How the pro-GOP media is using a rhetoric of war to radicalize its base

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

[Another paper from the Rhetoric Society of America conference. For the conference, the paper is titled : “The ‘War on Christians’ and Preventive War.”]

This panel came about because of our shared interest in the paradox that advocates of reactionary ideologies often use a rhetoric of return in service of radically new policies and practices. Sometimes they’re claiming to return to older practices that either never existed or that are not the same as what is now being advocated, and sometimes they’re claiming that their new policies are a continuation of current practice when they aren’t. It’s not a paradox that reactionary pundits and politicians would use appeals to the past in order to argue for a reactionary agenda—in fact, pundits and politicians all over the political spectrum use a mythical past to argue for policies, and, if anything, it makes more sense for reactionaries to do it than progressives—the tension comes from appealing to a false past as though it were all the proof one needs to justify unprecedented policies.

The false past is somewhat puzzling in various ways. It’s sometimes about apparently trivial points, such as the myth that everyone used to say “Merry Christmas!” It’s frequently appealing to a strange sense of timelessness, in which words like “Christian” or “white” have always had exactly the same meaning that they do now. It’s sometimes self-serving to the point of silliness– the plaint that “kids these days” are worlds worse than any previous generation. The evidence for these claims is often nothing more than hazy nostalgia for the simple world of one’s youth, so that the fact that as children we were unaware of crime and adultery is taken as proof that they didn’t happen in those days.

At first, when I started running across this odd strategy, I thought the rhetoric of return was essentially a kind of rhetorical diversionary tactic, born of necessity. People are naturally resistant to new policies, especially people likely to be attracted to reactionary ideologies, and engaging in reasonable policy argumentation is hard, especially if you don’t have a very good policy. People rarely demand that a policy be defended through argumentation if it’s the status quo, or a return to past successful policy, and that kind of makes sense. What that audience tendency means is that a rhetor who wants to evade the responsibilities and accountability of policy argumentation can try to frame their new policy as a return to a previously successful one or a continuation of the status quo. This is nostalgia as a diversion from deliberation and argumentative accountability.

But I now think that’s only part of it.

I think it’s a rhetorical strategy oriented toward radicalizing an audience in order to persuade them to engage in a preventive and absolute war, thereby granting in-group rhetors complete moral and rhetorical license. I’m arguing that there is a political strategy with four parts. Reactionary rhetors strategically falsify the past and/or present such that some practice (e.g., celebrating Christmas as we do now) is narrated as something all Americans have always done, and therefore as constituting America. Another strategy is to insist that “liberals” are at war with “America,” as evidenced by their determination to exterminate those mythically foundational practices (such as celebrating Christmas). Because liberals are trying to exterminate America, the GOP should respond with preventive and absolute war—normal political disagreement is renarrated as a zero-sum war in which one or the other group must be exterminated. The goal of those three strategies is to gain the moral and rhetorical license afforded by persuading a base that they are existentially threatened.

I. Strategic Nostalgia

Take, for instance, abortion. The GOP is not proposing returning to the world pre- Roe v. Wade; they are advocating a radically new set of policies, much more extreme than were in place in 1972. In 1972, thirteen states allowed abortion “if the pregnant woman’s life or physical or mental health were endangered, if the fetus would be born with a severe physical or mental defect, or if the pregnancy had resulted from rape or incest” (Guttmacher). Abortion was outright legal in four states. And while it was a hardship, it was at least possible for women to travel to those states and get a legal abortion.

GOP state legislatures are not only criminalizing abortion in all circumstances, even if forcing a woman to continue with a nonviable pregnancy is likely to kill her, but criminalizing miscarriage, criminalizing (or setting bounties for) getting medical treatment (or certain forms of birth control) anywhere, even where it’s legal. And it’s clear that a GOP Congress will pass a Federal law prohibiting abortion under all circumstances, as well as many forms of birth control, in all states. They are not proposing a return.

Or, take another example. In 2003, the Bush Administration proposed a radically new approach in international relations—at least for the post-war US—preventive war. But, as exemplified in Colin Powell’s highly influential speech to the UN (Oddo), this new approach was presented as another instance of preemptive war (the basis of Cold War policy).

II. Preventive War

To explain that point, I need to talk about kinds of war. When rhetors are advocating war, they generally claim it’s one of four kinds: self-defense, preemptive, preventive, and conquest. Self-defense, when another nation has already declared war and is invading, is a war of necessity. The other three are all wars of choice, albeit with different degrees of choice. A preemptive war is when one nation is about to be attacked and so strikes first—it’s preemptive self-defense against imminent aggression. A preventive war “is a strategy designed to forestall an adverse shift in the balance of power and driven by better-now-than-later logic” (Levy 1). Preventive war is about preserving hegemony, in both senses of that word.

Nations or groups engage in preventive war when they believe that their current geopolitical, economic, or ideological hegemony is threatened by an up-and-coming power. And I would note that white evangelicals started pushing a rhetoric of war when their political hegemony in the South was threatened by desegregation and internal migration (Jones); the GOP increasingly appealed to various wars as data came out showing that its base was not far from national minority status (FiveThirtyEight).

While wars of conquest are common, and the US has engaged in a lot, it’s rare to find major political figures willing to admit that they were or are advocating a war of conquest. The only example I’ve found is Alexander the Great at the river Beas, and our only source for that speech was written two hundred years later, so who knows what he said. Even Hitler claimed (and perhaps believed) that his war of conquest was self-defense. Wars of conquest—ones in which the goal is to exterminate or completely disempower another group simply because they have things we want or they’re in our way—are rhetorically a bit of a challenge. So, pundits and politicians advocating wars of conquest avoid the challenge. They claim it’s not a war of choice, but one forced on us by a villainous enemy, and thus either self-defense or preemptive.

Wars of conquest are generally what the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz called “absolute” war,; that is, one in which we are trying to “destroy the adversary, to eliminate his existence as a State” (qtd in Howard 17). Absolute war is not necessarily genocide; but it is oriented toward making the opponent defenseless (77), so that they must do our will. Most wars, according to Clausewitz, can end far short of absolute war because there are other goals, such as gaining territory, access to a resource, and so on, what he calls political ends.

What I am arguing is that the US reactionary right is using strategic nostalgia to mobilize its base to support and engage in an absolute war against “liberals” (that is, any opposition party or dissenters), by claiming “liberals” have already declared such a war on America. Thus, it’s preventive war, but defended by a rhetoric of self-defense.

As Rush Limbaugh said, “And what we are in the middle of now, folks, is a Cold Civil War. It has begun” (“There is no”) and “I think we are facing a World War II-like circumstance in the sense that, as then, it is today: Western Civilization is at stake” (“The World War II”; see also “There is No Whistleblower”). And it is the Democrats who started the war (“What Happened”), actually, a lot of wars, including a race war. Again, quoting Limbaugh, “I believe the Democrat Party, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, whoever, I think they are attempting, and have been for a while, to literally foment a race war. I think that has been the objective” (“Trump’s Running”).

If “conservatives” are at war with “liberals,” then what kind of war? If politics is war, what kind is it? The GOP is not talking about Clausewitz’s normal war, that is of limited time and proximate successes, but complete subjugation.

The agenda of completely (and permanently) subjugating their internal and external opponents is fairly open, as Katherine Stewart has shown in regard to conservative white evangelicals (The Power Worshippers). Dinesh D’Souza, in his ironically-titled The Big Lie, is clear that the goal of Republican action is making and keeping Democrats a minority power, unable to get any policies passed (see especially 236-243).

It is, in other words, a rejection of the premise of democracy.

III. Moral and rhetorical license

The conservative Matthew Continetti concludes his narrative of “the hundred year war for American conservatism” saying:

What began in the twentieth century as an elite-driven defense of the classical liberal principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States ended up, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, as a furious reaction against elites of all stripes. Many on the right embraced a cult of personality and illiberal tropes. The danger was that the alienation from and antagonism toward American culture and society expressed by many on the right could turn into a general opposition to the constitutional order. (411)

(Paul Johnson makes a similar argument in his extraordinary book.) The explicit goal of disenfranchising any political opposition, the valorizing of the attempted insurrection, new processes for confirming SCOTUS nominees, voter suppression—these are a general opposition to the constitutional order. It is clear that many GOP-dominated state legislatures intend to overturn—violently if necessary—any election Democrats win. Georgia’s recent legislation, for instance, “gives Georgia’s Republican-controlled General Assembly effective control over the State Board of Elections and empowers the state board to take over local county boards — functionally allowing Republicans to handpick the people in charge of disqualifying ballots in Democratic-leaning places like Atlanta” (Beauchamp).

GOP pundits and politicians can be open in their attacks on other Americans, American culture, and American society by using strategic nostalgia to renarrate what is American, and thereby gain moral and political license. That is, radicalize their base.

By “radicalize,” I mean the process described by scholars of radicalization like Willem Koomen, Arie Kruglanski, or Marc Sageman, that enable people to believe they are justified in escalating their behavior to degrees of extremism and coercion that they would condemn in an outgroup, and that they would at some point in the past have seen as too much.

Koomen et al. say that “perceived threat is possibly the most significant precondition for polarization [and] radicalization” (161). That a group is threatened means that cultural or even legal norms in favor of fairness and against coercion no longer apply to the ingroup. There are three elements that can serve “both to arouse a (misplaced) sense of ingroup superiority and to legitimize violence”:
“The first is the insistence that the[ir] faith represents the sole absolute truth, the second is the tenet that its believers have been ‘chosen’ by a supreme being and the third is the conviction that divinely inspired religious law outranks secular law” (Koomen et al. 160).
Since they (or we) are a group entitled by a supreme being to dominate, then any system or set of norms that denies us domination is not legitimate, and can overthrown by violence, intimidation, or behaviors that we would condemn as immoral if done by any other group. We have moral license.

One particularly important threat is humiliation, including humiliation by proxy. That’s how the anti-CRT and anti-woke rhetoric functions. If you pay any attention to reactionary pundits and media, you know that they spend a tremendous amount of time talking about how the “woke mob” wants white people to feel shame; they frame discussions about racism (especially systemic racism) as deliberate attempts to humiliate white Christians. This strategy is, I’m arguing, a deliberate attempt to foment moral outrage—what Marc Sageman (a scholar of religious terrorism) says is the first step in radicalizing. He lists three other steps: persuading the base that there is already a war on their religion, ensuring a resonance between events in one’s personal life and that larger apocalyptic narrative, and boost that sense of threat through interpersonal and online networks.

The rhetoric of war, at some point, stops being rhetoric.

And that’s what we’re seeing. 70% of American adults identify as Christian (Pew); it’s virtually impossible for an atheist to get elected to major office; Christian holidays are national holidays. There’s no war on Christians in the US. And the Puritans—the people Christians like to claim as the first founders of the US—prohibited the celebration of Christmas. But the pro-GOP media not only claims there is a war on Christians, but that its base can see signs of this war in their personal life, as when a clerk says “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” And pro-GOP media continually boosts that sense of threat through networks that prohibit serious discussion of policy, different points of view, or lateral reading.

What all this does is make “conservatives” feel that war-like aggression against “liberals” is justified because it is self-defense.

According to this narrative, the GOP has been unwillingly forced into an absolute war of self-defense. This posture of being forced into an existential war with a demonic foe gives the reactionary right complete moral license. To the extent that they can get their base to believe that they are facing extermination of themselves or “liberals,” there are no legal or moral constraints on them.

And that’s what the myths do. The myths take the very particular and often new categories, practices, beliefs, policies, and project them back through time to origin narratives, so that pundits and politicians can make their base feel existentially threatened every time someone says, “Happy Holidays.”




Beauchamp, Zach. “Yes, the Georgia election law is that bad.” Vox Apr 6, 2021, 1:30pm EDT (Accessed May 17, 2022). https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22368044/georgia-sb202-voter-suppression-democracy-big-lie

von Clausewitz, Carl et al. On War. Eds. And Trans. Michael Eliot Howard and Peter Paret. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Print.

Continetti, Matthew. The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism. New York: Basic Books. 2022. Print.

D’Souza, Dinesh. The Big Lie : Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, a division of Salem Media Group, 2017. Print.

FiveThirtyEight. “Advantage, GOP.” https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/advantage-gop/ Accessed May 24, 2022.

Howard, Michael. Clausewitz : a Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print.

Johnson, Paul Elliott. I the People : The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States. 1st ed. University of Alabama Press, 2022. Print.

Jones, Robert P. (Robert Patrick). White Too Long : the Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2020. Print.


Koomen, Wim., J. van der Pligt, and J. van der (Joop) Pligt. The Psychology of Radicalization and Terrorism. London ;: Routledge, 2016. Print.

Kruglanski, Arie W., Jocelyn J. Bélanger, and Rohan Gunaratna. The Three Pillars of Radicalization : Needs, Narratives, and Networks. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019. Print.

“Lessons from Before Roe: Will Past be Prologue?” The Guttmacher Policy Review, 6:1, March 1, 2003. (Accessed May 16, 2022). https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2003/03/lessons-roe-will-past-be-prologue

Levy, Jack S. “Preventive War and Democratic Politics.” International studies quarterly 52.1 (2008): 1–24. Web.

Limbaugh, Rush. “Biden Will Renew Obama’s War on Suburban Property Values.” October 26, 2020. (Accessed May 16, 2022). https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2020/10/26/biden-will-renew-obamas-war-on-suburban-property-values/

“Rush to the Democrats: Stop the War on Police.” May 4, 2021. (Accessed May 16, 2022)https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2021/05/04/rush-to-the-democrats-stop-the-war-on-police/

“Rush Sounds the Alarm on the Democrat War on Policing.” April 26, 2021. (Accessed May 16, 2022) https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2021/04/26/rush-sounds-the-alarm-on-the-democrat-war-on-policing/

“The World War II Challenge We Face.” June 6, 2019. (Accessed May 16, 2022). https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2019/06/06/our-world-war-ii-challenge/

“There is No Whistleblower, Just a Leaker! We’re in the Midst of a Cold Civil War.” September 27, 2019. (Accessed May 17, 2022). https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2019/09/27/were-in-the-midst-of-a-cold-civil-war/

“Trump’s Running to Save Us from a Race War Fomented by Democrats.” August 31, 2020. (Accessed May 17, 2022). https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2020/08/31/trumps-running-to-save-us-from-the-race-war-that-democrats-are-fomenting/

“War on Women! Dems Sponsoring Sex-Trafficking at the Border.” May 26, 2021. (Accessed May 17, 2022) https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2021/05/26/war-on-women-dems-sponsoring-sex-trafficking-at-the-border/

“What Happened Since I Was Last Here: The Left Sparks a Civil War.” (Accessed May 17, 2022). https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2018/06/25/what-happened-since-i-was-last-here-left-sparks-civil-war/

Oddo, John. Intertextuality and the 24-Hour News Cycle : a Day in the Rhetorical Life of Colin Powell’s U.N. Address. East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 2014. Print.

Pew Research Center. “Religious Landscape Study.” https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/ Accessed May 24, 2022.

Stewart, Katherine. The Power Worshippers : Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. Print.




Human Rights Rhetoric

Eleanor Roosevelt holding a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
from https://www.flickr.com/photos/fdrlibrary/27758131387/

For a supersession on human rights rhetoric.

Arguments about rhetoric and human right tends to focus on the term “rights” and the ethical problems and contradictions inevitably involved in imposing particular Western post-Enlightenment conceptions of universal rights on all other cultures.

The tension arises because so much rhetoric about humans rights has been grounded in Liberalism, with its emphasis on atomistic models of individuality and self-determination. Western Liberalism is not the only possible source for rhetorics of human rights, as much award-winning RSA scholarship has shown, but it does tend to be both foundational and constraining when the issue of human rights comes up in both foreign and domestic policy. Specifically, the problem I want to pursue is that US liberalism frames human rights as a commodity that the US has and has always had in such abundance that the only policy issues are: 1) how much of it to export and to whom, and 2) to what extent do we force others to open their market to our commodity.

In this brief talk, I want to focus on that notion of rights as a commodity because I think it ends up disturbingly redefining human in US political rhetoric

It’s absurd to think that the US has an excessive crop of human rights, or that it ever has. Yet, that notion of the US serving as the model for how to do liberty has been part of American foreign policy and domestic rhetoric at least as far back as US adventures in imperialism in the late 19th century. Woodrow Wilson was far from the first President to advocate foreign military ventures on humanitarian grounds. Similarly, the notion that liberty and property have a causal relationship was the basis of policies as varied as the Dred Scott decision, voting rights, distribution of public lands, forced privatization of tribal lands, and many others.

At the same time, however, there was a rhetoric of human rights, more fundamental and essential than the rights gained by legal citizenship or owning property. What happened with the rise of Social Darwinism and its conflation with “the market” is that we increasingly came to see all human interactions as competitive and individualistic market interactions. As many others have pointed out, the natural consequence of the tendency to see all human interactions as essentially market interactions is to make everything a commodity. As such, everything has a price, and everything can be sold. Since the market is competitive, it’s possible for some people to have none of a good and others to have cornered the market on it.

If human rights are a commodity traded in a free market, then not everyone can afford them, and so some people aren’t human.

This tendency to assume that a “free” market version of capitalism and democracy are necessarily connected became almost hegemonic during the Cold War, during which time we were perfectly willing to ally ourselves with anti-democratic governments, as long as they were open to American capitalism; we were (with a few exceptions such as Israel and some Scandinavian countries) completely unwilling to ally ourselves with even mildly socialist governments, even if they were anti-USSR. Capitalism was more important than democracy.

This was the assumption that meant we rationalize authoritarian governments as “democracies in transition.” It’s also why, with the breakup of the USSR and Soviet bloc, the US was more interested in privatizing everything, even if that immediately led to extreme income inequality and the attendant violations of human rights, than we were in establishing democratic norms and protecting human rights.

One other factor that’s important for thinking about the current US failure to protect the human rights of its own inhabitants is the just world model, and its manifestation in toxic populism and prosperity gospel.

I’ll start with the second. The just world model is a cognitive bias that says that people get what we deserve in this world—that bad things only happen to bad people, who have brought it on somehow, and good things happen to good people. Prosperity gospel is one form of this fantasy, saying that God rewards people of sufficient faith with wealth and good health. Thus, wealth and good health are signs that a person is blessed and honored by God.

Crucial to toxic populism is an imagined binary of people: authentic v. fake. Toxic populism takes the liberal notion of universality of experience and turns it into a singularity of validity. While acknowledging difference, it posits that only the position, values, beliefs, experiences, policy agenda, and so on of one group (the “people”) are “real,” and, as I argued in a different paper yesterday, the fundamental human right is to be a member of that group, with that ideology.

Out-groups don’t have human rights because they aren’t really human. Difference is dehumanizing.

Further, since rights are a commodity, and wealthy people are blessed and honored by God, then wealth should give a person access to more rights; they should be able to have greater buying power in the rights market.

What all this means is that people are willing to tolerate extraordinary injustice because they see it as a kind of justice. They don’t see disparate treatment by police, or deliberately discriminatory voting or housing policies as violating rights, because they don’t think poor people, political opponents, or any other out-groups have rights.

So, what I’m arguing is that we disagree about what specific public policies do in terms of rights because we disagree about who counts as a human deserving of rights. Doug Cloud has argued for shifting our attention to the term “rhetoric” in the phrase human rights rhetoric, and I think that’s astute.

Trying to argue with people assuming that they share our understanding of the distinction between rights and privileges, or they understand humans in the same we do, guarantees that we’ll get nowhere. I’m not certain that having the arguments we need to have will get us very far very fast, but it’s worth a try.

Is Biden responsible for high gas prices? The smartest non-“liberal” sources on the issue


As I’ve said elsewhere, demagoguery breaks a complicated issue with an array of policy options and explanations into two: one is narrowly defined, and everything else is the other. So, for the pro-GOP demagogic sphere, if you don’t support the current GOP, then you’re “liberal” which is, incoherently enough, the same as communist. (When I’m grumpy, I try to get the people who think democratic socialist, progressive, communist, and liberal are the same to explain Weimar Germany. They never do.) There are other demagogic enclaves out there, in which people insist you either completely endorse their agenda or you’re [whatever the extreme Other is], and they irritate me just as much, but they aren’t relevant to this post. So, I’ll stick with listing articles from non-“liberal” sources on the issue of Biden’s responsibility.

I have to admit that I didn’t find a smart, sourced argument that it’s all Biden’s fault. The best argument I found for blaming Biden was neither smart nor sourced, but it was better than a lot of others that were just argle bargle. And, really, that would be a hard argument to make. It’s useful to point out that gas prices have risen worldwide, and Biden is not actually President of the world. So, there’s no reasonable narrative that says it’s him alone. How would he make prices rise in Europe? There must be something else…it’ll come to me. Starts with a U, maybe, or supply issues?

Anyway, I’ve put these together so that, if you find yourself arguing with someone who says it’s all Biden, you can provide sources they’ll have a harder time deflecting.

So, let’s start with the notoriously liberal Journal of Petroleum Technology. It’s a complicated argument, and it’s really about natural gas. I will quote this (it’s important for something later): “A year ago, President Joe Biden and others were focused on priorities such as ending drilling on federally owned land. Now, the federal government is planning a lease sale for onshore drilling rights.”

There are several in Wall Street Journal. “Energy markets were already tight as the global economy rebounded from the pandemic, and gasoline prices have climbed recently as traders, shippers and financiers have shunned supplies of oil from Russia, which is the world’s second-largest exporter of crude oil after Saudi Arabia, according to the International Energy Agency.” There’s also this article of theirs (well worth a read) :
Pull quotes:

“Oil prices, already turbocharged by a rebounding economy after a pandemic-induced slowdown, were pushed even higher when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pulled some three million barrels of Russian oil a day from global supplies.”
“Gasoline prices have hit records as petroleum refiners that had cut back output as the economy slowed still haven’t ramped back up to pre-pandemic levels. The market has lost about one million barrels of daily petroleum-refining capacity since early 2020, when the U.S. was producing about 19 million barrels of refined petroleum a day.
Events in Ukraine caused oil prices to skyrocket, pouring gasoline on what was already a smoldering fire. Brent crude topped $130 a barrel in early March, and gasoline prices recently hit a record $4.331 a gallon, putting them up more than 15% from where they stood a month earlier, according to AAA. Prices have fallen slightly from that record, hitting $4.215 a gallon on Friday, despite the continuing loss of Russian oil.”

And what has Biden done? According to the notoriously liberal WSJ:

“President Biden has said his administration would release millions of barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which has a capacity of 727 million barrels. However, experts say that is unlikely to move the needle very much on the price of gasoline.
Some state and federal officials are also weighing state and federal gas-tax decreases to ease consumers’ pain at the pump. Business groups are pushing back on such moves, saying they could jeopardize infrastructure improvements.
The Biden administration also has held talks, or said it plans to do so, with major oil producing countries about potentially boosting production. Talks with Venezuela, the oil industry of which the U.S. sanctioned in 2019, met opposition from Republicans, as well as some Democrats.
Some Democrats, meanwhile, are pushing to suspend the federal gasoline tax, which amounts to 18 cents a gallon, for the rest of 2022.”

The free-market Economist doesn’t mention Biden. There’s one article from September that predicts problems, even without the war. More recent articles focus on Russia, such as this one.

The only one that tried to argue it is Biden is Heritage , which, seriously, has gone downhill. Not because I disagree with them (I disagree with all the sources I list) but because they stopped providing sources, and are dipping deep into just lying. This page, for instance, doesn’t cite any source for its claim. Its argument is that Biden is responsible for the high prices because he won’t “use all the energy sources we have”—in other words, there are high prices that even they say aren’t his fault. He’s to blame because he isn’t doing what would lower the prices he didn’t cause.

What should he do? Something that won’t immediately lower prices, and is unwise on other grounds.

This is argument by counter-factual, not necessarily a bad argument. But in this case, it is a bad argument, but bad faith. It engages in straw man, motivism, binary thinking, and non sequitur. The argument is: “Even now, with Americans struggling, they want to make it more expensive and difficult to explore for and produce oil, construct and operate pipelines, and access financing and investment. And that means they have to manipulate customer demand by discouraging gasoline use in the long run.”

For one thing, as mentioned above, Biden has eased up on drilling on public lands. What Biden has done is clearly explained in the WSJ article linked above and here. More important, allowing the exploration and production of oil on public lands, forcing people to accept pipelines, and…I don’t even know what the financing argument is—the article doesn’t say…will not result in an increase in oil for several years. So, this isn’t a solution for gas prices now. The whole drill now, drill everywhere argument is the equivalent of saying that we should spend every penny we have if someone in the family loses a job, which is risky at best. In any case, the point is that even the most anti-Biden argument implicitly admits it isn’t Biden, and he can’t solve it immediately. And that’s the best they’ve got. [1]






[1] They also like a heavily-edited Fox interview. Since they cut off what Granholm thinks is hilarious, I’m going to go with she made a reasonable argument.


Preface to Deliberating War

Army Air Corps in front of a plane

This is the latest version of the preface to the book I’m working on.

One semester, I was teaching Abrams v. US and Schenck v. US—two famous cases about criminalizing dissent in wartime—and I had a couple of students absolutely insistent that people should not be allowed to criticize a war “once boots hit the ground.” I pointed out that refusing to deliberate about a war we were in would mean we were guaranteed to have wars last longer than they needed, and therefore have troops die unnecessarily. They said it didn’t matter—what mattered that you could not criticize a war once people were risking their lives for it. To do so would be to dishonor them and their sacrifice.

My uncle was killed in the 1943 North Africa campaign. He successfully bombed a Nazi supply train, but his plane was downed in the resulting explosion–perhaps because he hadn’t been informed the train had munitions, perhaps because he was unable to pull the plane up fast enough since he’d been injured in the Battle of the Kasserine Pass. He was a hero to me.

Since the speculation was that a contributing factor to his death was an injury he’d gotten during the Kasserine Pass battle, at some point, I looked into it. Anyone familiar with the action knows what I found: “America’s first major battle against the Germans in World War Two would end in shame, disgrace and defeat—and Major-General Lloyd R. Fredendall would bear a great deal of the responsibility for that defeat” (Whiting 114). Histories of the battle have little or nothing good to say about Fredendall. He was “an appallingly inept commander” (Carr 28), whose leadership was “a tangled skein of misunderstanding, duplication of effort, overlapping responsibility, and consequential muddle” (Dear, Oxford Companion 644). His communications were often “incomprehensible,” and he became angry if asked to clarify (Blumenson 85). He “was utterly out of touch with his command […] feuded constantly with his subordinate commanders, and generally broke every known principle of leadership in the employment of his corps” (D’Este 24). He was “ill-informed and far from the scene” (Rutherford 121). Whiting says, “Critical of his superiors, Fredendall was outspoken about the defects of his subordinates, ponderous in action, overbearing in attitude and with a tendency to jump to conclusions—probably more often than not, the wrong ones.” (113) Major General Ernest N. Harmon, tasked by Eisenhower with assessing what went wrong in the battle, reported that Fredendall was “a physical and moral coward” (qtd. Atkinson 400). The book I read particularly noted his poor handling of the Army Air Corps, putting them in considerable and unnecessary danger (including getting fired on by American troops, Blumenson 81-2).

I was enraged.

At the author.

Not because I knew enough about the event to think that what the author was saying was untrue, but because I felt it shouldn’t be said.

I was immediately puzzled by my own rage. It would make sense for me to be outraged that Fredendall might have been an over-promoted coward whose incompetence may have contributed to my uncle’s death. It would make sense for me to be outraged if I believed that the author was being inaccurate or unfair to Fredendall. But, to be honest, neither of those was my first (or even third) reaction. I was outraged because someone was suggesting that my uncle’s death was the consequence of someone’s incompetence. And I felt strongly that that was not something that should be said. It took me a while to understand why I was more angry at someone arguing (even correctly) that his death might have been the consequence of military incompetence than I was at the incompetent who might have caused his death. I was having the same reaction as the students. My almost visceral response was that criticizing how the action was conducted dishonored my uncle because it seemed to say that his death was unnecessary, and therefore meaningless.

What I learned from my rage about the criticism of the Kasserine Pass action is that it is tremendously difficult to consider seriously that someone we love and admire might have died unnecessarily, as a consequence of bad decisions, bad leadership, or even for bad reasons. Yet, as I said to the student, if we can’t admit the bad decisions, bad leadership, or bad reasons, more people will die unnecessarily.

Eventually, of course, I worked around to realizing that some people are incompetent, some decisions are unforced errors, some wars are the consequence of political figures bungling or blustering or trying to stabilize a wobbly base or just having painted themselves into a corner, an irresponsible media, an easily-mobilized or distracted public, a culture of demagoguery, or various other not especially noble factors. Even in a just war (and I do think American intervention in WWII was just) there are unjust actions, bad decisions, incompetence, and failures of leadership, and, if we are to make the conduct of war more just and competent, we have to acknowledge the errors. But that my uncle’s death might have been the consequence of incompetence still hurts.

What I learned from my own reaction is that deliberation about a war is constrained by considerations of honor. I want my uncle honored. And it was hard for me to understand that honoring him is compatible with being willing to be critical about the conditions under which he died. We want our ancestors honored. That we want them honored shouldn’t make us unwilling to think carefully and honestly about how, why, or what for they died. The more we refuse to consider past deliberations critically the more we poison our ability to deliberate about the present, and the more likely it is that others will die.

My uncle was a hero. Fredendall bungled the Battle of the Kasserine Pass, in ways that might have contributed to my uncle’s death. Both of those things can be true at the same time. We have to live in a world in which we honor the military dead without thinking we are prohibited from being critical of the cause for which they fought, the people who led them, or the political discourse that caused them to go to war. Learning from mistakes gives those mistakes meaning.

This isn’t a book about military strategy, or military history; it’s about rhetoric. More specifically, this book is about the vexed relationship of political disagreement, deliberation, demagoguery, and war. And I don’t think we can figure out the right relationship without being willing to admit we’ve sometimes gotten it wrong.

We’re primed to reason badly when it comes to questions about war because the prospect of fighting activates so many cognitive biases, especially binary thinking. Under those circumstances, deliberation can easily be framed as opting for cowardly flight instead of courageous fight, as unnecessary at best and treasonous at worst. It’s precisely because disagreements about war are so triggering, so to speak, that we need to be deliberately deliberative. To say that we should deliberate reasonably before going to war is banal in the abstract, but oddly fraught in the moment, and this book uses several cases to explore why it is that we often evade deliberation even (or especially?) when the stakes are so high.

Many people believe it is counter-productive to deliberate about war before it starts, since they think deliberation might cause us to delay in an urgent situation, will weaken our will, enable cowardice to sneak in the door. But, like my students, many people believe we shouldn’t deliberate about war once it’s started because we shouldn’t have sent people to risk their lives if we’re uncertain that the risk is necessary—we owe them our full commitment, since that’s what they’re giving. My own experience shows the deep aversion to deliberating about a war even long after it’s over, since a critical assessment suggests that lives were wasted. In other words, we are averse to deliberating about war, ever.

But, if war and deliberation are incompatible, then war and democracy are incompatible, because democracy thrives on deliberation. This isn’t to say that every decision about a conflict should be thoroughly deliberated—that would be impossible and unwise—but that deliberation doesn’t weaken the will for war if there is a strong case to be made for that war. If advocates of war can’t make their case through reasonable policy argumentation, then they probably have a bad case, and it’s likely an unnecessary war. War triggers cognitive biases, and so deliberation is necessary to counter the effects of those biases—contrary to popular belief, we can’t simply will ourselves not to rely on biases; deliberating with people who disagree can, however, do some work in reducing the power of the biases. But, not all rhetors want us to reduce the power of cognitive biases. Because we are averse to deliberating about or during war, rhetors engaged in normal political disagreements who are unable or unwilling to advocate a policy rationally are tempted to claim that this isn’t normal politics; it’s war. If they can persuade their base that this situation is war, then they won’t be expected to deliberate. The cognitive biases triggered by war will motivate the audience to believe beyond and without reason, and some political leaders and media pundits want exactly that.

Rhetoric and war have a counterintuitively complicated relationship; after all, we don’t go to war because of what the situation is, but because of what we believe the situation to be—that is, the rhetoric about our situation. Being at war (or even believing ourselves to be at war), as I’ll emphasize in this book, often causes us to think differently about things; it persuades us. It also constrains our rhetoric in ways, such as how much we can be critical of the war or its conduct once boots are on the ground. Invoking war or its prospect can change how we argue, and rhetoric can be treated as a kind of war.
In this book, I’ll argue that the way we argue for a war (that is, the rhetoric) implies the conditions under which we can end it, how it will be conducted, what kind of war it will be, what kind of sacrifices (lives, resources, rights) will be expected on the home front, who and what our enemy is. The rhetoric we use might alienate, neutralize, or mobilize potential allies, gain sympathy and assistance from third parties, generate sympathy and assistance for our antagonist(s), or persuade third parties to remain neutral. It might unify a nation, thereby increasing support and morale, or frame the question in partisan terms, thereby ensuring divided support; it can enable us to deliberate our options, including long-term plans. It might make the military action to be diversionary, an attempt to deflect attention from a regime’s scandals or failures, thereby rousing cynicism rather than enthusiasm.

And war affects rhetoric. As mentioned above, when we’re seriously considering war, it’s easier to persuade people to imagine our complicated situation in binaries—pro-/anti-war, patriotic/traitorous, brave/cowardly, action/talk, confident/defeatist. And we can, I will argue, get into a cycle. Believing we are in danger of being attacked (or are already being attacked) increases in-group loyalty and extremism (see, for instance, Hoag et al.), and so we are less open to hearing nuanced explanations of our situation, holding in- and out-groups to the same standards, realizing that the world does not consist of an in-group and an out-group, or even paying attention to non in-group sources of information. If we imagine there are only two positions (pro- or anti-war) then we are likely to hear any criticism of our war plan—or even calls for deliberation–as “anti-war.” Thus, in the process of talking ourselves into a war, we can talk ourselves out of deliberating about that war, and out of deliberation at all. And then we have more war, less deliberately.

What a speed freak taught me about argument v. argumentation

What I learned from someone who said Stephen King and Richard Nixon conspired to kill John Lennon

Berkeley had a Department of Rhetoric, and I was a rhetoric major. So, I took a lot of classes in which we thought carefully about argument (the enthymeme was the dominant model). At some point, I became aware of someone who had sandwich boards about how Richard Nixon and Stephen King conspired to kill John Lennon.

He had a ton of data. He reminded me of Gene Scott, a guy on TV in CA who would sit in a butterfly chair and give all sorts of data supposedly proving something or other. The data was true. Deuteronomy really did specify the cubits of something, and those cubits, if added to the number of Ts in Judges really did add up to something. But the conclusions were nonsense (iirc, he made various predictions that turned out to be false).

Conspiracy Guy (CG) had two sandwich boards, one with the cover of a major publication, and the other with another (maybe Newsweek and Time?). One had Nixon on the cover, and the other had Stephen King. And CG did an impressive close analysis of the two covers. What did it mean that there was a bit of yellow here? It must mean something—it must be conveying an intention. And he could find a way that it was expressing the desire to kill John Lennon.

Since I was trained by New Critics, I was familiar with essays about “what does purple mean in Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Grey?” I even helped students write those essays. The assumption was that every authorial choice means something—it is conveying a message to the enlightened reader. (Btw, purple means nothing Portrait.) Being a good reader means being the person who catches those references that seem meaningless to the unenlightened.
Nah, it doesn’t. It means you’re over-reading. I realized this when I was watching this guy on the street make an argument for why Stephen King and Richard Nixon had conspired to kill John Lennon on the basis of his close reading of the two magazine covers.

He had a ton of data, and all of it was true. There was yellow, the people were looking a particular way; if you squinted you could see this or that, and so on. He also had good sources, Time and Newsweek. So, if we think of having a good argument as having claims that are supported with a lot of data from reliable sources, he had a good argument. But it wasn’t a good argument. It was nonsense.

What he taught me is the difference between data and evidence. What he also taught me is that people mistake quantity of data for quality of argument, and that some people (especially paranoid people) reason from signs rather than evidence. What I mean is that he had a conclusion, and he looked for signs that his conclusion was right. We can always find signs that we’re right, but signs aren’t evidence.

His argument was nonsense. Were Stephen King and Richard Nixon involved in a conspiracy to kill John Lennon, there’s no reason they would have signalled that intention via magazine covers determined independently and some time in advance. CG was mistaking his interpretation for others’ intention–a mistake we all make. It’s hard to remember that something seeming significant to us doesn’t mean someone else was signifying a semi-secret message.Were CG making a rational argument, then his way of arguing (who is on the cover of the two magazines) would always be proof of a conspiracy. But it isn’t. Or else every week there are some really weird conspiracies going on. It’s only “proof” when it supports his claim. That’s what I mean by someone reasoning by “signs.” The notion is that there is a truth (what we already believe) and data that supports what we believe are signs that we’re right.

People who believe in “signs” rather than evidence believe that the data that we’re right (“Nixon’s left eyebrow is raised”) is a sign and data that we’re wrong (the argument makes no sense) should be ignored. So, it’s always a circular argument.

In other words, data is right if and only if it confirms what we already believe, and it’s irrelevant if it doesn’t. If we think about our world that way—what we believe is true if we can find data to support it, and we can dismiss all data that complicates or contradicts our beliefs—then our beliefs are no more rational than a speed freak on a street in Berkeley going on about Stephen King and Richard Nixon. He was wrong. If we argue like he did, we’re just as wrong.

How in-group favoritism prevents our learning from history

antisemitic stained glass in cathedral

I mentioned in another post my discomfort with a professor who was engaged in classic in-group/out-group deflection about Catholic actions. A Catholic, he was trying to show that Catholicism isn’t that bad, isn’t actually responsible for all sorts of actions in which Catholics engaged, and is better than Protestantism. When Catholic secular leaders behaved badly, then they didn’t really count; only official doctrine mattered. When doctrine wasn’t great, and it was Catholic officials who were behaving badly, then only the statements of the Pope counted. When the Pope was the problem, then individuals were the ones who really represented Catholicism. We all do that.

We are drawn to believe that in-group membership both guarantees and signifies our goodness because, no matter how bad we are, we are better than That Out-group. We do so because we like to believe that we’re good people, and we also like the certainty that comes with believing that our in-group membership guarantees that we’re good. Unfortunately, that desire for certainty about our goodness often means we end up giving ourselves and our in-group moral license.

When we are committed to believing that we are good because we are in-group, then we engage in all sorts of “no true Scotsman” and dissociation in order to deflect in-group behavior we don’t want to acknowledge. And this often applies to our own history. But, if we lie about our own history, we can’t learn from it.

Americans lie a lot about slavery, and especially American Protestants. We don’t like to hear that people like us found themselves fully committed to terrible things, like slavery, segregation, genocide, and so on. We tell ourselves that they fully and completely committed to the wrong in-group. But they fully and completely committed to our in-group.

Slavery and segregation were defended as Christian, especially by conservative and moderate Christians, and it was only progressive Christians who criticized those systems. Martin Luther King said that moderate whites failed him—white moderate Protestants are lying when they try to claim him as one of theirs. If you have to lie to make your argument, you have a bad argument.

When I made the post about the Catholic apologist, I thought I’d already posted something I hadn’t.

In the 14th century, there was a massacre of Jews in Brussels. It followed the script of so many massacres of Jews. The most likely explanation is that a priest got into trouble (perhaps debts to Jews) and tried to cover his problems by invoking the antisemitic libel of Jews who wanted to stab a consecrated host. This bigoted massacre, like many, was reframed as a miracle, and it was celebrated as a miracle until 1967.

And, in fact, some Catholics still believe the lie (I recently ran across a person commenting that Jews try to steal consecrated hosts).

When we find the nuances, uncertainties, ambiguities, and complexities of policy argumentation paralyzing, we resort to believing that all we have to do is belong to the good group. We believe that, were everyone in this good group, we would never have injustice, cruelty, bad policies, crime, genocide.

That is so very, very comforting. It’s also a lie.

There is no group that is and has always been right. And so, when confronted with times that members of our good group (our in-group) have done extraordinarily terrible things, we find reasons they weren’t really in-group.

But, if we really want to make good decisions, we need to acknowledge that our group has done terrible things, and then we would have to acknowledge that making good decisions isn’t a question of being in the right group. We can’t be guaranteed that we’re making just decisions just because we’re endorsing the policy of our in-group. We actually have to deliberate those policies, and that means treating the arguments of other groups as we want them to treat our arguments.

So, for Christians, it means that being Christian—even being fully committed to a personal relationship with Christ–doesn’t guarantee we’re endorsing the right policies and doing the right things. But treating others as we want to be treated—that is, refusing to give ourselves and our in-group members moral license–just might get us pretty far in terms of following Christ.







Christians who repeat the anti-CRT rhetoric are failing as Christians; aka, Jesus didn’t mumble

sign saying "I am not an oppressor"
From https://www.newsbug.info/news/nation/commentary-attacks-on-critical-race-theory-reopen-old-wounds/article_7f053c53-270a-566e-99e3-622595161329.html

Imagine that someone was going around talking trash about you, claiming that you’d said all sorts of repellent things, and that you were part of a despicable group with villainous goals. Imagine that they persuaded people you were awful by claiming you’d said things you’d never said, rarely quoting you directly (and if they did, it was completely misrepresenting what you’d said, out of context or worse), and generally making a set of accusations people could know were wrong if they just talked to you, and listened to what you had to say. But they persuaded people, who were now going around repeating all those things without ever talking to you directly. And they were persuading people who weren’t bothering to listen to you.

You’d be furious at being treated that way. Everyone would.

Here’s the important point. If you’re a Christian, and you’d be furious if you were treated that way, then you’d feel obligated not to do that to others. Jesus said, very clearly, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Wanting people to listen to you directly before condemning you means Christians should listen to others directly before condemning them. To do otherwise is to reject what Jesus very clearly said.

Thus, if people who claimed to be Christian treated the “CRT” controversy the way they want to be treated, they wouldn’t repeat the anti-CRT rhetoric without first reading CRT, the material people are quoting that is supposedly CRT, arguments that the anti-CRT rhetoric is wrong and misleading. They wouldn’t rely on second- or third-hand versions of the what K-12 teachers are doing, what anti-racist pedagogy is, or even what CRT is.

When I point this out to people who say they’re Christian, I tend to get one of four reactions. I’ll talk about two.

Sometimes people never reply. I hope that means they’re thinking about it, and maybe will either look into the critiques of anti-CRT rhetoric, including from a white conservative Christian perspective, or they’ll stop repeating the rhetoric.

Sometimes people say that they don’t need to read CRT, or its defenses—they know it’s bad because they read descriptions of it that make it clear that it’s terrible. They know it’s bad because trusted sources (i.e., “in-group”) tell them it is. Is that how they’d want to be treated—do they think it’s fine if people believed terrible things about them just because “trusted” sources say they’re terrible? Of course not.

Do Christians think it’s fine if critics of Christianity mis-quote Christians, misrepresent Christianity, nut-pick, cherry-pick, lump all Christians into one group as represented by the most marginal versions, engage in argument by association? If we think it’s wrong for others to do that to us, then it’s wrong for us to do that to others.

Do we think it’s fine if people repeat the arguments in articles, books, videos, speeches, and so on that engage in all those dodgy and fallacious attacks on Christianity? In other words, are we fine with what Richard Dawkins and his loyal repeaters do? They’re relying on “trusted” (i.e. “in-group”) sources. If that’s wrong when it’s done to us, then it’s wrong when we do it to others.

Jesus didn’t mumble.

Pence, Putin, deterrence, and the irrational rhetor

Image from here: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/trump-attempts-fix-his-putin-problem-n1291815

Several people have asked what I think about what is happening with Putin, and Ukraine, and Putin’s rhetoric, and whether Putin will start a nuclear war. I have no more expertise about military theory than my dog Delbert, so I will stick to talking about rhetoric. But the rhetoric here is interesting, because much of what is happening is the playing out of the rhetoric of deterrence. Deterrence is often described as a strategy in international relations, but it’s all about rhetoric—about persuading people to act as you want by threatening them with violence.

Mike Pence’s recent comments exemplify what can only be called simplistic deterrence theory. He said that it’s no wonder that Putin chose to invade Ukraine in 2022, because “weakness arouses evil.”

Pence thereby exemplified how not to think about deterrence. Looking strong doesn’t necessarily stop evil, and he should know that, because the US has had a lot of foreign policy disasters grounded in the kind of simplistic deterrence theory he’s advocating. In other words, he’s either sincerely advocating a version of deterrence that is incredibly flawed, in which case he’s far too ignorant about foreign policy to be in a position to determine it, or he’s shamelessly and cynically using this moment to hurt Biden by advocating a model of foreign policy even he knows is wrong.

Either way is irresponsible.

In a realm of toxic masculinity, and both Trump and Pence are deep in that world, people either submit or dominate. People who are submitting can pretend they aren’t by submitting to the leaders, although they are, by framing their submission as joining in a group that dominates others. It’s domination by proxy. (Erich Fromm made this argument a long time ago about Nazis.)

More important, I think the most plausible reading is that Putin invaded the Ukraine when he did because he didn’t think the US was weak, and he certainly didn’t think Biden was—he thought Trump, pro-Trump media, and the GOP would step in line (as they generally have) and support him. He took a gamble that the GOP would submit to his domination of Ukraine. It wasn’t a bad gamble.

He probably thought he could also reliably count on a lot of media and pundits on other places on the political spectrum, and therefore probably believed that Biden would have been hamstrung in responding effectively. Again, he wasn’t entirely wrong, and how various groups, including parts of the GOP but not just the GOP, have responded remains extremely troubling. That’s the first part of this post. The second part is about Putin’s invocation of the irrational actor, also a rhetorical choice.

I. Pro-Putin rhetoric.

The most charitable interpretation of what he was doing is that he was endorsing a very simplistic version of the larger category of foreign policy called “deterrence theory,” which, even in its more subtle versions is vexed. The most charitable version is that he is completely ignorant about how deterrence works. (The less charitable version is either that he thought Trump took a strong line in regard to Russia, or that he cares more about hurting Biden than furthering intelligent deliberation about a very fraught situation.) In its crudest form (e.g., Pence’s), it says that looking like the kind of person or nation who will respond with maximum aggression will deter anyone from acting in ways we don’t want.

The deterrence model has a long history, and it isn’t particular to any one culture. Sun Tzu (fifth century BCE) writes about it, as does Thucydides (also in the fifth century BCE, in the character of Cleon, who is a demagogue). That the deterrence model is problematic isn’t news; a major point in Thucydides’ history is that adopting Cleon’s notion of responding with maximum aggression was a bad choice, and played out with moral catastrophes like the extermination of neutral city-states, and the practical consequence of pushing neutral or potentially allied city-states into enemies. Threatening aggression and deciding to look strong has often galvanized groups (as happened with both the French and American Revolutions). Even people highly supportive of the “War on Terror” agree that how it was done benefitted terrorists (for a good summary of that argument, see Richard English’s Modern War). Pence’s simplistic deterrence model has been the basis of much US foreign policy post-WWII, and therefore also the object of much criticism since then. After all, a model of foreign affairs that got us Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan (twice), Soviet meddling in the US “sphere of influence,” 9/11, and various other failures is pretty clearly not a guaranteed success.

Sometimes it provokes, rather than prevents, war. It does so even when the opponent believes that the threats of an aggressive response are sincere. If they believe that war is inevitable, and this is their best chance to get what they believe they need, then “deterrence” is actually provocation. This is called the “closing window of opportunity” motive for going to war, and deterrence can persuade people they’re facing a closing window. Times that “deterrence” has plausibly caused war include the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, WWI (as far as the Russian mobilization), how the French reacted to the Duke of Brunswick’s threats, the Peloponnesian Wars, and so many other cases.

This isn’t news to scholars of rhetoric. If I say that I’ll fire you next week for stealing if you keep doing it, I haven’t necessarily deterred you from stealing. If you’re stealing because you have no way to get your family food, you’ll just steal more immediately. I’ve created a window of opportunity for you.

If I communicate effectively that I am rigidly committed to holding on to dominating you, you don’t necessarily decide that your best choice is to submit. I’ve motivated you to take risky strategies to avoid my domination. In 427 BCE, that’s what Diodotus (in Thucydides) told Cleon (an advocate of Pence’s kind of deterrence theory) said would happen if Athens adopted Cleon’s policy. Eleven years later, Athens had adopted Cleon’s strategy, and Melos behaved as Diodotus said city-states would.

Deterrence works as long as it persuades a potential aggressor that they will not be allowed to get what they want through military action. It doesn’t work if they believe that they have no choice other than aggression, the threats of counter-aggression are bullshit, they can win even if there is an aggressive response, God is on their side so rational assessments of military strength don’t matter, they are in an apocalyptic battle, anything is better than submitting, and various other scenarios.

Clausewitz famously said that people engage in war for political goals. If political leaders are persuaded they can achieve their political goal without war, they won’t engage in it. If they think they can get it by threatening war, they’ll threaten it. If they are persuaded that they can get that goal only through war, then they’re likely to go to war; the more that they are persuaded that other countries will allow them to get what they want through war, the more extreme their demands; if they are persuaded that the war has gotten what they want, they’ll negotiate an end to the war; if they are persuaded that their existence as a political leader depends on their winning the war, then they’re likely to take outrageously risky gambles. If there is something a leader wants, and it can be attained through war, but only if they move faster than their opponents can mobilize support, then deterrence provokes rather than deters war.

None of what I’ve said in the previous paragraph is news to anyone even passingly familiar with the scholarship in deterrence theory—looking strong doesn’t guarantee a good outcome, aggressors don’t act because they think the others are weak. Either Pence is completely ignorant of what scholarship says, and he has no advisors passingly familiar with that scholarship, or else he does, and he knowingly lied in order to take a swipe at Biden. He put factional politics above everything else. Neither of those explanations makes him someone who should be involved in determining foreign policy.

Putin invaded Ukraine because he believed that he could present the world with a fait accompli, and because, I think, he believed that the US would be unable to stop him. Not because Biden is “weak,” but because Trump and pro-Trump media would support Russia’s aggression shamelessly, and so Biden would be unable to mobilize the support for Ukraine. Putin may have believed that invading while Biden was President would help Trump get reelected, and then he’d have a loyal supporter back in the White House.

Once again, he wasn’t entirely wrong.

Right up to and even after the moment of invasion, Putin has been able to count on people all over the political spectrum being willing to repeat Russian propaganda. But, particularly important would be his sense that he could get the GOP to support him. Given how supportive Trump was of Putin (I keep thinking about their unprecedented private meetings), how much large swaths of the GOP admired Putin, how much Putin openly worked for Trump, Trump’s hostility to Ukraine (which helped Putin), how much Trump undermined NATO (which Putin liked), Trump never doing anything Putin didn’t like, coupled with the tendency for Trump’s base and supportive media to flip positions when Trump signals, Putin might have believed that Trump could get the GOP to support the invasion. Putin could count on pro-Russian mouthpieces like Carlson, Greenwald, Chomsky, QAnon, and so many others. And, if so, Putin wasn’t entirely wrong—look at how long it took Tucker Carlson to change his position, what Carlson and Greenwald are still saying, and how Trump initially responded, and who even now has only muted criticism. Even Pence’s comment and what Hannity said recently shows that GOP pundits and political leaders are thinking about this situation more in terms of how they might damage Biden than what is the long-term right thing to do.

I also just have to say that a party that claims to be the Christian party that consists entirely of people who do and say things they fling themselves around like over-tired toddlers if done to them makes me alternately angry and despairing. When Jesus said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” he neither mumbled nor said, “Unless they’re Democrats.” A party that claims to be Christian could start by behaving as Jesus said very clearly we should behave.

And Pence fails that standard.

If Pence is right about weakness, then he’s wrong about which President signalled weakness. After all, Putin, who has wanted to invade Ukraine for some time, said he wanted Trump to win the 2016 election.

And Pence is the reason we still have a democracy.

I believe that we need a world in which many points of view are represented and are assessed by the same standards of argumentation. We need people who want small government, big government, state control, federal control, support for small businesses, policies that help international trade, and so much so on. I’m not advocating a world in which all points of view are considered equally valid; I’m advocating a world in which all policy agenda are held to the same standards of argumentation.

And Pence’s comment about “weakness” would sink like a rock. And he is among the best that the GOP has to offer, and Trump was hoping the insurrectionists would stop him.

We’re in a culture of demagoguery in which someone like Pence, who has principles, is still willing to engage in the kind of rabid partisanship that ends democracy. Pence helped Putin by trying to use this moment to undermine Biden.

II. The rhetoric of the irrational actor

When I was working on proslavery rhetoric, it became clear that there is a lot of political capital that can be gained by looking irrationally committed to the in-group (and stupid in-group policies). If you treat interactions as domination/submission, and you look as though you will do anything other than submit, you can get your interlocutors to go to ridiculous lengths to appease you. (This is why we have a cat whose vet makes house calls.) I thought this was an important insight.

Turns out that scholars in International Relations figured that out in the 60s, and that much of what both LBJ and Nixon did was in service of acting out that position. The idea was that, if they communicated that the US was willing to go to irrational extremes to punish the North Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese would come to the table willing to negotiate. Simplistic deterrence theory says that one way you can make people submit is by looking so irrational that others will submit. Look at how well that worked for LBJ and Nixon (and note that Nixon adopted it even after it hadn’t worked for the French or LBJ).)

What simplistic deterrence theory ignores is what one of the basic theorists of war (Thucydides) says very clearly.

Thucydides says that, for reasons relevant to its war with Sparta, Athens approached Melos and said, you can either become a vassal state of ours (i.e., cease to exist) or we will exterminate you. So, they presented two kinds of extermination. Were the simplistic version of deterrence theory correct, then the Melians would have submitted. They didn’t. They were exterminated. The Poles fought Hitler, knowing they would lose. Ukrainians are fighting Russia. Vietnamese fought France and the US. People fight even when they think have no chance of winning. Putin didn’t expect that.

Putin is adopting the stance of the irrational rhetor who has to be appeased. He flirts with appearing just irrational enough that he might start a nuclear war to get his way. That he’s flirting with it so strategically suggests to me that he isn’t all that irrational. Again, I know nothing about military theory, but I do know about the posture of the irrational rhetor, and that is what Putin is adopting. He isn’t completely irrational, in that he doesn’t have a personal history of behaving irrationally, but abusively. I suspect that the people who believe that he will win in Ukraine, and he will reduce it to rubble, are right. He will do so because, like Pence, he believes in simplistic deterrence theory. Whether Ukraine can hold him off long enough for him to sue for peace is not something about which I have an even remotely informed opinion, but, if they can–with world support–that would be good. But, even if he wins, the world needs to say this is his last win.





What Putin’s rhetoric should tell us about ours

Trump and Putin

This post is only partly about Hitler; it’s really about Putin, and it’s mostly about us.[1]

I write about train wrecks in public deliberation, so it was just a question of time till I got around to the question of appeasing Hitler. That UK politicians chose to appease Hitler (and the US decided to do nothing) is not just a famously bad decision, but a consequential one. Jeffrey Record says it nicely:

No historical event has exerted more influence on post-World War II U.S. presidential use-of-force decisions than the Anglo-French appeasement of Nazi Germany that led to the outbreak of World War II. The great lesson drawn from appeasement—namely, that capitulating to the demands of territorially aggressive dictatorships simply makes inevitable a later, larger war on less favorable terms—has informed most major U.S. uses of force since the surrender of Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945. From the Truman’s Administration’s 1950 decision to fight in Korea to the George W. Bush’s administration’s 2003 decision to invade Iraq, presidents repeatedly have relied on the Munich analogy to determine what to do in a perceived security crisis. They have also employed that analogy as a tool for mobilizing public opinion for military action. (1)

When I started researching the issue, I approached it with the popular story about what happened. That is, Hitler was obviously a genocidal aggressor who couldn’t possibly be prevented from trying to be hegemon of all Europe—he had laid all that out in Mein Kampf, after all. Leaders who chose to appease him were wishful thinkers who deluded themselves; other countries should have responded aggressively much earlier, at the remilitarization of the Rhineland, ideally, or, at least, when he was threatening war with Czechoslovakia over what he called “the Sudetenland.”

Turns out it’s way more complicated than that. Way more complicated. To be clear, I still think various countries made terrible decisions regarding Hitler and Germany, but the leaders were constrained by voters. It was voters who got it wrong. I’ll get to that at the end.

Hitler took over from the Weimar democracy, which had its problems. It also had its critics. It liberalized laws about sexuality and gender identity, reduced the presence of religious proselytizing in public schools, opened up opportunities for women, included a lot of a demonized group in its power (Jews), relied on democratic processes that included Marxists and democratic socialists, had a reduced military, encouraged avant garde art.

Here’s what is generally left out of popular narratives about WWII. Conservatives in all the countries that went to war against Nazis hated everything the Weimar Republic had done, including its tolerance of Jews, and so many didn’t think the Nazis were all that wrong–better than the USSR, and better than Weimar. Popular between-the-wars UK literature is filled with anti-semitic and anti-Slav rhetoric. Even during the war, a US anti-Nazi pamphlet that condemned Nazi racial ideology was severely criticized because it was attacking the “science” used to defend US segregation. As late as 1967 (in the lower court rulings on Loving v. Virginia) theories of race integral to Nazism were cited as authorities.

Hitler had a lot of apologists among conservatives, including the owner of the very popular Daily Mail in the UK. And, as George Orwell describes in the book that conservatives who quote him never read (haha, they never read anything he wrote–they just quote him), many UK media were knee-jerk anti-communist in their coverage of events—so knee-jerk anti-communist that they failed to distinguish between various kinds of leftist movements. So, a lot of UK media liked what Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler were doing.

Hitler’s first move after being granted dictatorship powers in 1933 (which he did with no particular outrage on the part of major media in other countries, including the US) was to criminalize membership in unions, the democratic socialist party, the communist party, or any other party that advocated democratic deliberation. His second act was to kill all the socialists in the Nazis, which, weirdly enough, was used by his defenders as proof that he was more moderate than they. And from that point on it’s hard to get things in chronological order. The important point, thought, is that by 1939, when there were still major media and figures defending him, he had criminalized not just dissent but any criticism of him, begun engaging in mass killing, criminalized various identities, begun a process of fleecing emigrants, openly reduced Jews to constant humiliation and abuse, put into law the racialization of Germany. He had also remilitarized the Rhineland, incorporated the Saar, violently appropriated Austria, and then appropriated the “German” part of Czechoslovakia. He then took over the rest of Czechoslovakia, and he still had defenders.

Then, when he invaded Poland, some (not all) said, oh, wait, he’s a bad guy. So, why didn’t they do anything earlier? Because his rhetoric was pretty clever.

He had two kinds of rhetoric. For his internal audience, it was exactly what the rhetoric scholar Kenneth Burke described in 1939. Unification through a common enemy, scapegoating/projection, rebirth, bastardization of religious forms of thought, toxic masculinity (not Burke’s term, of course—he talks about the feminization of the masses). All of this was about the rebirth of Germany into a “strong” nation set on domination of weak groups. But he also always made a point of the injustice of the Versailles Treaty, especially the guilt clause.

His external rhetoric had a lot of overlap with that. For instance, a lot of UK media—specifically “conservative”—endorsed and openly admired Hitler’s ‘strong man’ crushing of liberal democratic practices and leftist policies, since they hated those policies and practices. They were also anti-Semitic, anti-Slav, and believed in the Aryan bullshit behind Nazi policies, as were many people in the US. In both the UK and US, many major political figures were sympathetic to thinking of Jews as “a problem” who should be denied immigration.

To go back to the UK, these “conservative” media were thereby writing approvingly of very new practices, ones that traditional conservative voices (such as Edmund Burke) would have found horrifying. “Conservatives” were now writing approvingly of what had until recently been seen as the enemy of the UK. In other words, people often claim to be “conservative” when all they’re conserving in their loyalty to their party, and it has nothing to do with conserving principles.

Here’s the part I didn’t know about appeasement. Many people, all over the political spectrum, were willing to say that the Versailles Treaty was unjust. Hitler’s foreign policy was defended through the rhetoric of the Versailles Treaty, which emphasized self-determination. He didn’t believe in self-determination, of course, but he could use that rhetoric. And he did.

And, as scholars have argued, his use of that rhetoric made it hard for advocates of the treaty to say he was wrong in what he was doing. They certainly couldn’t go to war over it, since the Great War, as it was called, was almost unanimously understood everywhere other than Germany as a colossal mistake. To go to war over the remilitarization of the Rhineland would have seemed to most UK voters a bizarre compulsion to repeat the errors of 1914, when a minor political issue could have been resolved without war.

Hitler adopted the rhetoric that his enemies had recently used—the rhetoric of self-determination—to scoop up territories. He claimed that “the people” of a region wanted Germany to invade because they were being oppressed by [Jews/liberals/Slavs], and so his appropriation was actually liberation. When it came to Poland, he couldn’t plausibly argue that, so he shifted his rhetoric to self-defense—Poland, France, and the UK were intent on attacking Germany (he claimed they had), and so all Germany was doing was justifiable self-defense.

And that’s what Putin did. He adopted the rhetoric his enemies had used, which made it hard for them to call him out.

The rhetoric for a preventive war against Iraq—an unprecedented kind of war for the US—was that it was preventive self-defense. In fact, it was motivated by the desire to make Iraq a reliable ally in US foreign policy.

The rhetoric was that Iraq was supporting a global war against the US in the form of Al Qaida (Bush later admitted they knew it wasn’t), the site of anti-American terrorism, and various other lies. The Bush Administration, and its fanatically supportive media, told a lot of lies, that they knew were lies, because they wanted to put in place a government that would be an supportive of US policy or because they loyally and irrationally supported whatever a GOP President did. I happen to think Bush meant well. I think he believed a very simplistic version of the extremely controversial (and circular) “democratic peace” model, one he didn’t think most Americans would find compelling enough for war, and he so he lied to get what he thought was a good outcome.

The problem is that rhetoric has its own consequences, regardless of intention. By arguing that the US was justified in invading Iraq and putting in a new leader because 1) that state was fostering terrorism, 2) part of an anti-US conspiracy, and 3) presented an existential threat to the US, Bush legitimated a certain set of arguments (what rhetoricians call “topoi”). Just as the Versailles Treaty was grounded in topoi of self-determination, the Iraq invasion was grounded in topoi about terrorism and existential threat. There was a long history of that kind of rhetoric in the Cold War, especially about crushing any kind of political movements in the areas that the US considered its sphere of influence, such as Nicaragua, that might threaten US control. Throughout the Cold War, the US persistently crushed local popular movements of self-determination on the grounds of “sphere of influence”–we would not let any government exist in those areas if it wasn’t loyal to the US.

Putin used US Cold War rhetoric to justify his scooping up of areas, such as Chechnya. It would have been rhetorically and politically impossible for the US and NATO to go to war over that region, given how factionalized US politics is. Look at how the GOP—which had far less power in those days—was critical of US intervention in Serbia. Had Clinton advocated going to war, or even threatening war, over Chechnya, the GOP would have gone to town, and very few Dems would have supported it.

When it came to Ukraine, Putin adopted a rhetoric that cleverly blended Hitler’s rhetoric about Poland, US Cold War rhetoric, and Bush’s rhetoric about Iraq. It was a gamble, but not an unreasonable one (a different post) given the rhetorical conditions of US politics. You could take Hitler’s speech about invading Poland and just do a few “find and replace” to get his speech, and blend it with a speech of Bush’s advocating invading Iraq.[1]

My point is that adopting a rhetoric to get what you want—Cold War rhetoric to justify propping up corrupt and vicious regimes in Central and South American, lying about terrorism to get a war desired for other reasons—has consequences. Rhetoric has consequences in terms of legitimating certain kinds of arguments.

And here is the point about appeasing Hitler. I’m writing a book with a chapter about the rhetoric of appeasement. My argument is that it was a bad choice in terms of what was in the long-term interest of the UK (and the world). However, and this is what most people don’t know, or won’t acknowledge, politicians made the choices they did because appeasing Hitler was the obvious choice to make for any political figure (or party) who wanted to get (or remain) elected. If they advocated responding aggressively to Hitler they would have been excoriated by the most powerful media. Had Clinton advocated responding aggressively to Putin’s treatment of Chechnya, it would have gone nowhere. Had a GOP President advocated responding aggressively to Putin’s expansionism, the Dems would have thrown fits.

I’m not saying that we should have responded aggressively when Putin took over Austria, I mean Chechnya, but that we should have deliberated what Putin was doing. And we couldn’t. Because we are in a culture that demonized deliberation. We are in a culture in which engaging in politics means standing in a stadium chanting, having no political opinion more complicated than what can be put on a bumper sticker, loyally repeating, retweeting, or sharing whatever is the latest in-group talking point, and hating the other side is proof of objectivity.

And here I’ll go back to appeasing Hitler. I don’t really blame the politicians for appeasing Hitler, but that’s largely for the same reason I don’t blame my dog Delbert for eating cat shit. Delbert will do whatever he can to get to cat shit, and politicians will do whatever they can to get elected.

Politicians appeased Hitler because the voters wanted Hitler appeased. We need to stop asking why politicians did what they did in regard to Hitler and instead ask why voters voted the way that they did. FDR and Chamberlain don’t bear the blame for why the US and UK responded as we did to Hitler; voters do. The lesson of appeasement, and the lesson of Putin, is not that leaders make bad decisions, but that voters make bad decisions, and then blame leaders.

After the tremendously popular Sicilian Expedition ended in disaster, the very people who had voted for it claimed that they had been misled, and politicians were at fault.

They voted for it.

George Lakoff pointed out that “liberals” and “conservatives” both adopt the metaphor of family for government in that the government is a parent to the citizens who are children. What if, instead of imagining voters as tools in the hands of political leaders, we acknowledge what Socrates says: even tyrants are tools in the hands of citizens.

So, how do we counter Putin’s kind of rhetoric?

We accept the responsibility of voters, citizens, commenters, sharers, likers. We are all rhetors, and we try to behave responsibly, whether it’s about how awful cyclists are or whether Putin is right.

We stop remaining within our informational enclave. And we feel no shame about pointing out how unfair and irresponsible people are being.

We read the best arguments against our positions; we hold others to the same rhetorical standards as ourselves; we stop engaging in rhetorical Machiavellianism; we argue, well and fairly and vehemently. And we shame others who argue badly. We might do so vehemently, kindly, gently, or harshly, but we do so because we want others to do that to us.

[1] Normally, I link to citations, but that would have delayed this post by a week, since there are a lot of links. If folks want links and cites, let me know.
[2] For the people who have trouble with logic, and reason associatively, I’m not saying Bush was Hitler. I’m saying we shouldn’t judge rhetoric by whether we like its outcome or its advocates—it has its own consequences. Bad rhetoric in favor of a cause we like is, I’m saying, still bad rhetoric in that it legitimates what others might do with it.

“Populism” is not restricted to the plebians; Or, don’t bathe in bagels

A doodle of someone bathing in bagels, and a maid offering more.

I talk a lot about models of democracy. In this post, I want to talk about a kind often called populism, largely because I’m worried about the implications of that term. I think it hinders our ability to think usefully about policy deliberation because it implies that a flawed model of deliberation is restricted to one group. Thus, once again, it makes inclusive democratic deliberation an issue of identity rather than approach.

Several models of democracy presumes that we really disagree, and there is no one viewpoint from which the best policy is obvious. We really disagree because we have different values, priorities, perceptions, interests, needs, experiences, and so on. There is no one right policy, but a large number of policies that are good enough in terms of appropriately sharing the burdens and benefits.

If we operate from within this sort of model, then, if people come to a decision that seems wrong to us, we try to figure out the perspective from which it makes sense, or the negotiations and compromises that might make this a “good enough” decision. Sometimes there is none, btw, and it really was a bad decision. Or it’s only good from some a narrow perspective that it’s really not good enough, if the goal is inclusion. There are lots of decisions that people later regretted that don’t look any better close up–refusing to change the “Jewish” immigration quota in the late 30s, eugenics, Jim Crow (I’ve picked examples that were bipartisan in their support, btw).

There are other models that presume that there is one perspective from which it is obvious what is the right thing to do, and I want to talk about one kind of that model–it’s the one to which we’re appealing when we decide that an entity has come to an obviously bad decision, and it’s obviously bad because it hurts or doesn’t help us. It assumes that there is no point of view with any validity other than our own. It assumes that the right course of action is obvious to a sensible person. There is a disengaged elite that has made a decision that ordinary people know is wrong.

This model is often called populism, but I’m not happy about that term, since it implies that the “populace” engages in this approach to politics and not elites.[1] The problem is that very few people think we’re in the elite, and yet, if you think about elite in terms of education or class, elites engage in that rhetoric just as much as any other group.

There is, for instance, the “makers v. takers” rhetoric, which is used to justify massive tax breaks to the very wealthiest, because they’re ordinary, in a way, and opposed to “the liberal elite” or “the Washington elite” who want intrusive government. Wealthy people complain about professors as an intellectual elite, as though wealthy people are oppressed by Ernesto Laclau.

I’ve talked about it before as “obvious politics,” which might be the right way—the right course of action is what looks obvious to MEEEEEE. It’s also called “stealth democracy” by some political scientists. In my grumpier moments, I think the right term might be something like narcissistic politics. Because of the rise of discussion about narcissism, we’ve lost the term “self-centered,” and that might be the right term.

In any case, to make the point that it isn’t about the unwashed, uneducated, and gullible masses being seduced into thinking badly about things, I want to talk about some academic conflicts in which I’ve seen super-smart people reason exactly this way—whatever we call it. It’s a way of approaching politics that assumes that there is one viewpoint (MINE) from which it’s obvious what should be done.

One example was when there was discussion at one of my universities of shifting the academic calendar in a particular way, and many faculty wanted the change enacted immediately. This came up at a Faculty Council meeting, of which I was a member since obviously I am paying for sins of a past life that must have been pretty fun. Most faculty talked purely in terms of how it would help them and their students. Several people from the College of Engineering said that enacting this change immediately would cause the University to lose its accreditation with important engineering entities. They agreed with the problem (classes on the day before Thanksgiving) but disagreed about the plan. The majority of faculty voted for the change happening immediately.

This was at a University at which the College of Engineering losing accreditation would severely damage the university as a whole. But, the faculty who voted for changing the calendar immediately didn’t listen or didn’t care. They just looked at it from their perspective.

So, anytime that people who pride themselves on their education are outraged that Those Idiots are voting for something or supporting a candidate or party who will hurt them in the long run, I think about that meeting. It isn’t just Them. That’s what’s the matter with, for instance, What’s the Matter with Kansas.

The second example is actually a lot of examples, and it has to do with the cost of academic conferences. They are expensive, and travel is expensive, and departments often don’t support faculty adequately for attendance, or graduate students at all. Faculty at less prestigious colleges and universities sometimes have neither the salary nor university support to attend. Yet, attending conferences is tremendously useful for teaching, research, job-hunting, networking. Thus, the cost of conferences reinforces all sorts of nasty hierarchies in academia. It is a really important problem about which a field that claims to be inclusive really needs to work. We’re agreed on the need.

The plan, however, is up for argument, and one recurrent plaint is that the conference hotel is expensive, and the organization is clearly out of touch, greedy, or in cahoots with the hotels, and so conferences should be hosted at less-expensive hotels. There are complaints that rooms at the conference hotel are expensive, for instance, or that hosting an event in the hotel is pricey, or that the conference registration is far above what so many people can easily afford. Sometimes the accusation is that the organization is clueless about the financial situation of most academics.

My favorite moment, by the way, is when someone complained that the bagels at the conference hotel were expensive, in a somewhat incoherent post but that seemed to suggest they thought the organizers were bathing in champagne on the basis of the profits of bagel sales.

And, just to be clear, I made all those complaints, and more, until I organized a conference. I looked at this issue through the model of narcissistic politics. I’d love to say that I reasoned my way out of it, but I didn’t. I experienced my way out of it.

I made those complaints (except the bagel one) because, from my perspective, it looked like an obviously stupid set of decisions.

In fact, the whole situation is much more complicated and boring than these fantasies of obviously stupid or nefarious conference organizers imply. (Although I’ll admit I kind of love the image of some conference organizer trying to bathe in as much champagne as they could buy with what they profit from the sale of bagels in the hotel lobby, or perhaps even in bagels, hence the doodle above.)

Before I was involved in hosting a conference I didn’t consider so many things, such as the cost of the rooms in which panels were held. Nor was I even remotely aware of the normal cost of the hotel rooms that attendees might get and thus how huge the discount often is, or how that discount is achieved. I’m not sure any academic organization profits from its annual conference; the registration fees barely cover the costs (and some lose money). Sometimes the host covers the losses. I’m not aware of any conference in my field that profits from the annual conference.

In my (limited) experience, the registration fee pays for the rooms in which the panels are held, and the organization has to guarantee a certain number of room rentals in order to get the substantial reduction on room rates (and it is a substantial reduction), and that room rental is connected to a lower price on the conference space. In other words, an organization can’t host the conference at cheaper hotels because those hotels don’t have the space for the panels, and it can only get that panel space by guaranteeing a certain number of room rentals. The more room rentals it can guarantee, the greater the room rental discount.

So, I was wrong to imagine that conference organizers were bathing in bagels, or in the profits from bagels.

I’ve come to think that the problem is big, and the solutions aren’t obvious, and that organizations are working on them–they involve things like funds for certain kinds of attendees, tiered registration rates, perhaps more virtual attendance options (which doesn’t help with networking), organizational support for regional conferences. What I do know is that leaders of academic organizations worry about this a lot.

There are, of course, people in power who are greedy, narrow-minded, malevolent, corrupt, stupid, and so on, and we need to condemn them. My point is simply that no one died and gave us omniscience. We see as through a glass darkly, and a glass that only shows part of the possible world. That tendency to assume that only people like us matter, and people like us see the world in an obvious and unbiased way, isn’t about education, in-group membership, or some universal genius. It’s about information. We can’t know whether a decision is bad without trying to hear why people have made the decision they have. That it looks bad to us doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad.

Unless they’re bathing in bagels. That’s a bad decision.

[1]Paul Johnson talks about “conservative populism,” meaning a specific rhetoric mobilized by groups that claim to be “conservative” (spoiler alert: they aren’t), and he uses the term precisely and usefully, but I think one still might infer that populism is unique to people who self-identify as “conservative” (which is very clearly not what he means). Chip Berlet and Mathew Lyons have a book I still like, in which they talk about “Right-Wing Populism” which has as examples more than one Democrat, or supporter of the Democratic Party. Like Johnson, the term “right-wing” is restrictive. An awful lot of really good and smart work talks about populism more generally, which appears all over the political spectrum. But, again, it seems to me that, while no one is claiming that only people on that point of the political spectrum appeals to populism, there does seem to be the implication that it’s a vice of “the populace.”