My area of expertise is what I’ve taken to calling “train wrecks in public deliberation.” I’m interested in times that communities used rhetoric to talk themselves into disastrous decisions—ranging from the Athenian decision to invade Sicily in 5th century BCE to LBJ’s decision to escalate the Vietnam War in the summer of 1965. I came to notice patterns–not of political personalities or even policies but of cultures of discourse— what I came to call demagoguery.
All political issues are policy issues, and we always have a variety of policy options available to us. In these cultures of demagoguery, that rich and nuanced world of policy options was and is denied in favor of framing our cultural problem as a question of a zero-sum battle between two groups: us and them. When we’re in a culture of demagoguery, when everything is framed as two sides, those two sides appear to be on opposite sides of every issue, but they actually agree about quite a lot.
They both agree that there is no legitimate disagreement with their position; they agree that politics is a zero sum battle between us and them. They just disagree as to who is whom. They agree that for every problem there is one solution and that disagreement is the consequence of the presence of people with bad motives. This agreement that disagreement is useless can come from several different positions, but two are important in our era: political narcissism, and political sociopathy.
For some people there is only one legitimate understanding of the common good (mine) and everyone who disagrees is blinded by self-interest, duped by the media, or knowingly advocating a bad policy. To say that there is only one political good, and that I and only I am the one oriented toward that good on every issue[1] is a kind of political narcissism.
Another position is that there is no legitimate political disagreement because none of us is really interested in the common good—there is no common good at all. We are all our for ourselves, and no position is ethically superior to any other–there are just winners and losers, and any political or rhetorical strategy is allowed if it’s oriented toward winning. This is a kind of political sociopathy.
Those aren’t all of the positions possible, but they’re two that I hear a lot when people are arguing for a no-holds barred wrestling match between us and them. I think the people who advocate those positions are sincere. I think that people who argue that they and only they are advocating the one political good in every situation believe that is true; they cannot imagine that any other position might have any legitimacy in any circumstance. They believe that everyone sees the world exactly as they do.
And those who believe that everyone is out for their own good are out for their own good, and they think everyone else is too.
What neither of those two realize is that not everyone is like them—they universalize from their own position, posture, and ideology.
I think we disagree about politics because we disagree. People who privilege disagreement, who see disagreement as an important step toward the best agreements do so for all sorts of reasons, and from all sorts of different positions–such as various forms of relativism, perspectivism, fallibism, and lots of others.
I want to set all that aside in order to talk about what happens in a culture in which all disagreements are framed as a zero sum battle between us and them. And spoiler alert: it isn’t pretty.
This culture of demagoguery often begins as a cunning rhetorical framing of political disagreements as a zero sum battle between two groups because that frame is more motivating and mobilizing for voters, donors, and consumers. But it can easily become what people believe is an accurate description of our political landscape and our policy options.
So, initially, something like the confirmation of a supreme court justice is framed as a battle between us and them because that frame is more likely to get people to contact their representatives, donate to their party, and support their party’s decision. It’s also more likely to motivate people to read articles, watch the news, click on links. This false binary of our political choices benefits political parties and a for-profit media.
The zero-sum battle means that not only is disagreement delegitimated but, eventually and inevitably, disagreement is demonized. Compromise, bargaining, finding common ground — from within this false binary, those are way of trucking with the devil, and I don’t mean in the Grateful Dead sense. One doesn’t compromise with the devil after all; one exterminates him.
So, unless this rhetoric is stopped, the zero-sum us v. them frame for politics results in a rhetoric of extermination. And then the train wrecks.
Once disagreement is demonized and political disagreements are framed as a battle between good and evil, the appointment of the supreme court justice can easily be described as simply one battle in a war of political extermination and existential threat. As soon as one side makes claims of wanting to exterminate the other, then both sides can frame the political situation as one of existential threat.
And once we are in a situation of existential threats, then we are justified in anything we do. We are in Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception” in which we honor the law by suspending or abrogating it. The narrative that enables the suspension of law is that the one group that genuinely honors the law is forced into a situation in which the law must be suspended or violated due to the evil machinations of the other side —the plot of about 80% of Law and Order episodes.
Now, it would seem that once a political party has used the rhetoric of existential threat to get into power, that rhetoric would lose its force. The rhetorical challenge becomes, once you are in power, how do you maintain the rhetoric of threat and victimization that enabled you to gain power?
Paradoxically, the acquisition of power enables this supposedly victimized group to use its propaganda machine, as well as the forces of government, to justify the removal of all checks and balances on the in-group executive, and to transform the government into a single party government by declaring the executive above judicial restraint, exempt from charges of criminal behavior, allowed to use their position not only to protect themselves from accountability, but to profit financially, even obscenely, to use the financial resources of the government to reward loyal political allies, and to use all the financial, investigative, prosecutorial, and coercive resources of the government to exterminate powerful sites of dissent.
Once the procedural constraints have been defanged, and “neutrality” of any institution is falsely politicized as part of a hostile out-group conspiracy, once an executive has made it clear that he refuses to be restrained or held accountable, that he is personally profiting, and openly trying to institute a one-party government (of which he is the head), then it becomes possible to factionalize all parts of the government–especially traditionally neutral parts, such as the military and police forces.
At this point even members of his own party, and his own base, should recognize the danger, and work to check to the overreach of power, and, if they do, as happened with FDR and packing the Supreme Court, we step back from the brink. But, as both How Democracies Die and Why Nations Fail (written from very different political perspectives) both show, the very people who could stop the overreach—that is, the in-group political figures and media, the judiciary, the military, or the base—often don’t. The people who could stop the overreach often choose not to if the executive is doing whatever is necessary to keep the economy benefiting his base, keep his base from listening to criticism of him, continuing to promote — through his loyal propaganda machine–the narrative that all of their problems are caused by Them (the party he is eliminating).
If his propaganda machine can persuade his base of that, then they will believe that they are flying when really he’s just persuaded them to jump out of a window with him.
I’m talking in the abstract, but I think everyone in this room knows that I have a particular political figure, situation, and era in mind: Hitler, and what he did between March 1933 in 1939.
There’re lots of other cases–someone rising to power on the waves created by the cultural demagoguery: Ceaușescu, Stalin, Mugabe, Chavez, and others. Sometimes the structures of checks and balances were weak, sometimes they were strong, and people chose not to enforce them. But in all cases, there was a culture of demagoguery.
[1] We should be passionate about politics, and so a person can be passionately committed to a community solving a problem, and convinced it must be solved, and that isn’t political narcissism, but passionate commitment to a problem. Even if they are passionately committed to one solution to the problem, that’s just passionate commitment. It’s the assumption that their group or political position is right about everything that makes it skid into political narcissism.