [….] A second objective in this period is the maintenance of morale in South Viet Nam, particularly within the Khanh Government [….] he must stabilize his government and make some progress in cleaning up his own operational backyard. (690)
The Course of Action that Bundy’s memo advocates, and Taylor endorses, “relies heavily upon the durability of the Khanh Government. It assumes that there is little danger of its collapse without notice or of its replacement by a weaker or more unreliable successor” (692). Ten days later, worried about a coup, Khanh himself would resign and skedaddle to Dalat. He had to be coerced to come back and form a triumvirate. There were no illusions about the instability and unpopularity of the government, and yet the US was pursuing a plan that, as was repeatedly insisted, depended upon a stable and popular government, which US officials knew they didn’t have. They did, however, have one that wouldn’t negotiate with Hanoi.
The Means
One of the “means” necessary for success was preventing peace talks: “We must continue to oppose any Vietnam conference” (#313). After listing the various means the US should take, Bundy says,
These actions are not in themselves a truly coherent program of strong enough pressure either to bring Hanoi around or to sustain a pressure posture into some kind of discussion. Hence, we should continue absolutely opposed to any conference. (#313; 678).
That this was the means was not publicly admitted. But the conservative and “realist” political scientist Hans Morgenthau had figured that out, snarkily noting in an article in New Leader in June of 1964:
Our main immediate problem is apparently not to win the war against the Viet Cong but to prevent the ascendancy of an anti-war government in Saigon. What we are saying and doing must, then, have as its main purpose to prevent the collapse of the morale of General Nguyen Khanh’s government and of its military forces (44).
Thus, American Vietnam policy in 1964 was to prevent negotiations with Hanoi until the morale, bellicosity, and military effectiveness of the South Vietnamese was such that Hanoi (and China) would believe that a divided nation was the best they could possibly get: “We need to apply “a combination of military pressure and some form of communication under which Hanoi (and Peiping) eventually accept the idea of getting out” (#313). The “Next Course” also advocated dropping leaflets, increased training of RVN forces, mining of the Haiphong harbor, “tit-for-tat” actions, only acknowledging successful military actions. Taylor said, “The US Mission has recognized in its information and psychological programs the need to present the Khanh government in its most favorable light at home and abroad, particularly in the United States” (# 306 660).
What I hope is striking to you is that the means were profoundly rhetorical; they were about persuasion—persuading the North Vietnamese they couldn’t win, and the South Vietnamese that they could. South Vietnamese needed to be persuaded to support the war, and both the South Vietnamese and Americans needed to be persuaded to have faith in the Khanh government—its stability, competence, and resolve. But even the American officials themselves weren’t persuaded of any of those things. So, the Machiavellianism came to be the approach to public deliberations—critics of American policy in Vietnam had to be smeared, discredited, and deflected. Preventing reasonable discussion of Vietnam policy itself became a means necessary for the ends.
Machiavellianism
I mentioned earlier that McNamara said the US objective was destroying Hanoi’s will to fight and ability to support the Vietcong. He said, “Neither then nor later did the chiefs fully assess the probability of achieving these objectives, how long it might take, or what it would cost in lives lost, resources expended, and risks incurred” (152).
The amoralizing of means didn’t mean they were actually neutral—there is nothing morally neutral about napalm—it just meant that people could deflect or even demonize public discourse that criticized the ends or means. The ends (and therefore the morality of the means) are themselves outside the realm of argument—they’re simultaneously obscured and circular (since the postulated morality of the ends or intentions justifies being dishonest about what the ends or intentions actually are). We can’t argue reasonably about the ends—because they’re postulated as moral—and we can’t argue at all about the morality of the means. Thus, amoralizing policies (the means) necessarily results in the demoralizing and depoliticizing of public discourse. The point I’m makingis that US officials (like many others) were Machiavellian not just in terms of their use of napalm, but their approach to public discourse. And my crank theory is that one necessarily leads to the other.
Laws of history
A lot of people are sharing this post, and it’s wrong. Students were tremendously supportive of Nazis. (I think they were also supportive of Mussolini and Franco, but I haven’t read much about them, so I might be wrong.)
More important, this post appeals to the fantasy that complicated political situations are actually simple. It says they’re really a binary between a group with perfect insight and the right understanding, and a ruling class that is a Disney villain. That way of thinking about politics shuts down our ability to argue with one another reasonably about policy options. As it is intended to do.
There are evil groups and evil policies, but, if I were going to say that there is a good law of history it would be: no framing of any major policy conflict as binary of two groups (one right and the other evil) has ever been just, accurate, useful, or helpful.
I’m open to counter-examples, but, since thinking about this framing of politics has been something I’ve been studying for forty years, I’m pretty confident that there isn’t one.
So, if you think you know of a time when a major policy issue was a binary between two sides–of two groups (one right and the other evil) –I’d love to hear about it.
Critics of Trump need to stop saying he’s unprecedented
Tl;dr the people who support a political figure who says, “I am so committed to the Real People that I will violate all legal and moral norms to enact my policies” always end up regretting it. Trump is very precedented, and it’s never worked out well.
I once had an unfortunate disagreement with a colleague whose work I so very, very much admire and have always supported. It came about because they kept saying that Trump and his actions are “unprecedented.” They were saying this for good reasons—wanting to mobilize outrage about Trump—but it is a historical claim, and, as such, it’s false. More important, it’s rhetorically (but understandably) misguided.
I think I came across as a pedant, crank, or someone who disliked their work. In reverse order, I love their work, and I am a crank and pedant, but, as it happens, when it comes to my insisting we not talk about Trump as unprecedented, I am neither.
His supporters believe he is unprecedented, and that’s one of the main reasons they support him. And they deflect any consideration of the precedents, as well as any criticism of him.
A lot of criticism of Trump has to do with who he is, and that kind of criticism helps him. All the evidence is that he is a corrupt, dishonest, racist, fiscally incompetent, and dishonest man who regularly sexually assaulted women, and who advocated insurrection. But there’s no point in emphasizing any of that when talking to his base because they agree that he is that person and did those things. They support him because he is a racist, corrupt, dishonest, rich person who gropes women. Most of them like that he is that person. They want to be him.
People who aren’t his base support him because they believe that they will benefit from the policies he’ll enact, especially “freeing” business owners and rich people from rules, restrictions, and taxes.
And there are people who will vote for him just because they have been trained to hate the hobgoblin of “liberals” by years of demagoguery. Some of them aren’t wild about Trump, and some have become wild about him because of the criticism. That kind of support is strengthened by the way that media and some scholars frame our vexed and complicated world of policy commitments as actually a third-rate reality show of a fight between “liberals” and “conservatives.” The single-axis model of policy affiliation depoliticizes policy argument, but that’s a book (which may come out fairly soon, fingers crossed).
Here’s the important point: just because that’s how the media frames something, and it’s possible to find supporting data, that doesn’t mean the frame is either accurate or useful. The media frames questions about birth control in terms of pro- or anti-abortion. It framed questions about the Iraq invasion as pro- or anti-war. Both of those policy disagreements are and were better served by acknowledging a a spectrum, rather than a single-axis continuum or binary.
The media frames all questions in terms of two identities at war (“left v. right”). To the extent to which media–even if they identify as “left”–frame issues in terms of identity, they help Trump.
There are a lot of reasons that people support Trump. People who rely on Fox News, the manosphere, Newsmax, for their information would vote for a cold turd as long as they were told voting for that turd would piss off “the woke mob.” Second, chiliastic fundagelicals love his aggressive actions in regard to Israel because they want nuclear war there–they believe it will reduce the number of Jews to 40k who will be converted, and thereby bring about Jesus’ reign on earth. That many Jews are choosing to support Trump because of his advocating policies that increase the likelihood of nuclear war in that region is just really frustrating. Third, descendants of immigrants pull up the ladder behind them. Unhappily, this has always been the case—the people most hostile to a new group of immigrants is the most recent group of immigrants. Fourth, toxic populism.
I think the first three are fairly clear, so I’ll emphasize the last.
Populism says that our world is not complicated, but actually a zero-sum battle between an elite and the real people. It says that we don’t have reasonable and legitimate disagreements about policies. It says that the correct course of action is obvious to all real Americans/Christians/workers/conservatives/whatevs. [1]
Commitment to a populist leader is generally irrational. Populist leaders say there is a real us, and that all our problems are caused by Them. They say that we can solve all our problems by fanatical commitment to the in-group, and refusing to listen to any criticisms of the in-group. The first move of toxic populists is to ensure their base dismisses as “biased” any criticism of them. They do so by demonizing (they’re evil), irrationalizing (they’re motivated by feelings, but we’re motivated by reason), and pathologizing (they’re lazy, criminal, corrupt) any source that is not fanatically committed to the leader/group.
Trump is a toxic populist.
The proof is that, if you say this to any of his supporters, and give the definition of a toxic populist, they won’t engage your argument.
Their first move will be whaddaboutism, their second will be deflecting the definition on the grounds that, since it applies to Trump, it must be “biased” (they’ll probably say “bias”), their third will either be harassing you (they like signing you up for Ashley Madison) or blocking you.
Claiming that Trump is unprecedented confirms his supporters’ belief that there is no already existing evidence that what he wants to do is politically, ethically, and economically disastrous. It enables them to deflect comparison to Castro, Chavez, Erdogan, Franco, Hitler, Jackson, Mussolini, Putin. Claiming that Trump is unprecedented saves them from the rhetorical responsibility of showing that supporting someone like Trump has worked out well. (Narrator: it hasn’t, especially for the working class, but even for plutocrats.)
Not all Trump supporters are the same, but the narrative that he is unprecedented enables every one of them to keep from thinking about the long-term consequences of their support. But, as I said, he’s following a playbook. It isn’t restricted to “right-wing” (I hate that term) leaders. What’s wrong with Trump isn’t about left v. right. It’s about whether a political leader values and honors democratic and legal norms or argues that he (almost always he) shouldn’t be held to them because reasons. And a leader who has made that argument has never worked out well.
Many of his supporters, like people who have supported authoritarian governments in Central Europe, are wealthy people who believe that they will profit from an authoritarian anti-socialist government. In Russia, they supported Putin, and they were wrong, as shown by what Putin did to the economy, and by the number of plutocrats who fell out of windows and landed on bullets. Paradoxically, capitalism requires innovation, and there isn’t much of that in an authoritarian culture. Authoritarian cultures/governments that have been profitable have done so by stealing ideas and innovations from democratic ones (e.g., printing or weaving).
But, and this is the important point, there are other examples of times when the people with a lot of monetary power backed a charismatic leader who was openly advocating an authoritarian government, and it didn’t work out well for them. There are precedents, and they show that charismatic leadership is actually a really bad way to run an organization, let alone a country.
The question Trump supporters should be asked is: when has support of this kind of political figure worked out well?
And that is the only aspect of Trump that is unprecedented.
[1] For a long time, I was averse to calling this “us v. them” false way of thinking about politics “populism.” I thought it should be called “toxic populism.” But, that train has left the station. Still and all, I’d argue that there is a difference between “our current political situation hurts these groups that don’t have a lot of political power” [what I think of a kind of populism—trying to worry about the ramifications of our policies on people not in power] and the binary thinking of toxic populism (our complicated political situation is actually a simple binary between people who are good/honest/real/authentic and Them). The best short book on populism is Jan-Werner Müller’s What is Populism. The best thorough work is the Oxford Handbook on Populism.
Book Proposal for “Deliberating War: Where There is a Will, There is a Ferry”
In 2003, Bill O’Reilly declared a “War on Christmas.” Or, to be more precise, he declared that there already was a war on Christmas being conducted by “liberals” (sometimes “secular progressives”), and therefore “we” had to fight back. Just why “secular progressives” would care very much about Christmas, let alone engage in war about it, might seem puzzling, and so O’Reilly explained the long-term goal of this war:
“Secular progressives realize that America as it is now will never approve of gay marriage, partial birth abortion, euthanasia, legalized drugs, income redistribution through taxation, and many other progressive visions because of religious opposition. But if the secularists can destroy religion in the public arena, the brave new progressive world is a possibility. That’s what happened in Canada.” (Wildau)
To anyone familiar with the principles of argumentation, or even Canada, this description is absurd. And yet O’Reilly was not the first person to insist that there was already a “war on Christmas,” nor that specific and normal policy disagreements should really be understood as part of “liberals’ war” on America (Coulter), business (Lin), Christians (Media Matters “Fox News”), Christmas (Gibson, O’Reilly, qtd. in Wildau), conservatives (Hasson), the family (Stoll), men (“Coming War,” Venker), the police (Grassley, MacDonald), religion (Gregg), Republicans (Knefel), the rich (Perkins), the right (Hanson), statues (Robertson), suburban property values (Limbaugh), Trump (Goodwin), the unborn (Cassidy), white males (Lifson), white people (Cegielski), “you and your family” (O’Reilly, qtd. in Stabile).
This reframing of normal policy disagreements as war is common all over the political spectrum. Both Avik Roy (an editor for Forbes) and Congressional Representative Barbara Boxer agreed that the dispute over Obamacare was a “war on women.” Roy said Obamacare was a war on women, and Boxer said opposition to it was. I regularly receive mailings about the war on the environment, education, science. Nor is the framing of politics as war very new. Criticism of slavery was characterized as treason, as was disagreeing with 17th century Massachusetts authorities about the precise nature of salvation.
Because it is so common to refer to a policy disagreement as a war on the in-group, it is tempting to dismiss the frame as a metaphor, simply a rhetorical strategy to mobilize a base and get attention. That is, to treat the metaphor of politics as war as a meaningless stylistic choice (mere rhetoric). Another way to dismiss the significance of the framing is to normalize it, to say that politics is a kind of war. Advocates of such a strategy often cite the 19th century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz: “War is politics by other means.” The former approach treats the politics as war frame metaphorically and the latter literally, but neither takes the frame seriously. And both thereby normalize treating policy disagreements as skirmishes in a larger war.
There have long been people who argued that metaphors of war for disagreements was something to be taken seriously (Kenneth Burke in War of Words [unpublished until 2018], George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By [1980]). This book is in that tradition, arguing that treating normal policy disagreements as war constrains democratic deliberation to varying degrees depending on the kind of war imagined. It does so for several reasons, and in several ways.
First, even under the best of circumstances, deliberating about war is vexed. A community has (or should have) the opportunity to deliberate about whether we should go to war, how it’s being conducted, when and whether to end it, and, in retrospect, what happened and why. Yet many people sincerely believe that we shouldn’t deliberate about whether to go to war; if we are attacked (or are about to be attacked), we should—in a state of anger and outrage—respond with however much aggression is necessary to crush the antagonist. Many people believe that a community shouldn’t deliberate about war once it’s started, since to question whether to continue the war dishonors those who have already died for it, or who are currently risking their lives for it. For similar reasons (dishonoring those who have sacrificed), we shouldn’t deliberate about a war afterwards—whether it was well-conducted, necessary, could have been ended earlier. Thus, for many people, we shouldn’t deliberate about a war before, during, or after—that is, at all. In such a situation, those who call for deliberation are easily characterized as cowards, ditherers, unmanly overthinkers, traitors, dupes of the enemy. Characterizing a disagreement as war makes deliberation harder.
Second, this deep aversion to deliberating about war can be strategically manipulated by rhetors who want to evade deliberation for other reasons. This book doesn’t advocate a very complicated model of “deliberation,” instead settling for “good enough” deliberation—more or less reduced to treating others’ (and Other’s) arguments as we’d like ours treated, and holding in- and out-group arguments to the same standards. Although a fairly low bar, it’s one a large number of rhetors can’t or don’t want to meet, so, instead of deliberating, they evade, truncate, or vilify deliberation. They argue that the truth is obvious, only bad people disagree with them, and deliberation aids the enemy. The more that an community believes that the situation is war, the less likely we are to insist on deliberation—the more likely we are to exempt in-group rhetors, political actors, and institutions from moral, legal, and rhetorical norms.
Third, there are kinds of wars, and not all kinds have the same consequences for the extent to which we allow in-group actors to violate moral, legal, and rhetorical norms. Wars can vary both in terms of means and ends. There are and have long been legal and/or moral norms concerning the means that antagonists use. Even before the United Nations, there were expectations regarding such issues as treatment of civilians, civilian territories, neutrals, neutral territory, POW, exchange of prisoners, and so on.
Wars have different ends, ranging from limited territorial to political/physical extermination of the Other. Wars with limited territorial goals (such as the 1859 Pig War) assume the continued coexistence of all parties (except the pig). At the other extreme are wars oriented toward the complete destruction of a political, cultural, religious, or ethnic entity (the Third Punic War, Hitler’s goals in WWII). While limited political goals doesn’t necessarily mean limited destruction, or limited violation of norms (e.g, the Iraq invasion had limited goals—regime change—but high levels of destruction and norm violation), wars of extermination necessarily require almost complete violation of norms. Communities faced with an antagonist determined on our destruction generally give complete moral, legal, military, and rhetorical license to in-group actors. Thus, paradoxically, a political or military leader who wants to violate norms can get license to do so by claiming that the community is already faced with an antagonist determined on in-group extermination. They can get permission to conduct a war of extermination by claiming it already is one.
So, if politics is war, what kind of war?
If it’s a war of extermination in which actors are granted full license to violate any and all legal, moral, and rhetorical norms, then it’s a war on democracy.
Advice on Writing and Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc
When I was a kid, my family got a dog, and I got sent to doggy training school with this dog. This was in the day when you didn’t start training your dog till it was six month old, since the training consisted of yanking it around with a choke collar. (I’ve since been told that this method was actually popularized by literal Nazis. I choose to believe that’s true.) Since the dog weighed as much as I did, it didn’t go well. Or maybe it did. During the whole training, he was the least well-behaved dog in the class (with some kind of shepherd a close second). On the day of the final exam, it was windy and there were bits of paper, bags, and leaves blowing around. Almost every other dog in the class was out of their minds running after the flotsam. Jack got first place, since he was the least badly-behaved dog in the class. (The Shepherd got second.) Jack went on to be a wonderfully well-behaved dog, within reason. (Where he found all those bras he placed on the front lawn I don’t know.)
When I was an adult, I got a Malamute mix, and went to a dog training class. The trainer, who had a Sheltie, gave us lots of advice, and had us do things like teach a long recall by having the dog attached by a long length of clothesline. The scar between my fingers is no longer visible. For complicated reasons, I also ended up with a Dane/Shepherd mix (Chester Burnette). So I trained both dogs. Chester was so good he became a demo dog, and I flirted with the idea of becoming a dog trainer. After all, I had done such a great dog with Chester. This is called post hoc ergo propter hoc. Meanwhile, the Malamute mix (named Hoover) would take off if the door was opened more than two inches. I dismissed that training failure as my not having been experienced enough. Nah. He was a Malamute.
I read a lot of books and articles on dog training (and a fair amount on cat training), and it was all very emphatic, very clear, and contradictory. It was all in the genre of “You just have to [do this one thing] and you will have a perfectly behaved dog.” But, were that true, then there would only be one dog training book, or all the books would say the same thing. There’s more than one book, and they contradict each other. So, training a dog is not a simple thing that involves doing just this one thing.
I ended up deciding that all the advice was good. It had worked for the trainer, and their training of their dog. Almost all advice about dog training is good, but it isn’t all relevant to every situation. At that time, there was a big thing about dominance in dog training (the Monks of New Skete were big), and that worked with the Malamute. If I wanted him to sit, I needed to plant my feet, stand up straight, and say, “Sit” like I was a boot camp instructor. That was good advice. For Hoover.
If I did that with Chester, he would climb onto the couch and cover his eyes with his paws. It was bad advice for Chester.
At 38, I became a parent. I didn’t want to parent the way my parents had, so I read so very many books on parenting. And it was just like the dog training books. Every book said that you should do it this way because it worked for us. And, like the dog training books, they contradicted each other. I’m willing to believe it did work out for them. But, were raising a child easy and straightforward, there would be one parenting book, or they would all say the same thing, There isn’t and they don’t.
Almost all advice about parenting is good, insofar as I’m certain it works for some parents with some children, but it isn’t all relevant to every situation. One of the particularly rigid and doctrinaire books was written by someone who had to retract a lot of it when they had a special needs child.
In other words, I think a lot of both dog training and parenting advice is post hoc ergo proctor hoc. People engaged in certain practices (or believed they did), and they got a good outcome, so they believe that those practices led to those outcomes. And they told others to do it the way they believed they had done it. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe the dominance-based practices of the Monks of New Skete worked despite what they did; maybe the “spare the rod” folks did more damage than good, but had enough kids enough not-damaged that they could claim success.
More important, even if those practices worked for them, that doesn’t mean that those practices will work for everyone.
I started working in a Writing Center when I was around 19. And I’ve been paying attention to advice about writing ever since. It’s almost all good, even Strunk and White, in that it’s almost all going to work for someone in some situation. Some writers get through a whole career by working themselves into a shame-filled panic. I have never met a successful writer who wrote a Ramistic outline before starting a draft, but I suspect Cotton Mather did, and he wrote a lot. I met a writer who claimed to write from beginning to end without substantial revising. I’m dubious, but maybe it worked for him. Some people write for two hours every morning; some people write late at night; some people find that binge-writing works for them; some people write a little every day.
So, I wish that people looking for advice on any of those things knew that just because someone thinks something worked for them doesn’t mean it actually did, although it might have, but that doesn’t mean you’re at fault if it doesn’t work for you.
Self-help rhetoric is pretty consistent. It has these steps:
1) You are failing at what you want to do;
2) You can succeed if you do this simple thing;
3) I know because this simple thing has worked for me, and the people with whom I’ve worked.
There are lots of great things about self-help rhetoric. It’s comforting. It’s hopeful. But the way in which it’s hopeful (“all you have to do is [this]”) can mean it’s shaming when it doesn’t work. And that’s the moment when the simplicity of self-help rhetoric becomes toxic.
Self-help advice is always true in that it has worked for someone. But it’s never always true. And it never makes writing, or training a dog, or raising a child, easy. Because none of them is an easy thing to do.
Unless you have a sheltie.
“AITA: I’m a Republican who is blaming the Democrats for the House of Representatives being shut down.”
I often read a subreddit AmItheAsshole. People write in describing some incident where they think they were right, but someone tells them they behaved badly, and they’re asking for judgment.
For instance, there was recently a post by someone who said that his girlfriend dithered and delayed in the morning, and therefore regularly drove well over the speed limit in order to get to work on time. The Original Poster (OP) told her that her speeding was unsafe, and that she should get up earlier. She ignored him. She got a lot of speeding tickets. When she had gotten so many speeding tickets that she was about to lose her license, she told the OP that he should claim he was driving her car at the time of the last ticket–that he was the one speeding. That would cost him a lot of money (directly and indirectly) but it would enable her to keep speeding, since she could keep her license. He refused. She said he was the asshole because now she would not be able to drive to work. She told him that he would have to drive her to work, since he had caused this situation. He refused.
He was unwilling to take the hit of increased insurance rates and having to drive her to work just because she had ignored everything he warned her about, and had chosen to make really bad decisions. She said he was the asshole, since her current situation—having to take public transportation to work—what the consequence of a decision he’d made.
So, who is the asshole?
AITA is really a subreddit about blame and responsibility, and commenters are invited to make one of several judgments: YTA (you’re the asshole) meaning you, and you alone are responsible for this situation. In other words, the OP is responsible for her losing her license. Or, there’s NTA (not the asshole) meaning that there is an asshole (a person whose bad behavior led to this situation) but it isn’t the person who posted the question (for instance, the girlfriend who dithers in the morning). NAH (no assholes here) meaning that it’s a bad situation but not because anyone behaved badly. ESH (everyone sucks here) meaning that this situation came about because everyone is awful.
Clearly, she hadn’t learned from this situation. She had no intention of driving any differently. She didn’t see the consequences of her behavior as…well, the consequences of her behavior. She thought someone else should step in and save her, so that she could continue to be irresponsible. Technically speaking, OP could have kept her from losing her license. But she would never have been in that situation had she been more responsible about her time management.
I taught college writing for about forty years. And, when I was the teacher of record, I sometimes had a student who was flunking my class (because they hadn’t turned in any work, they’d plagiarized, what they did turn in had little relation to the assignments, and so on), and they would say to me, “If I flunk this class, I’ll be kicked out of college; because of you, I’ll be thrown out of college.” Technically speaking, my flunking them might be the final straw, and so, if I didn’t flunk them, they could stay in college, until they flunked the next class.
But, if they hadn’t flunked (and weren’t flunking) lots of other classes, what grade I gave them wouldn’t matter. What I did only mattered because of the situation they’d gotten themselves into. I didn’t force them to flunk; I didn’t keep them from doing the work. Like the girlfriend who regularly violated speed limits, the situation they were in–about to flunk out of college–was the predictable consequence of choices they’d made.
The claim that Democrats are responsible for the House impasse reads to me like an AITA post. So, imagine that the Republicans claiming that the House inability to get any work done is the fault of the Democrats wrote in to AITA. What would the judgment be?
Demagoguery means reducing complicated, nuanced, and uncertain policy issues to questions of fanatical loyalty to us (including refusing to look at any non-fanatically in-group media) and Them (everyone else). Demagoguery means refusing to compromise. The GOP has promoted an anti-government demagoguery since the 80s. The basic message of that demagoguery is that the government is the cause of all problems, so shutting down the government would be good. No reasonable person believes that, but it’s been a winning frame for the GOP. So, they’ve spend forty years promoting it.
The GOP decided to engage in a kind of gerrymandering that meant that winning a primary rewarded the most demagogic candidate. The GOP (and its media enablers) decided to reward demagoguery. The GOP decided to refuse to hold its most demagogic members accountable for anything, ranging from an attempted to coup to sex-trafficking underage girls.
And now, having enabled the election of people who think refusal to compromise is a good thing, whose policy agenda is entirely negative and fairly incoherent, and who couldn’t reason their way out of a paper bag if both ends were open and there were flashing EXIT signs, but who are fanatical and in districts that would elect a dead dog if it had R next to its name, the GOP is realizing that they’re held hostage by unreasonable people.
And they think the Dems should save them.
That girlfriend thought the OP should take the hit. She thought he should lie, take the insurance hit, and pay the fine, so that she could keep speeding.
So, who is the asshole?