Imagine that we work at a charity together, and I advocate a policy that will actively hurt what we claim we’re trying to do—and the research is clear on that—and I say that I’m advocating this policy because it will get me in good with the boss. Actually making our world better and helping the people we claim to want to help is less important to me than getting in good with the boss. You’d decide I’m a narcissistic jerk. That would be a correct inference.
People who want to criminalize abortion, who have never advocated the policies that actually reduce abortion, aren’t actually concerned about abortion. We could reduce abortion if we offered easy access to cheap and effective birth control, offered accurate sex education, had universal health care, publicly supported childcare, reasonable parental leave. When I point out to people who advocate criminalizing abortion (and birth control) that there are other methods more effective at reducing abortion, they say that they are more opposed to those policies than they are to abortion.
I want to stop here for a moment. They pass by that quickly, but it’s actually really important. They’re fine with women dying from unsafe abortions. They’d rather have that outcome than women having access to effective to birth control.
So, let’s do the math. Reducing abortion is not their highest priority. They aren’t actually trying to reduce abortion. They are only opposed to safe abortions. More concerning, they are more opposed to women having access to safe birth control (and the various social safety nets) than they are to abortion.
In my experience, what they say is that they are more concerned with doing what God wants than with actually reducing teen pregnancy (Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming talks about this, see especially 135-6). They think God wants them to lie (that is, say things that are factually untrue but true to their policy agenda), and that God doesn’t care if that lying means people get pregnant, spread STD, or otherwise suffer in ways they wouldn’t have if they had been given good information and good healthcare.
As a Christian, I’ll engage in an aside, and say that, when I argue with people like this, they can never reconcile what they’re doing with Jesus saying “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” They can’t imagine a God who wants everyone held to the same standards; they seem to imagine God as someone just like them, with all their petty hatreds, grievances, and in- out-group affiliations but with superpowers. They think God wants them to reward their in-group and punish their out-group; that is, treat the out-group in ways we would never want to be treated.
And, just to be clear: they want to criminalize abortion, not reduce it. This is about people wanting to believe that what they’re doing is so right that it will get them good with God, even if it means tragedy for all sorts of people. They don’t care about those other people. They think God doesn’t. They think God only care about them. Their personal relationship with Jesus is an eighth-grade Mean Girl relationship that involves bonding with God on how much they hate someone else.
I think they’re wrong about God giving them moral license. I think God cares about the people they want punished and the tragedies they know they’re causing. I think they’re narcissistic fucks just looking out for themselves, so concerned about their own salvation that they are sociopathic about the people their policies hurt. I think they’re worse than the people more concerned about their own purity than they were about helping a bleeding stranger.
I’m a scholar of train wrecks in public deliberation—times that communities came to bad decisions, although they had all the time, information, and counter-arguments necessary to come to better ones.
And, although they smear across eras, cultures, and particular situations (but all more or less within what is considered the “Western Tradition”), they share the same characteristic: the communities abandoned policy argumentation in favor of thinking of the variegated, nuanced spectrum of policy options actually open to them as a binary between right (loyal, ethical, in-group) and wrong (treacherous, unethical, out-group). That is, demagoguery.
There was, often, a legitimate need, a serious problem. There was also a situation in which the community had multiple—not just two—policy options available to them. But, when people tried to argue about multiple plans, the response was for people to argue that the need was great, and that we must do this thing. And they treated people who wanted to argue about the plan as people who wanted to do nothing.
That was Cleon’s argument. His opponent wanted retribution (severe, in fact) against the rebellious Mytileneans. Cleon wanted genocide, and he framed his opponents’ argument as doing nothing. Cleon briefly argued solvency (being brutal would terrify other “allied” states into submission) and the feasibility argument was pretty clear (I mean, they could kill all the Mytileneans whom they didn’t sell into slavery and raze the city—as the Athenians would in regard to Milos), but he didn’t even acknowledge the potential unintended consequences. His argument was, in an enthymeme, “We should kill all male Mytileneans and sell everyone else into slavery because the rebellion endangered the empire.” In other words, “My policy is good because the need is real.” That enthymeme has an appalling major premise: that Athenians should commit genocide against any city-state that has people whose actions endanger the Athenian empire.
Nor did he engage the arguments his opponents actually made. Diodotus, who argued against Cleon, didn’t disagree about the need–he, too, was outraged about the Mytileneans revolt; he had a different plan. He certainly didn’t advocate doing nothing.
This might all seem very weird, and very distant, but it isn’t. We are always in the world of Cleon and Diodotus–a world in which we can decide that our policies should be about exterminating anyone we think dangerous, and in which we declare any dissidents from that policy to be corrupt on the grounds that, if they disagree with our policy, they don’t care about the need (Cleon’s position); or a world in which we argue the advantages and disadvantages of our various policy options (Diodotus’ position).
After 9/11, I found myself arguing with many people about the proposed invasion of Afghanistan. 9/11 was appalling, and terrifying. It was an extraordinary act of violence against the US, but I didn’t think that invading Afghanistan would solve the problem of anti-US terrorism. I didn’t see why that was the right plan. Clearly, something had to be done, but it seemed to me that solving the problem of terrorism couldn’t be solved by invading one country, especially when it wasn’t even the country from whom the terrorists had come. I was asking for good old affirmative case construction, in which people argue on the stases of feasibility, solvency, and unintended consequences of their plan.
And, over and over, the people with whom I was arguing emphasized the need (as though I disagreed about that) and then said something like, “We must do something” and sometimes went on to argue that doing nothing was a terrible plan. I agreed with the need, and I never advocated doing nothing—I didn’t like their plan. Our situation in regard to Afghanistan was never invade Afghanistan or do nothing. It was never invade Iraq or do nothing.
In the train wrecks I study, that false frame of “do this thing or do nothing” won the rhetorical contest. Arguments about policy were thoroughly evaded in favor of rhetoric that associated one group (the real Athenians, Christians, Southerners, Germans, Americans, progressives, Democrats, Republicans, animal lovers, dog lovers, Austinites) with one policy, ignoring that that group had a lot of policy options.
Being convinced that the need is real never means that you are necessarily committed to this policy. That’s demagoguery.
We are, as citizens in a democracy, never exempted from arguing policy. To say we are is to promote demagoguery.
In my train wrecks, and my own experience trying to argue with people about why we shouldn’t invade Afghanistan NOW, people who want to argue about our policy options (rather than believe that this need means there is only one possible policy option) are told, quite clearly, that they aren’t taking the issue seriously. That’s what I was told, over and over. That’s what Cleon said to (and about) Diodotus: Cleon said that Diodotus didn’t think what the Mytileneans had done was bad. That’s what the pro-invasion media said—any dissent from this policy was only on the part of people who didn’t take the need seriously, who didn’t care about terrorism, or who actively helped it.
You either supported Bush’s very odd and problematic policy, or you supported terrorism. And that was, and always is, a false binary. A demagogic binary.
When I tried to argue that invading Afghanistan wasn’t necessarily a good policy, I was lectured about the need. Over and over and fucking over. That there is a legitimate, pressing, and even urgent need doesn’t mean this policy is right. This policy has to be defended on its merits, as opposed to other policy options—not as against doing nothing.
Diodotus wasn’t arguing for doing nothing; I wasn’t arguing for doing nothing in regard to 9/11.
At one point in time, my husband and I lived in a part of Kansas City with problematic water. A guy selling water filters came out and talked to us about how terrible the water was. He could never explain why his company’s filter was any better than our other options. The water really was bad, but that doesn’t mean his company’s filter was right. Our choice was not his policy or doing nothing.
A few years ago, a Texas state legislator argued that teen pregnancy is bad, and therefore we should ban suggestive cheerleading. Teen pregnancy should be reduced, but that doesn’t mean that banning suggestive cheerleading is a good policy. He was never able to argue that his plan solved the problem, was feasible, or didn’t have consequences worse than the problem he was trying to solve. What he could argue was that teen pregnancy was bad, and thereby frame anyone who wanted to point out how bad his policy was as a person who didn’t care about teen pregnancy (or liked suggestive cheerleading).
Anti-abortion rhetoric works by advertising the number of abortions and insisting that the only possible solution is banning abortion and restricting information about effective birth control. The number of abortions really is troubling; there is a need. But banning abortion and demonizing birth control (their plan) doesn’t solve that need. Itworsens it.
Were people really concerned about reducing abortion, and were they people who considered reducing abortion the most important value, they would model policies on places that have reduced abortions. They don’t. They insist that if you don’t want to ban abortion, you don’t care about the number of abortions (when, in fact, there are better policies for reducing abortion). We don’t have a world in which we either have our current number of abortions or we ban it, but that is the world they promote. It’s a world of the false dilemma—either you agree with my policy or you want to do nothing. That was Cleon’s argument; that was the argument for invading Iraq.
I think impeaching Trump immediately is not the best policy. That doesn’t mean I misunderstand the need to impeach Trump. Showing that Trump needs to be impeached immediately is not the same as showing that Trump needs to be impeached. People who are arguing for Trump immediately aren’t supporting their case by showing that Trump should be impeached. They need to engage in the policy stases.
My belief that we shouldn’t impeach Trump for a while (perhaps as late as March) doesn’t mean I think people who believe we should impeach him immediately are bad, stupid, or irrational. That guy in Kansas City really might have had the best water filter. But his arguing need over and over didn’t show that his plan was the best. It really might be the best policy to impeach Trump immediately, and that case is made through engaging, reasonably and fairly, the arguments for engaging him later. It is not made by reasserting the need.
That Trump should be impeached is not actually proof that he should be impeached immediately. That there is a need doesn’t mean that this policy is right. And, really, that’s the larger point I’m trying to make continually: our culture needs to engage in policy argumentation. Instead, we have a demagogic world in which people argue need, and then say, if you acknowledge this need, you must support this policy. If you reject the policy, you must be a person who fails to recognize the need.
People arguing for delaying impeachment aren’t arguing for doing nothing. We aren’t arguing about whether to impeach Trump; we’re arguing about when. That’s a good argument to have. Because arguing policy is always a good policy.
Trump will get impeached, and then this argument will appear to be over. But it won’t really. The argument about argument will be with us: arguing need doesn’t exempt you from arguing plan. That there is a need doesn’t mean only one plan has merit.
[image from here: https://www.blackcarnews.com/article/train-wreck]
Many people who call themselves Christian, and think they represent all Christians, believe that, when communities are living by God’s word (which they understand, unequivocally, from God’s mouth to their ears, so to speak) then that community will not be punished with terrible things. Thus, they reason, if there are terrible things happening, we just need to get back on the right path, and those things will go away. That’s the argument being made by a lot of people aboutgunviolence.
It’s a kind of bastardization (as Kenneth Burke would say) of the Jeremiad. The Jeremiad is a rhetorical narrative—our culture was once in touch with God, and following God’s laws, and we were prosperous and happy and there was no disagreement; but, we have fallen from God’s law, and now we are suffering bad things (especially disagreement, but also violence), and so we need to purify our culture from practices that God condemns, and then our problems will be solved.
The Jeremiad depoliticzes political issues. It makes all policy issues not issues about what policies we should have but issues of personal will and out-group presence.
The American fascination with the Jeremiad is usually attributed to second generation New England Puritan preachers saying that things were great with the first generation–who were pure of heart–, but now they’re bad because people aren’t pure enough. What’s really odd about that argument is that the first generation wasn’t good. They saw people drop like flies. They bickered over everything, and sued one another like the lawyers they were. A large part of The History of Plymouth Plantation was about their lawsuits.
There never was a golden age in American Protestant religion when people weren’t dying, killing, suing each other, and, for that matter, buggering various animals (the most entertaining part of The History of Plymouth Plantation). The Jeremiad is a historical narrative (people followed God and things were great, now we don’t, and things are terrible) that is indefensible as an argument about history.
MAGA is a Jeremiad, especially when connected to notions about how when “In God We Trust” was on our money things were better, and crime has been going up ever since we banned prayer from schools (it hasn’t, and we didn’t). But, okay, let’s run with that argument. Things were better when there was slavery? Things were better in the 50s?
One thing I think we should ask white Christians engaged in Jeremiads about how we need to go back to when America was great, in the fifties, is: could they please explain how that time was better? What, exactly, was better, and more in line with what God wants, about segregation, about a time when people posed cheerfully in front of a castrated, flayed, and burned black body? Was that when America was great? When a man could rape his wife, even if they were legally separated, and he could know he would suffer no consequences? When employers could pay POC and women less for the same work? Where is that in the Bible? When “conservative” rhetoric could criminalize the very people employed in order to break unions?
Christians engaged in Jeremiads about how times were better and we used to follow God’s law are generally engaged in what I like to think of as narcissistic ethics (the world is good or bad as it is good or bad for them and people like them) and what others have called naïve realism (something is true if it seems true to you). Personally, I don’t think either of those is much in line with what Jesus said, but I’ll set that aside just to emphasize that, if you try to engage someone making this argument about how things were better when you could have a picnic while lynching a black man who hadn’t done anything, they’ll talk about abortion or gay marriage.
This isn’t an argument about history; this is a statement of personal commitment to an irrational political agenda that is supposed to stand for a relationship with Christ.
It also a statement of personal commitment to an irrational narrative of causality. The dumb version of the Jeremiad says that things used to be great because people used to follow God’s law (and there is a short and ahistorical list of what that meant—we prayed in schools [no that didn’t happen everywhere], we had “In God We Trust” on our money [the history is pretty complicated], but appalling practices from those “good old days” are cheerfully ignored), and now things are all bad (they aren’t).
Thus, people who believe this false narrative say, the bad things that are happening to us are not because of policies for which we have voted, or the politicians we have voted to put in place, but because we have stopped following God’s laws, and so those things will go away if we all become more righteous.
Here things get a little murky. There are people who believe that gun violence is a scourge God has put on us because we allow abortion. (So, why wasn’t there this level of gun violence before abortion was outlawed?) Thus, the white supremacist Trump supporter drinking deep of toxic masculinity who could easily get a weapon that would enable a mass shooting is just an agent of God, not a consequence of white supremacy, toxic masculinity, the eliminationist and victimization rhetoric he regularly consumes.
A person who says he is engaged in mass shooting because he believes his actions to be what right-wing pundits say he should do (like JimAdkisson) has nothing to do with right-wing rhetoric. It’s about lack of prayer in schools. But, the same people who claim that right-wing shooters aren’t inspired by right-wing rhetoric will blame any shooter who can be labeled as leftist on leftist rhetoric (James Hodgkinson).
In other words, if there is a shooter, the first move for mainstream “right-wing” media (by which I mean Fox, Limbaugh, and the other main sources of information for many people—the most mainstream media there is) is, if possible, to say the person was a “lefty.” If that isn’t possible, say he was mentally ill, an anomaly, and it would have been prevented had there been good guys to shoot him.
But you also get the argument that he was an agent of God because bad things happen when we do not follow God’s law.
People say we politicize gun violence when, after a shooting, we want to talk about policies about guns, and many of them mean that because they sincerely believe that, if we all just believed what they believed (which they describe as having faith in Christ) then no one would do anything bad. They believe that we can pray away the gay and we can pray away the guns.
They believe that gun violence would simply end were we a culture in line with their vision of Christ. Therefore shooting isn’t a political issue (that is, one that could be solved through a change in policies), but an issue of personal faith and cultural commitment. Gun violence can’t be solved through policies about guns, but only by a spiritual rejuvenation.
Note, however, that they don’t think they can pray away abortion. Abortion is a political issue that can be reduced, they believe, through a change in policies. (It can, but not the policies they’re advocating.) They say they think gun violence is bad, and they say think abortion is bad, and so they are working (and have been working for years) to change the policies on abortion.
That’s because, they say, abortion is a violation of God’s will. And gun violence isn’t?
I long ago learned that, when someone makes a claim about how everyone thinks or acts, pay attention to the logical implication. Socrates would have liked the syllogism:
Everyone is just out for themselves.
The person saying this is included in the category of “everyone.”
Therefore, this person is out for zirself.
It’s generally turned out to be true: people who say that “everyone lies when it’s useful,” “everyone is good at heart,” “everyone will screw you if they can” may not be making a claim that is factually true of “everyone,” but it’s true of them.
That observation was particularly interesting when homophobic groups argued that allowing gay marriage would end the human species (by ending human reproduction) and destroy families because, presumably, once gay marriage is an option, everyone will opt for it. That’s interesting. It isn’t true of everyone, but I’ll believe it’s true of the people making the claim.
That isn’t to say that every person who makes that argument is living in a plexiglass closet, in which they’re the only person from whom the truth is hidden, and that they are all barely resisting from gay relationships. But it is a silly argument—that isn’t what has happened anywhere gay marriage was legalized—and it is saying something really interesting about them. What it’s saying is that they believe that everyone is only, with great will, keeping themselves from SIN, and that all sins are the same. So, if they slip up and stop engaging in rigid self-control, it’s just a question of time till they’re giving a blowjob, while shooting up, gambling, aborting babies, molesting children, and voting Dem. They believe that sin is the consequence of lack of self-control, and if you loosen up on self-control, then you have no control at all. And you do ALL THE SINS.
I don’t think the kind of people who make that are argument are gay, but I do think they believe that they have to be incredibly rigid about their values, commitments, and policies, or else all hell breaks loose. They believe they could commit all the sins. That’s interesting.
That some people believe that, if the government allowed any sinful action they consider sinful, then everyone (including them) would instantly stop everything for some kind of very lame porny bacchanal is not actually minimally good policy argumentation. It’s a reason for them to get therapy. They don’t have political issues, but personal ones.
But, we’re in a world in which people like them believe that they should take their personal issues about sin to the larger political sphere.
They believe that something they consider a sin should be prohibited by the government.
And, to be blunt, everyone thinks that.
That’s how democracy works. It works when the things that we all think are sins get to be argued—when we engage in policy argumentation. A system that divides every issue into a zero-sum contest isn’t a culture engaged in democratic deliberation.
That is our world. We all think we are completely and obviously right, and that anyone who disagrees with us is either a dupe or a villain. That’s good. We should care about our politics.
Good political deliberation isn’t about being emotional or not; it isn’t about whether you do or don’t have evidence to support your claims; democratic deliberation is and should be about policy argumentation. And the ban abortion argument fails to make its case in terms of policy argumentation.
If you want to reduce abortions, and you have a rational argument, then you could make your case pretty clearly. Here is the ban abortion case (as far as I can figure):
There is a need:
It’s bad (women are killing babies)
It’s not going away (women have been legally allowed to kill babies since Roe v. Wade) [note the slippage between pre- and post Roe v . Wade]
Narrative of causality:
I have to admit that I can’t figure this one out. If you want to reduce abortion, the narrative of causality is empirically clear: increase access to accurate information about birth control.
So, what, exactly, is the “reduce abortion by enacting polices that don’t reduce abortion” argument?
Just to be clear: were the “reduce abortion” actually the most important value for people who want to ban abortion, then they would do anything that would reduce abortion. But they don’t.
There isn’t a zero-sum contest between people who think abortion is awful (and should therefore be banned) and people who think abortion should be legal. A lot of people who think abortion is awful think it shouldn’t be banned. They think banning is the wrong policy.
And that is the argument over which ban abortion people find themselves doing everything to avoid policy argumentation. Were abortion argued in terms of policy, the “ban abortion now” forces would lose. They can’t defend their position through policy argumentation.
Despite what “ban abortion now” rhetors say, no one is pro-abortion. Everyone wants to make sure that women rarely are even presented with the decision of abortion. The “abortion” argument isn’t about abortion: it’s about how you prevent women getting to the point of even thinking about getting an abortion.
And there are, loosely, two stances on that: one is grounded in empirical data about what actually reduces women finding themselves in a situation in which they might want an abortion; and the other rejects everything about policy argumentation in favor of a belief that if people beleeeeeve strongly enough then good things will happen.
The abortion argument isn’t about policies and outcome and data (nor is the climate change argument, or bathrooms bills).
Relatively recently, the topos of “banning abortion strengthens the family” popped up. That was new. Once I fell down the rabbit hole of the “strengthening the family” argument, what I found was that there are two different ways that people try to make that connection—that banning abortions strengthens the family. One is the very old argument that [this policy] is good because we believe it is the policy God wants us to advocate. It doesn’t matter if the policy is practical—what matters is that we are enacting God’s will, and therefore God will reward us. Since strong families are good, then banning abortion will result in strong families.
The second one is that banning abortion will strengthen families because they believe that the only strong family is one that is controlled by a male who controls himself rigidly. One of the most important things for him to control is the sexuality of the females in the family. Legal access to abortion not only gives women autonomy regarding reproduction, but separates sex from the consequence of pregnancy. And, of course, the solution that actually reduces abortion—access to effective birth control—also increases women’s sexual autonomy. So, for people who believe that strong families require male control of women’s sexuality, this solution is just as bad as abortion.
It’s very clear what banning abortion does: it doesn’t reduce pregnancies that are the consequence of rape, that endanger women’s lives, that involve teens. It certainly doesn’t end abortions. When abortion was illegal in most states, rich women could always get an abortion by going to a state or country in which it was legal (and they did), and women without enough money could try back alley abortions.
My rabidly GOP father (if a person drove badly, he’d say, “Probably a Democrat”) had one point on which he rejected the Reagan and post-Reagan policy agenda: abortion. He was a pathologist, and, after the second autopsy of a woman who had died from a botched amateur abortion, he could not support making abortion illegal.
The people who want to ban abortion call the other side pro-abortion, but, if you oppose effective birth control and accurate sex education, you are pro-abortion—you are supporting the policies that contribute to abortion.
The abortion argument is a great example to show how public discourse about policies evades policy argumentation. If you think abortion is bad, and you want to reduce it, then you think abortion is an ill, and you should be willing to support policies that demonstrably reduce abortion. If you aren’t, then this all really isn’t about abortion. And this isn’t. It’s about women’s sexuality.
[Normally, I try to provide links, but I’m really uncomfortable giving these groups any clicks.]
