Patricia Roberts-Miller

What I want to do today is begin by talking a little bit about the place of “demagoguery” in contemporary rhetorical scholarship, then offer my own definition, and then show its application in regard to someone I admire. And, in a way, that’s the whole project in a nutshell: scholarship in rhetoric can’t serve a useful critical purpose if it just comes down to scholars praising people we like and blaming people we don’t—rhetorical scholarship should be deliberative, and neither epideictic nor judicial.

Jurgen Habermas’ “What is universal pragmatics” has a wonderful footnote with a diagram of kinds of discourse–communicative versus strategic action.

As is common among scholars of public discourse, Habermas’ focus is on communicative action, and the rest of his career has been spent trying to identify the ontological bases, precise criteria, and most promising models for public deliberation as opposed to instrumental reason, a.k.a., strategic action. As I said, that’s fairly common for scholars of public discourse, who tend to focus on what deliberative discourse is, how to teach it, how to foster it, how to balance inclusion and civility. Since I spent a chunk of my career working on that problem, I’m not critical of that kind of scholarship—it’s important.

But we have tended to ignore the other side of the chart– why are people so drawn to instrumental reason even in cases where deliberative approaches would be more helpful? It isn’t particularly controversial in business, management, counseling, mediation, interpersonal mediation, and a variety of other fields that businesses, communities, and relationships benefit more from approaches to decision-making that are toward the deliberative rather than toward the strategic action side.

And by “toward deliberative side” I don’t mean anything particularly high-minded or complicated – in fact, I have fairly low standards about what constitutes deliberative discourse. I’m not necessarily talking about a community in which people are nice to each other, or unemotional, or in which no one is offended, or everyone feels safe — I just mean one in which it’s considered necessary to listen to, and therefore fairly represent, the other side.

The notion that you should listen to your opposition seems to me to be a no-brainer–you can’t even be sure that you actually disagree unless you’ve listened enough to know what your interlocutor is arguing. And, if you and that person aren’t just vehemently agreeing, and you want to change the mind of the person with whom you’re disagreeing, it’s going to be very hard to persuade them to change their mind unless they feel you’re engaging the arguments they’re really making. Yet early on in my teaching I discovered that a fair number of my students thought it was actively dangerous to listen to the opposition, let alone restate their argument in a way the opposition would consider fair.

So I became interested in how to try to persuade people to listen to the opposition, and that task necessarily led me to think about two questions: first, what makes listening to the opposition dangerous; second, what makes living in a world of demonizing, dehumanizing, and irrationalizing the opposition attractive, even pleasurable.

Once you’ve posed that second question you may well find yourself, as I have, studying what I’ve ended up thinking of as train wrecks in public deliberation– times that communities took a lot of time and a lot of talk to come to a decision they later regretted, and concerning which they had all the evidence they needed in the moment to come to different conclusions.

Thus, I’m not talking about times when communities had no choice, or inadequate information, or when they made decisions I think they shouldn’t have made. I mean things like the Sicilian expedition of 415 BCE, the Salem witch trials, the US commitment to slavery and then segregation, anti-immigration fear mongering of the 1920s and the related forced sterilization of around 65,000 people in the United States, the Holocaust, Japanese internment, LBJ’s decision to escalate in Vietnam, the Iraq invasion, and other more specific incidents, such as Hitler’s refusal to order a retreat from Stalingrad or Haig’s insistence on the direct approach in various World War I battles.

And there are a few common characteristics about these incidents, in terms of what had become “normal” political discourse—specifically, heightened factionalism, so that politics became a performance of ingroup loyalty, and the ethos of the nation was reduced to one faction—that is, pluralism is demonized–and thwarting the opposition is just as much a laudable goal as enacting policies, because there is no sense that multiple factions might be legitimate or that the community benefits from disagreement. The nation is the party, and failure to support the party is treason. Obviously, in such a world, compromise and bargaining, let alone inclusive and pluralist deliberation, are disloyal, cowardly, and evil.

So it began to look to me as though there was a strong correlation between bad decisions and bad decision-making processes — not that they are necessarily and inevitably related, but that they often are, and so I started trying to identify the specific characteristics of those bad decision-making processes.

Largely because I don’t like neologisms, I started using the term demagoguery for that approach to public discourse. That may have been a mistake. Often people engaged in this kind of work do come up with a new term. Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyon use the term right-wing populism; David Neiwert calls it eliminationist; Kenneth Burke describes the same phenomenon in regard to Hitler, doesn’t use any term in particular. That’s something worth discussing—whether I should simply use a different term, rather than try to salvage a deeply troubled one.

Early in this project I, like most other scholars of this kind of rhetoric, focused on individual rhetors, on demagogues; I’m now certain that was a mistake.

Scholarship on demagogues went out of fashion in rhetoric in the seventies, largely because that scholarship consistently appealed to premises that were rationalist, elitist, and anti-democratic. Most definitions of “demagogues” emphasized the emotionalism of their arguments, the populism of their policies, and the selfishness of their motives. The conventional criticism of such scholarship was four-part:

1. 1. The criticism looked rhetorical, but it was really political—”demagogue” was simply a term for an effective rhetor in service of a political agenda that the scholar didn’t like;
   2. By condemning demagogues for emotionalism, scholars were idealizing a public sphere of technocratic and instrumental argument, and necessarily banishing individuals and groups who were passionate about their cause—since victims of injustice tend to feel pretty strongly about their situation, prohibiting demagogues would have a disproportionate impact on marginalized and oppressed groups;
   3. Demagogues are always “men of the people,” so the scholarship on demagogues is anti-populist—why assume that only the masses are misled?
   4. Scholarship condemning demagogues is demophobic—the (false) assumption is often that the rise of a demagogue is the consequence of “too much democracy,” once again implying that the elite don’t make mistakes.

I agree with all of those criticisms—I do think that much existing scholarship on demagogues is not particularly helpful for doing much other than saying, “I don’t like that rhetor.” But I don’t think that makes the project hopeless—I think the problem comes from focusing on demagogues, rather than demagoguery.

Take, for instance, Kenneth Burke’s 1939 brilliant analysis of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and the odd logical problem it falls into by trying to explain Nazism through Hitler’s individual psychology. According to Burke, Hitler became obsessed with the Jews because he lost arguments to them in Vienna (to be honest, I think that might have been a factor, but his own anxiety that he might be Jewish was probably more important), but, if that’s what made him anti-Semitic, why did his anti-Semitic rhetoric work? Did every member of his audience go to Vienna and lose an argument to a Jew? Of course not. Whatever Hitler’s personal motivations were—he was anxious about his heredity, he was out-argued by Jews–, they don’t explain why he was effective with people who didn’t have those anxieties or experiences.

Burke set out to analyze Hitler’s rhetoric because of Hitler’s political power—the scholarly method was to select the rhetor and then look a the rhetoric. Similarly, scholars of demagogues, ranging from James Fennimore Cooper to Michael Signer, generally use the process of beginning with political figures they considered demagogues, and then looking to see what those figures had in common.

That method guarantees that what they will have in common is that the scholar doesn’t like them. The “demagogues” are always in the scholars’ outgroup, and that may be why there is so much motivism. Scholarship on demagogues generally focuses on the motives of the demagogue—demagogues, unlilke statesmen (thank Plutarch for that fallacious distinction), look out for themselves. They want power, but statesmen (and I use the gendered term deliberately) want what’s best for the country or community.

Since people attribute bad motives to members of the outgroup and good motives to members of the ingroup for exactly the same behavior—an ingroup member who makes a lot of money is a hard worker, and an outgroup member who makes a lot of money is greedy–, this criterion of motive means that it will never help us identify ingroup demagogues. After all, the basic premise of this approach to finding demagogues is that they are bad people—if we admire someone, we won’t admit they’re bad, so they can’t be demagogues.

In addition to the problem that it prevents us from seeing when we’re being persuaded by demagoguery, this criterion doesn’t even capture the most notorious demagogues, who almost certainly sincerely believed that they were doing the right thing for their communities and countries. Hitler thought the Holocaust was necessary and justified and right. He meant well.

So focusing on identity and “bad motives” doesn’t help us identify the kind of rhetoric we want to.

The emphasis on demagogues presumes that, as Burke said of Hitler, they can lead a great country in their wake—they are masters in control of the masses. But, if you look at the leadup to the train wrecks, that isn’t what you see at all. You don’t see an individual who magically changed what the masses thought—Hitler would never have succeeded without considerable help from the elite, and, famously, Hitler wasn’t saying anything new. People moved to support Nazism weren’t all moved by Hitler (Adolf Eichmann doesn’t mention Hitler’s rhetoric), and Hitler’s rhetoric wouldn’t have been effective if it had been entirely new. It was commonplace.

Demagogues don’t create a wake—they ride a wave.

Probably more important, if you go about it by looking at the leadup to train wrecks, you sometimes don’t see a demagogue at all, but you do see demagoguery. Proslavery forces didn’t have a single rhetor who led everyone along—the antiabolitionist alarmism, scapegoating, and general demagoguery wasn’t emanating from one rhetor, but was almost ubiquitous. It was in newspapers—even of opposing parties—speeches in Congress on all sorts of topics (including the question of the Sunday mails), novels, poetry, plays; it was used by major figures, minor figures. Prosegregation rhetoric was similarly demagogic, ubiquitous, and headless—there wasn’t a figure from whom it emanated. There wasn’t an individual who led the US in his wake; there were a lot of figures who decided to ride a wave.

If we look at decision-making processes rather than demagogues, I think we’d end up with a definition like this:

Demagoguery is a discourse that promises stability, certainty, and escape from the responsibilities of rhetoric through framing public policy in terms of the degree to which and means by which (not whether) the outgroup should be punished for the current problems of the ingroup. Public debate largely concerns three stases: group identity (who is in the ingroup, what signifies outgroup membership, and how loyal rhetors are to the ingroup); need (usually framed in terms of how evil the outgroup is); what level of punishment to enact against the outgroup (restriction of rights to extermination).

There are certain recurrent characteristics. It

• • reduces all policy discussions to questions of identity and motive, so there is never any need to argue policies qua policies;
  • polarizes a complicated political situation into us (good) and them (some of whom are deliberately evil and the rest of whom are dupes);
  • insists that the Truth is easy to perceive and convey, so that complexity, nuance, uncertainty, and deliberation are cowardice, dithering, or deliberate moves to prevent action (naïve realism);
  • is heavily fallacious, relying particularly on straw man, projection, appeal to inconsistent premises, and argument from conviction;
  • is not necessarily emotional or vehement, but there is considerable emphasis on the “need” portion of policy argumentation (which is generally an “ill” caused by the presence or actions of “them”) often with implicit or explicit threats that “we” (the ingroup) are faced with extermination, emasculation, and/or rape;
  • draws on certain “motivational passions” (in Robert Paxton’s terms) shared with fascism, although it can be used in favor of non-fascist political agenda, and even in non-political circumstances.

One of the advantages of this approach—demagoguery rather than demagogues, or rhetoric rather than identity—is that it can enable us to see ingroup demagoguery.

For instance, take two people who a personal hero of mine: Earl Warren.

In the spring of 1942, California Attorney General Earl Warren testified before the Tolan Commission regarding the mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans. A typical passage of his testimony concerns a map he gave the Committee showing Japanese land ownership. He explains what the map shows:

Notwithstanding the fact that the county maps showing the location of Japanese lands have omitted most coastal defenses and war industries, still it is plain from them that in our coastal counties, from Point Reyes south, virtually every feasible landing beach, air field, railroad, highway, powerhouse, power line, gas storage tank, gas pipe line, oil field, water reservoir or pumping plant, water conduit, telephone transmission line, radio station, and other points of strategic importance have several — and usually a considerable number — of Japanese in their immediate vicinity. The same situation prevails in all of the interior counties that have any considerable Japanese population.

I do not mean to suggest that it should be thought that all of these Japanese who are adjacent to strategic points are knowing parties to some vast conspiracy to destroy our State by sudden and mass sabotage. Undoubtedly, the presence of many of these persons in their present locations is mere coincidence, but it would seem equally beyond doubt that the presence of others is not coincidence. It would seem difficult, for example, to explain the situation in Santa Barbara County by coincidence alone. (National defense migration. Hearings before the Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration, House of Representatives, Seventy-seventh Congress, first[-second] session, pursuant to H. Res. 113, a resolution to inquire further into the interstate migration of citizens, emphasizing the present and potential consequences of the migration caused by the national defense program. pt. 11; 10974)

Notice that this argument, in favor of mass race-based imprisonment without trial, is neither emotional nor populist. And Warren was not motivated by political or personal gain—he sincerely believed that he was doing the right thing. He doesn’t fit common, or even many scholarly, definitions of a demagogue.

And, too, notice all the hedging—”Notwithstanding” and “It would seem difficult.” And notice his adopting the posture of a reasonable person—he isn’t saying all Japanese are knowingly part of the conspiracy. He isn’t unreasonable; he acknowledges some coincidence. So, his assertion that this can’t be coincidence seems more reasonable because of his having established himself as a person not prone to conspiracy theories.

In this passage, as throughout his testimony, there is a rhetoric of realism, factity, and submission to the data. Warren’s motives were good, in that he sincerely believed California was in danger—he didn’t gain any political power from taking this stance. It isn’t very emotional—as I said, there’s a matter of fact tone, with really only one brief exhortation—and it isn’t populist. He doesn’t fit the common definitions of demagogue.

But it is sheer demagoguery.

Warren is redirecting the complicated policy question—what, if anything, should we do about enemy nationals—into an identity question about “the Japanese.” Even the need question (should we fear sabotage) is reframed as an identity question: the Japanese can’t be trusted. His evidence, such as the maps, assume what’s at stake—it’s a circular argument.

The question he’s answering is whether the Japanese are trustworthy, and he’s answering that question with an enthymeme that has the major premise that the “the Japanese” are nefarious: The Japanese are nefarious because they own land near important war resources. This isn’t an argument he makes about Germans, Austrians, Italians, or French—he didn’t even bother to look into their land-owning patterns. And, of course, there are much more obvious and innocent explanations for those land owning practices—areas with a “considerable” Japanese population would have people engaged in fishing, farming, canning, and other activities that would make owning land near beaches, water, and power quite desirable.

Warren’s argument is unanswerable because it’s unfalsifiable.

But, Warren wasn’t a magician with a word-wand who swept citizens of the western states into a panic. There isn’t really even any good evidence that his testimony was widely reported—it probably had little impact on the juggernaut of mass imprisonment. It probably legitimated the racist panic of other people listening to him, by making them feel that their perceptions were reasonable and fact-based, but I doubt it changed anyone. He was appealing to perceptions about “the Japanese” that had been promoted by thousands of rhetors in the previous forty years—especially the Hearst papers, but also the Japanese Exclusion League, the FBI, the Los Angeles Times, major and minor politicians, and scholars of race. He was repeating what “everyone” knew.

Warren was refuted during the hearings—an expert on Norway pointed out that the notion of sabotage having had any impact on Nazi success was a myth, others noted that there hadn’t been sabotage at Pearl Harbor, and one person said about Warren’s argument that the lack of sabotage was proof that sabotage was planned, “I don’t think that’s real logic.” But he didn’t stick around to listen.

Warren later regretted his involvement in the mass imprisonment. He said, “Whenever I thought of the innocent little children who were torn from home, school friends, and congenial surroundings, I was conscious-stricken” (The Memoirs 149). But why didn’t he think of that in the first place? Because he didn’t imagine what his plan would really look like. He imagined the need—he had a great imagination when it came to the horrors of Japanese sabotage—but he didn’t imagine what his plan would actually look like.

Nor did he listen enough. He listened to police officers, sheriffs, and other law enforcement, but he didn’t listen to any of the people who testified against imprisonment. He didn’t listen to the opposition.

Warren was a good man, a progressive who helped clean up California politics, a compassionate man, whose leadership of the US Supreme Court gave us Brown v. Board, but a man drinking deep from demagoguery.

It isn’t clear that his demagoguery had much impact—the juggernaut was already started, and the really important demagoguery was all the anti-Japanese fear-mongering of various California media (especially the Hearst papers), organizations like the very powerful Japanese Exclusion League, even thrillers and their conventional representation of Japanese. Had Warren been the only one making the kind of argument he did, it wouldn’t have matter. He didn’t matter—his demagoguery did.

And that raises a point that is important. Demagoguery isn’t necessarily harmful. I mentioned it’s not always political—there is demagoguery in movie or music criticism that is actually pretty hilarious. As long as it’s a small amount, it’s fine. I generally say it’s like eating chocolate-covered caramels or sitting on the couch watching a bad movie. If that’s all you ate, or all you did, you’d get sick, but it isn’t always harmful.

So our problem now isn’t whether this or that political figure is a demagogue—that is itself accepting the major premise of demagoguery: that we can and should decide all political questions in terms of identity. We shouldn’t, as scholars, teachers, or citizens, be worrying about who is or is not a demagogue: we should be worrying about whether we are encouraging, rewarding, and deciding on the basis of demagoguery.

 

 

If you spend as much time as I do crawling around the internet arguing with extremists, you quickly learn the “that source is biased” move. You present a piece of evidence, and the person won’t even look at it because, they say, that source is biased.

Let’s start with that isn’t what you do with a biased source. You don’t reject it; you look at it skeptically–you check its sources. Right now, a lot of people are refusing to look at claims that Trump hasn’t been as successful as he claims because, they say, that argument is from the Hillary camp. That’s called the genetic fallacy–it doesn’t matter where the claim originated; it matters if it’s true. Whether it originated with Hillary camp or not, it’s possible to check whether they are using Trump’s numbers about his own wealth. If they are, it’s a claim to take seriously.

But, for a lot of people, that isn’t how it works. They believe that you can reject anything said by what social psychologists call the “outgroup.” The basic premise is that the “ingroup” is “objective” and the “outgroup” is “biased,” so, to determine if someone is “objective,” you just ask yourself if they’re in the in or outgroup.

Let me explain a little about in and outgroups. An ingroup isn’t necessarily powerful—it’s the group you’re in. So, if someone asked you to talk about yourself, you would describe yourself in terms of various group memberships—you’re a Pastafarian, Sooner, essentialist feminist, neoliberal, knitter. Social psychologists call that group (the one you’re in) the “ingroup” and various groups you’re not in (it’s important to your self of identity that you’re not like Them) “outgroups.”

We all have a lot of ingroups, and we have a lot of outgroups, and the importance of any given one can heighten or lower depending on the situation. We are made aware of those many (even contradictory) group memberships when they’re under threat, unusual, or interesting. If you are an American, and you find yourself in a space where American is an outgroup, you’ll likely bond with other Americans. Sitting in a group of people in a classroom in Tilden, Texas, if asked to say something about yourself, you wouldn’t say, “I’m an American.” Sitting in a group of people in a classroom of mixed national origin in Belgium, you’d be pretty likely to say, “I’m an American.” If, in Tilden, another American said something critical about Americans, you’d be more likely to listen than if a non-American said it in Belgium. If you’re already feeling a little marginalized for your group membership, you’re more likely to be at least a little defensive.

And here is a funny thing about ingroup membership. There is a kind of circular relationship between your sense of your self and your sense of the ingroup—you think of yourself as good partially because you see yourself as a member of a group you think is good, and you think that group is good partially because you think it’s made up of people like you, and you think you’re good. Your group is good because you’re a good person, and you’re a good person because your group is good.

Because you’re good, and because your group is good, then you and other ingroup members necessarily have good motives. Duh.

Thus, we have a tendency to attribute good motives to members of the ingroup, and bad motives to members of the outgroup, for exactly the same behavior. An ingroup member who works long hours in order to make a lot of money is a hard worker; an outgroup member who does that is greedy. An ingroup member who gives a lot of advantages to family members is loyal; an outgroup member who does that is motivated by prejudice against outsiders. An ingroup member who says something untrue is mistaken; an outgroup member is deliberately lying. Politicians we like are motivated by a desire to benefit their community or country; politicians we don’t like are driven by a lust for power.

An example I use in teaching a lot is how we respond to a driver in a car with a lot of bumper stickers who cuts us off on the road. If the bumper stickers suggest the person is a member of an ingroup important to us—we like the politician they endorse, for instance—we’re likely to find excuses for what they’re doing. We might think to ourselves that they’re running late, or didn’t see us, or perhaps (as I once thought to myself) it’s actually an outgroup member who borrowed a car. If the bumper stickers show it’s someone we think of as an outgroup, we’ll think, “Typical.”

In other words, we rationalize or explain away bad behavior on the part of ingroup members as a temporary aberration, an accident, or something caused by external circumstances. But, bad behavior on the part of someone in an outgroup is proof that they are all like that—it’s an example of how they are essentially bad people.

If a member of the ingroup behaves well, then we say it’s the consequence of internal qualities—their essence. If the driver with all those bumper stickers we like does something really nice, we’ll think, “Typical.” It’s proof that ingroup members are essentially good people. If a member of the outgroup behaves well, then we say it was done for bad reasons, or done by accident.

So, if an ingroup political figure kicks a puppy, she was mistaken, or meant well, the puppy deserved it, or we might even try to find ways to say it wasn’t really kicking. If an outgroup political figure kicks a puppy, it’s proof that he is evil and hateful and that’s what they’re all like.

If an outgroup political figure saves a drowning puppy, she just did it get votes. If an ingroup political figure does it, that incident is proof that people like us are just plain better.

We are more likely to empathize (or, in rhetorical terms, identify) with people who persuade us they’re members of an ingroup important to us. We’re more likely to be persuaded by them—that’s why salespeople immediately try to find some point of shared identification. They’ll also often try to bond by claiming to share an outgroup—rhetoricians call this “identification through division.” That is, the salesperson tries to get you to identify with her by sharing your dislike of “them.”

In Texas, where I live, there is a notorious rivalry between Texas A&M (the “Aggies”) and University of Texas (the “Longhorns”). My husband went to A&M, and wears an “Aggie” ring. When we go shopping for big-ticket items, the salespeople will often notice his ring and start talking trash about Longhorns, and how awful the University of Texas is. They’re trying to bond with us by showing that they share the Longhorns as an outgroup. Since I’m a professor at UT, it doesn’t generally go over very well.

If I get you to identify with me, to see yourself as like me in some important way, I’ve persuaded you that you and I are in the same ingroup. If I’m really successful, I get you to identify with me so much that you will perceive an attack on me as an attack on you. I now have your ego attached to my success. That’s an important part of demagoguery (but not every time someone does that is demagoguery—it’s a part, but not the whole).

One of the main goals of demagoguery is to persuade people not to listen to the outgroup (basically because the claims of the ingroup would fall apart if people looked at them critically). And it does so by saying, “They are biased; we are objective.”

But, again, you don’t reject a biased source; you look at it more carefully. Whether claims about his wife’s immigration status, his wealth, the lawsuits against him, his hiring of illegal immigrants, his screwing over little people, his poor financial record, his lying originated with the Clinton camp doesn’t matter–what matters is whether they’re true. And that can be determined by drilling deep into the sources of those “biased” sources. That is how you assess evidence.

People who support Trump do so because they believe that

• • politics is inherently corrupt, and politicians favor special interests because they depend on those “special interests” for campaign donations—Trump doesn’t owe anyone anything, and he is his own man;
  • Trump is authentic; normal politicians say what they’re supposed to say, and normal politics has gotten us into a state where normal people (aka, het white males) aren’t getting the things to which they’re entitled; therefore, we need an abnormal politician who will say that “normal” people are getting screwed;
  • all the criticisms of Trump come from biased sources;
  • Trump’s motives are good because he expresses kind thoughts about non-whites, and he is concerned about them—he has good motives; he is, therefore, not racist;
  • Trump’s arguments are rational because he can give evidence to support them—he makes a claim, and he gives an example or single piece of evidence that would look good to someone not especially informed on the issue;
  • Trump’s arguments are rational because his claims are endorsed by experts;
  • Trump’s arguments are rational because he gives specific datum, they support what people believe, and he doesn’t have an irrational affect;
  • Trump’s arguments are “objective” because he is speaking the Truth;
  • Trump’s arguments are good because someone uninformed about the topic on which he’s speaking can assess a good argument;
  • Trump has really good judgment, since he is a billionaire;
  • Trump, despite his problematic history regarding fidelity, child molesting, fraud, and lying, is a good person because he is one of “us.”

These aren’t just claims about Trump; these are grounded in premises in what it means to make a good argument. And where did people learn what it means to make a good argument?

In their rhetoric classes. And, although I loathe putting my thesis first (another way rhet/comp is gerfucked) I will say that these seem to be good arguments because we, as field, have said they are. We fucked up. We taught them that a person with literally no expertise in the subject can tell you whether you’ve made a good argument.

This has made me ragey for my entire career, and it’s the basis of every single fucking program. We take students, usually literature students, and we tell them they are appropriate judges of whether someone has made a good argument on topics about which they know nothing. We tell them they can assess the credibility of a source on the basis of several rules that are pretty wonky (is it a peer-reviewed journal, is it a recent source, does the author have an advanced degree). We tell them either not to worry about the logic of the argument, or we encourage them to apply the rational/irrational split, a notion that muddles the argument someone is making with the posture they appear to be taking while making it. We tell them to teach their students that “bias” is easy to assess, and comes from motives, and, finally, we encourage them to infer bias/motive from identity. We can judge an argument on formal qualities. Teachers who have, literally, never taken a single course in linguistics, logic, argumentation, or rhetoric can tell students that their language, logic, or argumentation is bad.

Well, that’s what Trump tells his followers—you don’t know anything about this, but you can decide, without any knowledge, what’s true and what isn’t. You can tell them I am speaking the truth without looking at my sources. You can judge my argument by judging me.

And on the basis of what?

Their own sense.

Trump appeals to his voters’ “sense” about what is right and wrong. We have teachers—we have textbook authors—who are relying on their own “sense” about right and wrong in regard to topics on which there is actual research. So, who are we to say, “Well, I have no actual expertise on these issues, but you should rely on experts?” We can’t. So, we have spent generations telling students that “good” arguments are… ….well, really, what are they? Arguments that please the teacher?

We have spent many, many years telling people the wrong things about argument and argumentation, and all those wrong things are in Trump. (At this point, assuming people got this far, I’ve probably lost a bunch of folks. And that’s the consequence of the thesis-first method of arguing. We expect someone to put their argument at the beginning because our faith in persuasion is so small—and because we want to know whether we should put our guard up. A lot of people in rhetoric cite studies that supposedly show that people aren’t persuaded, but that isn’t what those studies actually show. That’s a different rant.)

There was a time when argumentation textbooks would have a section on fallacies and logic, but that is long past. And why? How many teachers of argumentation (or authors of argumentation textbooks) could pass a simple test on fallacies? What, for instance, is argumentum ad misericordiam (aka, appeal to pity)? Is it an appeal to emotions? Is an appeal to emotions an irrational appeal?

Short version of my argument: no person who says an appeal to emotions is irrational should be teaching argumentation. That is an actively harmful way to approach discourse.

Argumentum ad misericordiam is one of the fallacies of relevance—it is an irrelevant appeal to emotion; it is a kind of red herring. And you can’t judge whether a single argument is engaging in that fallacy without knowing the context of the argument—without knowing the larger debate in which that argument is happening. So, I’m not making the old argument that rhetoric teachers shouldn’t teach political topics because we aren’t political scientists; I’m saying that we shouldn’t assess arguments without knowing the context of that argument—the sources it’s using, the oppositions it’s establishing.

We stopped having lists of fallacies in argumentation textbooks because of a confusion between formal and informal logic (two related, but distinct, fields). Formal logic is, as its names implies, associated with the forms that a “logical” argument can take, so it assumes that you can talk about arguments the way you talk about a math problem, with symbols. Formal logic has little (or nothing) to do with how people need to argue about political, ethical, or aesthetic topics, since they aren’t usefully captured in forms. Informal logic (or argumentation) concerns the ways that we argue, and it emphasizes that an argument needs to be assessed in relation to the context and conversation (something is a false dilemma not because it only presents two options, but it reduces a variety of options to two—if there are only two options on the table, then it isn’t a fallacy).

Authors of the most popular comp textbooks appear to have known only about the former, and didn’t know about the latter. I know many of those teachers, and they’re good people, but they spent so much time writing textbooks that they stopped reading scholarship. So, most textbooks in composition and rhetoric are gleefully disconnected from scholarship in relevant fields. Again, if you think I’m being ugly, just look for footnotes or endnotes citing recent research. Not there.

If I had time, I would talk about what it would mean to incorporate actual scholarship about reasoning and persuasion into our comp textbooks. Short version: Aristotle was right—it’s about enthymemes and paying attention to major premises. Ariel Kruglanski has argued that people tend to reason syllogistically—this is a dog; dogs hate cats; therefore, this dog must hate cats. And so, if we wanted to think usefully about logic, we would look at major premises—how reasonable is the assumption that dogs hate cats? Does the argument assume that premise consistently, or does it sometimes assume that dogs love cats?

As a culture, we oppose emotion and “rationality,” and that means that, to determine if an argument is “rational,” we try to infer whether the rhetor is “rational.” And we generally do that by trying to infer if the rhetor is letting his/her emotions “distort” their thinking. Or, connected, we rely on a definition of “logic” that is commonly in textbooks—a “logical” argument is one that appeals to facts, statistics, and data. [Notice that an argument might be logical in that sense—it makes those appeals—but completely illogical in the sense of its reasoning (what Aristotle actually meant by “logos”).] But, if we think of a rational argument as an argument made by a rational person, then we can look at a rhetor and judge whether s/he is the sort of person who speaks the truth, and who has data to support their claims. That’s a terrible definition of logic.

(As an aside, I’ll mention a better way to think about rationality—first, does the argument fairly represent its sources, including oppositions; second, does the argument appeal to consistent major premises; third, are standards of “logic” applied across interlocutors.)

But, let’s set that aside for a bit. Let’s talk about Trump. There are some issues regarding Clinton and the Clinton Foundation, but they pale in comparison to the issues regarding Trump and his “charitable” foundations. So, why do Trump supporters condemn Clinton about “corruption”, happily ignoring that their candidate has done worse?

They do so for three reasons, all of which fyc textbooks have taught them are good ways to argue.

First, they say any source that says the Trump Foundation did a bad thing is “biased.” (Okay, they usually say it’s “bias,” but you know what I mean.) They infer that bias by pointing out that the source is criticizing Trump (in other words, it’s a circular argument—you can reject all criticism of Trump on the grounds that it’s biased, and you can show it’s biased by pointing out it’s critical of Trump).

Second, and closely related, they say that any site with disconfirming evidence is written by someone with a bad motive. This too is inferred from the fact that someone is making a critical argument.

Third, perhaps (usually the stop at the first two), they show that there is a reason they’re right—data or statistics.

What all of this is assuming is that a good argument is something floating in space, unconnected to any other arguments—it has a certain form.

And Trump’s arguments have those forms—he is sincere, he really believes what he’s saying (even if it contradicts what he said recently), he can give an example to support what he’s saying, he has all the best experts, he is saying things his audience wants to believe. Trump’s arguments are appallingly apt examples of bad faith argumentation. He is a casebook in demagoguery. There is no rhetoric worse than his. And common methods of teaching argument would give him an A. This is our child. We taught generations of students that having a few (more or less random) experts supporting us, starting with your thesis, giving some examples, and leading with main claims, all of that makes a good argument. We taught them that a person with literally no expertise in the subject can tell you whether you’ve made a good argument. Because that’s how we graded them.

 Recently, there has been a lot of talk about populism and demagoguery in relation to the American presidential election, but also with the Brexit-vote in Britain. The terms populism and demagoguery are often used interchangeably. What’s the difference between the two? Are they used to describe the same thing, the one being used in a positive sense and the other in a negative?

Initially, a demagogue was simply a leader of the demes, the non-leisured class in democracies in ancient Greece–it was a political designation, like calling someone a Green, or Libertarian. Authors like Plato or Plutarch who were highly critical of democracy used the term negatively (as a Republican would use “Democrat” as a negative term, even a sneer). Plutarch seems to have been the one to make the demagogue v. statesman distinction. For Plutarch, a statesman looks out for his country, but a demagogue looks out for himself. That’s a useless way to try to make the distinction–political figures, even the nastiest (perhaps especially the nastiest), think they’re doing good.

Most people use the term simply to mean “an effective rhetor whose policy agenda I dislike.” It’s often associated with populism, but every effective politician in a democracy has to be populist.

The label demagogue is seemingly used in a negative whenever someone is able to captivate the masses. Does the term demagogue have an inherent element of resentment or distrust of “the people”/”the masses” by the establishment? That is: In a democratic society, shouldn’t the “will of the people” be something positive? Is the labeling someone a demagogue anti-democratic?

Common uses of the term are what rhetoricians call a “devil” term–what George Orwell would have called “double plus ungood.” There’s rarely anything very specific about it, and it’s never used to describe an ingroup political figure. They follow demagogues; we follow states(wo)men.

Some scholars have tried to identify a more precise and useful way to think about demagoguery–they (we) usually identify certain recurrent characteristics: scapegoating, projection, simplifying complicated issues in a binary, authoritarianism, condemning of deliberation and thinking, and policies of purification.

Ypu’ve written: “Demagoguery,” rather than being a specific kind of rhetoric, is simply a term of abuse that people apply to rhetors with whom they disagree.” Is demagoguery inherently negative? Or can it be used in a positive sense? If demagoguery is to captivate “the masses” through emotional appeals, couldn’t the same definition be used for, say, Obamas “hope and change” message in 2008? Does a demagogue always lie?

What I was trying to say there is that’s how it’s often used. And that’s useless.

Demagoguery isn’t inherently damaging. No scholar defines it as captivating the masses through emotional appeals–that’s also a useless definition. (Who doesn’t do that?) If “demagoguery” is going to be a useful term, then we have to distinguish between leaders we think led their followers astray or seriously damaged their communities and ones who opened up opportunities.

My area of scholarship is train wrecks in public deliberation–times when communities came to bad decisions, after a lot of argument, then got feedback that their decisions were wrong, and recommitted. If you look at those times and infer characteristics about the public discourse at the time, then you see the problem is never populism (sometimes it’s very elite discourse), nor is it emotionalism, but scapegoating, projection, and those other characteristics listed above are very important.

Demagogues are more often than not perfectly sincere; while they are inaccurate, they do not intend to lie.

You write in Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Volume 8, Number 3, Fall 2005, pp. 459-476, that “It is notable, however, the extent to which this scholarly project lapsed; journals in rhetoric show few or no articles on the subject since Steven R. Goldzwig’s 1989 piece on Farrakhan.” Why do you think there have been little scholarly interest in demagoguery in recent years? Is it because there have been relatively few demagogues in recent years? If so, why/what is needed for a demagogue to gain support? Do you think there will be an upswing in interest with the recent political climate?

The most common definitions emphasized populism and emotionalism, and those aren’t connected to communities making bad decisions. But a lot of scholars have talked about the issue, just not with that term. Berlet and Lyons use the term “toxic populism;” Niewert talks about “eliminationists;” Kenneth Burke (in a brilliant 1939 analysis of Hitler’s rhetoric) doesn’t use the term demagoguery, but that’s what he’s talking about.

I think the focus on demagogues is part of the problem. Demagoguery tries to reframe all issues as ones of ingroup membership (us v. them); focusing on demagogues means we’re still arguing about identity. Instead, we should be arguing about policy.

I just wanted to clarify one point. You write:

“Demagoguery isn’t inherently damaging”, but also “If “demagoguery” is going to be a useful term, then we have to distinguish between leaders we think led their followers astray or seriously damaged their communities and ones who opened up opportunities.”

I don’t understand how you can square those two. If demagogues are “leaders we think led their followers astray or seriously damaged their communities” doesn’t that mean that it is inherently damaging? Or have I misunderstood you?

Good point. If you look at leaders who led their followers astray or seriously damaged communities, you can see that they didn’t do it by some kind of magic rhetoric they cast a spell over a populace. They didn’t do it alone; they had a lot of people who not only followed them, but all of whom were participating the same kind of rhetoric. Demagoguery is damaging when it’s normal political discourse. There’s always going to be someone out there going on and on about how we need to purify our group of this or that kind of person. A community is in trouble when there are lots of people who accept that’s a good way to argue–that we should be trying to figure out who is and isn’t loyal to the ingroup and then we’ll have solved our problems.

Donald Trump is the consequence of normalized demagoguery; not the cause.