Hey all, I was on a fun podcast with Johanna Hartelius and Jason Micheli, talking about demagoguery and the most recent book.
Talking about Deliberating War on a fun podcast
Tag: deliberating war
Deliberating War is published!
The e-book version of Deliberating War is available from Springer!
“Drawing on a rich collection of examples from ancient Greece to the present day, Patricia Roberts-Miller ably demonstrates the failure of political leaders to engage in deliberation when choosing to undertake, continue, or escalate war. Instead, they reframe the situation, deflect the real issues, demonize the enemy, and make themselves the victim, all to convince themselves that war already has been forced upon them and they have no choice. Sometimes wars are justified, but political leaders, specialists, and citizens will all benefit from this accessible work that shows what can happen when deliberation is an essential feature of the rhetoric of war.” (David Zarefsky, Northwestern University, Author of “Lyndon Johnson, Vietnam, and the Presidency: The Speech of March 31, 1968”)
“Deliberating War is a thorough, insightful, and well-written discussion of how people in the Western tradition deliberate about war and treat deliberation as war. In discussing various kinds of war, and various kinds of deliberating about war, Roberts-Miller illuminates how and why some of these are more dangerous than others. This book is a must-read for scholars in history, political science, and communication who care about war, democracy, and the relationships between them.” (Mary E. Stuckey, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences at Penn State University)
“Deliberating War takes rhetoric’s relationship to war out of the realm of meaningless metaphor and into the realm of real, critical, potentially cataclysmic importance. For millennia, debates about war have translated to the battlefield and events on the battlefield have translated into debates about who we are, what we value, and how we should act towards one another. Given how high the stakes are, Roberts-Miller demands that readers grapple with how politicians use rhetoric to drag people to war. But politicians don’t act alone, so she also demands that everyone learn to choose their words more wisely in matters of war, politics, and life.” (Ryan Skinnell, Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing, San José State University)
“Patricia Roberts-Miller’s Deliberating War is a probing study of the rhetorical dynamics that feed on political factionalism to displace deliberation and transform the trope of “politics as war” into real war. It is a sustained and close study of multiple cases of armed conflict that cross historical periods and involve an assortment of adversaries. Various rhetorical practices are insightfully analyzed for how they obstruct democratic deliberation, including how the call to arms is strategically framed, which fallacies typically are deployed, which issues are obscured and left unaddressed, and how the dynamics of the discourse can even carry adversaries into a war they wanted to avoid. Her critique of appeasement rhetoric is particularly acute, as is the point she makes about the militarization of politics in general, which reduces the spectrum of normal policy disagreements to political combat. This is an important work of scholarship on the consequences of literalizing the metaphor of war.” (Robert L. Ivie, Professor Emeritus in English (Rhetoric) & American Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington)
“In this incisive and necessary book, Patricia Roberts-Miller skillfully interrogates the political factors in the decisions made by nations to go to war and the critical lack of deliberation when making those decisions. Her analysis captures the enormity and the tragedy of governments choosing war without losing the humanity of those who must carry out those decisions. In addition to political rhetoric scholars, this book should be required reading within the halls of the U.S. Congress, inside the walls of the Pentagon, and in the classrooms of military academies and war colleges.” (Derek G. Handley, Assistant Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (CDR, U.S. Navy Retired))
Book Proposal for “Deliberating War: Where There is a Will, There is a Ferry”
In 2003, Bill O’Reilly declared a “War on Christmas.” Or, to be more precise, he declared that there already was a war on Christmas being conducted by “liberals” (sometimes “secular progressives”), and therefore “we” had to fight back. Just why “secular progressives” would care very much about Christmas, let alone engage in war about it, might seem puzzling, and so O’Reilly explained the long-term goal of this war:
“Secular progressives realize that America as it is now will never approve of gay marriage, partial birth abortion, euthanasia, legalized drugs, income redistribution through taxation, and many other progressive visions because of religious opposition. But if the secularists can destroy religion in the public arena, the brave new progressive world is a possibility. That’s what happened in Canada.” (Wildau)
To anyone familiar with the principles of argumentation, or even Canada, this description is absurd. And yet O’Reilly was not the first person to insist that there was already a “war on Christmas,” nor that specific and normal policy disagreements should really be understood as part of “liberals’ war” on America (Coulter), business (Lin), Christians (Media Matters “Fox News”), Christmas (Gibson, O’Reilly, qtd. in Wildau), conservatives (Hasson), the family (Stoll), men (“Coming War,” Venker), the police (Grassley, MacDonald), religion (Gregg), Republicans (Knefel), the rich (Perkins), the right (Hanson), statues (Robertson), suburban property values (Limbaugh), Trump (Goodwin), the unborn (Cassidy), white males (Lifson), white people (Cegielski), “you and your family” (O’Reilly, qtd. in Stabile).
This reframing of normal policy disagreements as war is common all over the political spectrum. Both Avik Roy (an editor for Forbes) and Congressional Representative Barbara Boxer agreed that the dispute over Obamacare was a “war on women.” Roy said Obamacare was a war on women, and Boxer said opposition to it was. I regularly receive mailings about the war on the environment, education, science. Nor is the framing of politics as war very new. Criticism of slavery was characterized as treason, as was disagreeing with 17th century Massachusetts authorities about the precise nature of salvation.
Because it is so common to refer to a policy disagreement as a war on the in-group, it is tempting to dismiss the frame as a metaphor, simply a rhetorical strategy to mobilize a base and get attention. That is, to treat the metaphor of politics as war as a meaningless stylistic choice (mere rhetoric). Another way to dismiss the significance of the framing is to normalize it, to say that politics is a kind of war. Advocates of such a strategy often cite the 19th century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz: “War is politics by other means.” The former approach treats the politics as war frame metaphorically and the latter literally, but neither takes the frame seriously. And both thereby normalize treating policy disagreements as skirmishes in a larger war.
There have long been people who argued that metaphors of war for disagreements was something to be taken seriously (Kenneth Burke in War of Words [unpublished until 2018], George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By [1980]). This book is in that tradition, arguing that treating normal policy disagreements as war constrains democratic deliberation to varying degrees depending on the kind of war imagined. It does so for several reasons, and in several ways.
First, even under the best of circumstances, deliberating about war is vexed. A community has (or should have) the opportunity to deliberate about whether we should go to war, how it’s being conducted, when and whether to end it, and, in retrospect, what happened and why. Yet many people sincerely believe that we shouldn’t deliberate about whether to go to war; if we are attacked (or are about to be attacked), we should—in a state of anger and outrage—respond with however much aggression is necessary to crush the antagonist. Many people believe that a community shouldn’t deliberate about war once it’s started, since to question whether to continue the war dishonors those who have already died for it, or who are currently risking their lives for it. For similar reasons (dishonoring those who have sacrificed), we shouldn’t deliberate about a war afterwards—whether it was well-conducted, necessary, could have been ended earlier. Thus, for many people, we shouldn’t deliberate about a war before, during, or after—that is, at all. In such a situation, those who call for deliberation are easily characterized as cowards, ditherers, unmanly overthinkers, traitors, dupes of the enemy. Characterizing a disagreement as war makes deliberation harder.
Second, this deep aversion to deliberating about war can be strategically manipulated by rhetors who want to evade deliberation for other reasons. This book doesn’t advocate a very complicated model of “deliberation,” instead settling for “good enough” deliberation—more or less reduced to treating others’ (and Other’s) arguments as we’d like ours treated, and holding in- and out-group arguments to the same standards. Although a fairly low bar, it’s one a large number of rhetors can’t or don’t want to meet, so, instead of deliberating, they evade, truncate, or vilify deliberation. They argue that the truth is obvious, only bad people disagree with them, and deliberation aids the enemy. The more that an community believes that the situation is war, the less likely we are to insist on deliberation—the more likely we are to exempt in-group rhetors, political actors, and institutions from moral, legal, and rhetorical norms.
Third, there are kinds of wars, and not all kinds have the same consequences for the extent to which we allow in-group actors to violate moral, legal, and rhetorical norms. Wars can vary both in terms of means and ends. There are and have long been legal and/or moral norms concerning the means that antagonists use. Even before the United Nations, there were expectations regarding such issues as treatment of civilians, civilian territories, neutrals, neutral territory, POW, exchange of prisoners, and so on.
Wars have different ends, ranging from limited territorial to political/physical extermination of the Other. Wars with limited territorial goals (such as the 1859 Pig War) assume the continued coexistence of all parties (except the pig). At the other extreme are wars oriented toward the complete destruction of a political, cultural, religious, or ethnic entity (the Third Punic War, Hitler’s goals in WWII). While limited political goals doesn’t necessarily mean limited destruction, or limited violation of norms (e.g, the Iraq invasion had limited goals—regime change—but high levels of destruction and norm violation), wars of extermination necessarily require almost complete violation of norms. Communities faced with an antagonist determined on our destruction generally give complete moral, legal, military, and rhetorical license to in-group actors. Thus, paradoxically, a political or military leader who wants to violate norms can get license to do so by claiming that the community is already faced with an antagonist determined on in-group extermination. They can get permission to conduct a war of extermination by claiming it already is one.
So, if politics is war, what kind of war?
If it’s a war of extermination in which actors are granted full license to violate any and all legal, moral, and rhetorical norms, then it’s a war on democracy.
[DRAFT] Part of the introduction for Deliberating War
There are five ways of imagining policy conflicts that make it likely we will see ourselves as having no option but some degree of aggression—that is, to see a policy disagreement as discursively insoluble. The first is believing that one is a voice crying in the wilderness, a prophet sent by God speaking an unpopular and yet immediately recognized Truth. Claiming that no one is listening, that one is all alone, is a lively glimpse of being fourteen, and, as in the case of Muir, it isn’t necessarily entangled with victimization or persecution. By claiming that God is on one’s side, one does seem to be implying that opponents are un-Godly, a characterization that fosters motivism (discussed later). It also seems to imply that negotiation, bargaining, and even inclusive deliberation are problematic—prophets aren’t known for sitting down at a table with opponents and working out a yes-yes solution. But (again, as in the case of Muir), it’s often nothing more than rhetorical flourish, venting, or a bit of hyperbole. It doesn’t inevitably or necessarily prohibit using deliberation to find a political solution far short of violence against the Other.
The second is shifting from policy disagreements to questions of identity. If, for instance, there is a minister with a different interpretation of the faith/grace/works conundrum from us, we may feel threatened by his rhetorical success. If we confuse our feeling threatened with his being a threat, then we’ve made him the problem—not his rhetorical effectiveness, nor our ineffectiveness, nor the conundrum, but his presence in our community. A policy issue has become a conflict of identities.
The third is to frame that conflict of identities in terms of essential, almost ontological, strife between good and evil—those who disagree with us do so, not out of principle, but out of their identity as bad people, and their loathing for good. John Winthrop, for instance, categorized all the conflicts as parts of Satan’s plot to destroy the Puritan project. Cotton Mather, when more or less forced to admit that the witch trials had been badly managed, still deflected responsibility, maintaining that the events were Satan’s fault.
Once such a plot is posited, then it cannot be falsified. Disconfirming evidence (for instance, that the witchcraft convictions depended on violating evidentiary norms, that there is a long history of disagreement about Scripture) is deflected and dismissed. Hutchinson’s death at the hands of Siwonoy is proof that she was wrong; he doesn’t draw that conclusion about others killed in wars on indigenous peoples. It’s only evidence when it confirms the already existing beliefs.
Because we are threatened with extermination by an Other plotting against us, we have moral license. “Moral license” is the fifth way of imagining policy conflict, and it follows from the others. We don’t condemn victims who violate ethical norms in order to save themselves or their group; moral license means that individuals or groups are free to violate those norms while still claiming the moral highground. One of the crucial tenets of reasonable deliberation is that discourse rules (e.g., is it okay to lie?) are reciprocal—all parties are held to them. But, if it is a question of extermination, we’re likely to allow the victim to lie, but condemn lying in the aggressor. If we believe ourselves to be already or imminently victimized, we are likely to believe ourselves and our in-group rhetors and leads to be justified in lying—to be unbound by any discourse rules, especially reciprocity. Thus, if we are rhetorically successful in persuading ourselves or others that we face an existential threat, we are less bound to find non-violent ways of resolving the conflict, and will be seen as more justified in violating norms. Sometimes that violating of moral and rhetorical norms is hypothetical, as when slavers justified mass killings of African Americans on the grounds that the slaves would do it if they could (what’s called “the wolf by the ears” argument).
What I hope this list suggests is what will be pursued in this book: there is a complicated relationship between rhetoric and war. The more that we believe that our disagreements can be solved discursively—that is, the more faith we have in the power of pluralistic approaches to persuasion and deliberation–, the less likely we are to believe that our only choice is war. The more that we are persuaded that there is an evil Other already at war with us, and determined on our extermination, the less likely we are to value or demand inclusive, pluralist, and reasonable rhetorical approaches to our disagreements. The more we are persuaded that this war is total war, signified and engaged in major and minor ways, the less likely we are to believe that there are neutral actions or actors, and the more likely we are to find ourselves treating normal policy disagreements as themselves a kind of war. When politics becomes a kind of war, I will argue, we have to think carefully about what kind it is.
This isn’t a book about military strategy, or military history; it’s about rhetoric. We’re primed to reason badly when it comes to questions about war because the prospect of being the victim of violence 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.
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. We shouldn’t.
Preface to Deliberating War
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.
Introduction to “Deliberating War”
“When men go to war, they begin by taking action, which they ought to do last, and only after they have suffered do they engage in discussion” (Thucydides, History 39, Lattimore 1:78)
According to the Greek historian Thucydides, in 431 BCE, the evenly-matched city states of Corinth and Corcyra were in conflict with one another, and each decided to try to ally itself with one of the major regional super powers: Athens and Sparta. At what Thucydides calls “The Debate at Sparta,” a Corinthian speaker tried to persuade Sparta to intervene in the conflict on its side, a policy choice that would almost certainly provoke war between the evenly-matched superpowers of Sparta and Athens.
The conflict between Corcyra and Corinth involved yet another city-state Potidea, as well as complicated questions of prestige (Corcyra had been a colony of Corinth), but it didn’t directly involve Sparta in any way. There were not immediate obvious benefits to getting involved, and there were considerable risks. It wasn’t simply that the outcome of a war between Athens and Sparta was impossible to predict with any certainty—Athens was financially stronger, and had a masterful navy, while Sparta had a much better infantry—but it was very possible that any real winner would be their common enemy Persia. Persia had tried to invade the Hellenic region (what we call “Greece”), and had been repelled only because of combined efforts of Sparta and Athens, as well as political instability back home. Were Athens and Sparta to go to war, it’s possible that they would weaken each other so much that the next Persian invasion would succeed.
Given the unpropitious rhetorical circumstances, what persuasive strategies could the Corinthian speaker use?
This book has an openly normative claim: he should make his case through rational policy deliberation. By ‘rational,’ I don’t mean to endorse the conventional notion of “rationality” as a characteristic of an individual, nor is ‘rationality’ defined as the absence of emotion; what do I mean will become more clear through the course of the book. I’ll make my argument in a largely negative way, showing what rhetorical choices various rhetors made, speculating why they made those choices, and then discussing the implications and consequences. What I will argue in this book is that there is a rhetorical trap for policymakers, a trap that has consequences for everyone in the community, and many people outside of it. Rational policy deliberation is hard, and it is not always the most persuasive strategy. If there are a lot of possible policy options, the situation is complicated or ambiguous, a small number of people are suffering from the “ill,” the “ill” is something that will happen in the distant future or difficult to imagine. A rhetor’s preferred policy might be particularly difficult to present persuasively for many reasons, such as that rational deliberation would show it to be a harmful, dangerous, or meretricious plan. It might be a good policy, but not obviously good, or there might be considerable immediate costs and only long-term benefits. It might be—like several policies discussed in this book—one with high political costs (e.g., one that touches a ‘third rail’).
When rational policy deliberation seems risky or less persuasive, rhetors are tempted to evade it, and that is the trap. They might instead opt for strategies more likely to be effective in the short-term at mobilizing support, selling a product, inspiring voters, gaining assent to a policy, diverting attention from a failure or scandal. For instance, a rhetor might insist that there is still only one choice in terms of available policies, that this choice isn’t just right, but obviously the only possible choice, and therefore we don’t need to engage in policy deliberation at all. We just need to commit fully and passionately to that option. If we believe strongly enough, we will be successful, so anyone insisting on deliberation is either stupid or corrupt, and just trying to waste our time.
This way of evading democratic deliberation has been aptly called “stealth democracy” by Elizabeth Theiss-Morse and John R. Hibbing. They argue that a large number of Americans believe that there are not genuine good faith disagreements about our policy options. Instead, they believe that there is an obviously correct course of action that should and could be taken. People who argue for other policies are doing so only because they are professional politicians, government employees, and “special interests” who do not look out for the best interest of “normal” Americans. This way of thinking about policy disagreements, it should be noted, presumes a group of “normal” Americans who have the same priorities, values, needs, interests, and policy preferences. It thereby also presumes the presence of people whose arguments should be dismissed, whose very presence is corrupting. Since we can’t argue with them (they don’t really have arguments), any political conflict with them is a zero-sum. Appealing to this perception of political conflict might initially seem to be simply evading the responsibilities of rational policy deliberation, but it’s doing more: it’s demonizing deliberation itself.
That perception baits the trap for framing a policy disagreement as an apocalyptic war of extermination. Another strategy for evading deliberation is to insist that there is an Evil and powerful out-group determined to exterminate the in-group, and this policy, party, or leader is our only choice. When people feel threatened, we are less likely to insist upon rational deliberation, so one way a rhetor can avoid having to deliberate rationally is to make an audience believe they are threatened. Since we are faced with imminent extermination, we must act now, and deliberating about our options is suicidal. And so rhetors often claim that we are already at war—real, metaphorical, spiritual, economic, political—and therefore we have to abandon normal ethical standards and political processes and exterminate the Other in preventive self-defense.
The more that there are rhetors saying that we are justified in going to war against that group because that group is essentially committed to our extermination, the more that we are committed to a war of extermination against them. The more that we are committed to a war of extermination, the more that we are endorsing the abandoning of all the norms of a civil society—the notion that simply being human means you are guaranteed certain rights, regardless of who you are—in favor of an authoritarian society in which there is only the “right” to be in-group. Paradoxically, then, the claim that “they” are already engaged in that war is used to rationalize exterminating “them” and abandoning the notion of universal rights. Communities committed to democratic deliberation have often tried to restrict this understanding of conflict as a war of extermination to foreign policy—how we treat some Other nation. Treating conflict as a war of extermination that prohibits policy deliberation eventually, and inevitably, democratic deliberation.
Rhetors don’t necessarily fall into this trap because they’re stupid or corrupt—these rhetorical strategies don’t seem like traps, or rhetors think they’ll be able to get back out, or they think that’s just how politics works. In this book, I want to show why smart people get trapped, what it means for policy deliberation, and how we dismantle the traps.
Chapter summaries of the Deliberating War book
[Various folks have asked about the book I’m currently trying to write, so I decided I’d post the part of the latest draft of the introduction that is the draft of the summary of the chapters I’ve drafted. You might sense a theme here. As it stands, the intro begins by talking about the Corinthian speech at the “Debate at Sparta” and then moves into these summaries.]
It’s conventional to think of rhetoric as changing the minds of an audience—gaining their compliance to one’s main claim or set of claims. Thus, to look at the rhetoric of the “Debate at Sparta” is to look at what strategies rhetors used to gain (or try to gain) compliance to their argument about whether to go to war with Athens. While those present eventually voted for a resolution that was implicitly a decision for war with Athens, it isn’t clear that they did so because the speech for war (the Corinthian’s) changed their minds. This chapter uses the Debate at Sparta and Alexander the Great’s speech at the Beas River in order to make two major points: first, what matters about rhetoric surrounding a decision to go to war is not whether it persuades listeners to go to war, but how the way the war is defined in the course of the discussion: what kind of war it is (e.g., preventive, pre-emptive, limited, total), and, closely connected, what the goals of the war are (in other words, at what point can we say that the war was successful, and can therefore be ended). Second, the strategies that are the most attractive to a rhetor who is simply looking for short-term gains in persuasion are ones that constrain policy deliberation and, therefore, threaten the long-term best interests of the community as a whole. Among the most effective—in the short-term—strategies is to deflect away from pragmatic disagreements about policy options by describing the situation as an existential battle between two entities, a description that can trap a culture into either a war of extermination or endless war.
The second chapter considers Charles Cambreleng’s speech in Congress in February of 1835 and several articles about the 1873 controversy concerning the ship Virginius. Both situations enable thinking about the relationship of factionalism, hyperbole, threat inflation, and bargaining. While presenting a situation as a zero-sum conflict of such intensity that we don’t have time to deliberate is rhetorically powerful (threat inflation), it isn’t always oriented toward starting a war. There are considerable benefits under various situations, including one of hyperfactionalism, in looking as though one is panting for war, even (or especially) when war is unnecessary and unwise. The problem is that appealing to the triumph of faction as a good in and of itself encourages communities to make “Vladimir’s Choice.” While the agonism of factionalism can function to ensure that there is disagreement, and that therefore policy proposals are disputed (“interrogated” is the term often used), it can paradoxically mean that irrational loyalty is admired and emulated. Thus, factionalism can either function to improve or prohibit policy disagreement, and even deliberation. The final point in the chapter is that our tendency to think in terms of binary paired terms (that is, assuming that all issues can be mapped as terms that are consistently opposed to some and associated with others) means we assume that our rich and varied spectrum of political commitments can not only be reduced to two opposing ones, but that they are opposed in every way and at every point. The more factional a community, the greater the pressure to present policy commitments as grounded in principle, and the less likely it is that they are—appeals to principle become sticks with which to whack the opposition, and not legs on which beliefs stand.
This book is an exploration of how communities do and don’t engage in effective public deliberation about war. But, I won’t rely on any very precise use of the term “war”—this book includes discussions of conflicts that never happened (such as the US going to war with France or Spain), conflicts in which war was never formally declared (Vietnam, the Falklands/Malvinas), failed attempts to prevent a war (appeasing Hitler, the Falklands/Malvinas), and times that people claim something is metaphorically war (factional politics as war). The third chapter focusses on the April 3, 1982 debate in Parliament, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in the unenviable position of having to announce that Argentine troops had occupied the long-disputed islands of Malvinas/Falklands. Although the islands were not of strategic or economic importance to either Argentina or Britain, diplomatic negotiations over the future of the approximately one thousand people on the islands had sputtered without noticeable progress for almost twenty years. Oddly enough, neither Argentina nor Britain wanted a military conflict over the territory, and both governments thought they could avoid such a conflict almost until the moment that British troops arrived. Since the area was primarily of symbolic importance, and neither side wanted military conflict, it’s interesting to wonder how they ended up in a war neither wanted. In this chapter, I’ll argue that the situation exemplifies some of the ways that factionalism can create untouchable third rails in politics, and then we have the train wreck of a war no one wanted. Or, to mix my metaphors, the short-term gains of refusing to negotiate Falklands’ sovereignty coupled with the high costs of rational deliberation about the long-term policy options meant that pundits and politicians who hoped to keep their jobs were willing to take the gains and avoid the costs.
Paradoxically, that we believe that the correct course of action is obvious to us, and would have been obvious to us had we be in the charge at various moments in the past, keeps us from learning from the past. It enables us to tell a story about gullible, oblivious, benighted, and possibly corrupt fools who ignored the obviously right policy. There are several errors in that narrative—the notion that there is a correct course of action, that it’s obvious to good people, that we are the exactly the good sort of people who see it, and that anyone who disagrees with us (or who took a different course of action in the past) did so because they are failed and flawed. The third chapter, about the Falklands War, and the fourth, about appeasing Hitler, are both about instances in which there was not an obviously correct course of action that all people of good sense and goodwill recognized immediately for what it was; more important, that there were people believed in a right answer, obvious to them, and obvious to everyone, and that disagreement about what should be done was unnecessary at best and villainy of some sort at worst, is precisely what led to decisions communities later regretted.
There’s a saying attributed to Santayana, “Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.” The problem with that saying is that there is an awful lot of history to know, and we don’t know which past incident we should take as our model. As will be discussed in the fourth chapter, we think that appeasing Hitler was an obviously stupid policy—not just given what we now know, but given what was obvious at the time. And so the supposedly obvious mistake about Hitler is frequently, even compulsively, applied as the obvious parallel that should make it clear that we should respond with maximum aggression to this provocation. But it is also obvious to many people (and was obvious to many people in the 1920s and 30s) that the Great War had been caused by responding with excessive aggression, thereby provoking Germany and Austria. It is (and was) obvious to many people that appeasing Austria would have been the wise choice. Thus, history does not tell us that appeasement is always an obvious mistake. In fact, it isn’t even clear that the example of Hitler is a case of political leaders making a choice which was to them obviously wrong. I think they made the wrong choice, but not an obviously wrong one, and it may have even been that they made the choice they did because so many people believed that the correct political option is always the obvious one. That is, the tragedy might have come about at least partially because people thought not only that they were right, but so obviously right that they could dismiss out of hand any disconfirming information or arguments.
Throughout the book, I argue that rhetors are tempted to avoid policy argumentation because it’s hard, not particularly popular with audiences, even less popular with most media, and often obligates them to talk about their policy or party in ways that will expose flaws. As mentioned above, one of the flaws might be that the case is rhetorically difficult and the audience is unlikely to see the situation as meriting much concern. In 1947, Harry S Truman wanted Congressional approval for providing support for an anti-communist (and problematic) government in Greece, and for Turkey. Worried that the “ill” of his case would seem remote, and the aid risky (since it might lead to another European war), Truman and his speechwriters chose the same strategy as had the un-named Corinthian: make the conflict not a limited dispute but an existential and inevitable battle between two identities. This move put the specifics of Truman’s policies above the realm of pragmatic rational policy argumentation—if we’re facing extermination, it’s frivolous to count pennies or dispute data. If the situation is urgent, then asking for democratic deliberation helps the enemy. The fifth chapter looks at the rhetorical problem presented by this framing of American foreign policy arguing that it wasn’t possible for this remain a frame only for foreign policy. It must, inevitably, become the way that domestic deliberation about foreign policy would be handled, and it was.
If we are in an apocalyptic battle between Good and Evil, then there is no such place for the everyday politics of compromise, deliberation, fairness, reciprocity. The conclusion argues that what initially seems to be an effective solution (hyperbole and demagoguery) to an immediate rhetorical problem—how do I persuade people to adopt a policy (or support me) without relying on policy argumentation, since that probably wouldn’t work?—is a trap. At some point, hyperbolic rhetoric becomes threat inflation, and then that inflated threat becomes the premise of policies, both foreign and domestic. And then agreeing as to the obvious existential threat posed by the Other and uniting behind the obvious policy solution is a necessary sign of being on the side of Good. Thus, the rhetoric of existential war inevitably has as one its major casualties democratic discourse itself. And democracy without democratic discourse isn’t democracy.
If politics is war, what kind of war?
In May of 1943, Adolph Hitler had to face that the Nazis could no longer hold Sicily. Hitler, relunctantly and uncharacteristically, agreed to an evacuation of the Nazi troops from Sicily to the Italian mainland, but was told that the evacuation would be difficult because several of the ferries that might take the troops to the mainland had been destroyed. Hitler told his generals, “the decisive element is not the ferry, but the will” and “Where there is a will there is a ferry” (137). In another discussion with his generals in December of 1942 about the situation in the Stalingrad encirclement—100,000 troops were surrounded by Soviet forces and quickly starving and freezing to death—he was told that some of the troops were simply dropping dead of exhaustion. He deflected the question of whether there should be a fighting retreat (or even a set of strategic small retreats) to the question of medals. The connection seemed to be that soldiers were dying because they weren’t sufficiently motivated to continue living, something medals would help. He clearly believed that the will could conquer anything, from freezing to death to getting across a strait.
This belief, that the will could triumph over everything, meant that he fired anyone who didn’t seem to him to have sufficient will. This belief in the power of the will was a narrative: people of a certain kind (good people with sufficient will) can triumph over anything, including the lack of a ferry, or starvation and freezing temperatures. Hitler’s decision-making about war was always within that narrative.
Clausewitz famously said that war is politics by other means. If war is politics, then politics is war, and figures ranging from Mao Tse Tung to Steve Bannon have made exactly that argument. Of course, they don’t mean it is literally war, but that the stories we tell about politics are the same stories we tell about war. Many people have argued that we shouldn’t think of politics as war, and I don’t entirely disagree, but I have a different question: what kind of war? What story of war are we telling that we think is the story of politics?
Is the story about groups who are destined to go to war, who cannot possibly co-exist, or about groups who have conflicting material needs that might be negotiated? Is the story that our group has already is already under attack by an enemy determined on our extermination, and so we are in an extraordinary situation in which we are unconstrained by normal notions about moral behavior? Or, is the case that we are bargaining with another group about material goals, and threatening to go to war will enhance our bargaining situation, and so we have one narrative for the people bargaining (this is all a bluff), and another for the general public (we need to go to war)?
Not all wars are the same, not just in that they have different costs and causes, but they are very different kinds. There are limited wars, oriented toward very specific goals, or intended as one of the pressures brought to bear while bargaining. There are total wars, wars of extermination, preventive, pre-emptive, proxy. There are a lot of kinds of wars. So, if we are saying that politics is like war, whether we imagine war as limited and temporary violence or as extermination of the other matters tremendously.
Democracy is a method of government that can withstand passionate fighting among partisans, but when politics is seen as a war of extermination of all but one political position, then democracy is exterminated. This book is an attempt to persuade readers of that claim, but also to explain how and why it is that we move from seeing conflict and disagreement as beneficial to requiring extermination. That part of the argument is more complicated.
By “politics,” people usually mean the policies that are enacted by political figures, and the rhetoric we have about those policies. And, perhaps paradoxically, or perhaps not, the kind of political discourse—that is, rhetoric—we have about whether to go to war can help or hinder effective deliberation about war, whether and how to go to war, how to conduct it, whether to continue it. That is, if we see political discourse itself as war, then what kind of war we think it is (a war of extermination, bluffing, strategic) constrains or even prohibits effective political deliberation about whether we should go to war.
The argument I will make in this book is that how we think about discourse (which I’ll call rhetoric) and how we think about war are mutually inflecting. Take, for example, Hitler. Hitler thought about rhetoric as a kind of war—a war of extermination of opposition points of view that he would win through a combination of seduction, trickery, intimidation, jailing, shooting, sheer will, and success. That rhetoric worked tremendously well with his base, and reasonably well with the German public from 1933 until 1944. In other words, it worked as long as he was winning; it failed when he wasn’t. Equally important for the purposes of this book, that’s how he approached the deliberations with his generals about how to conduct the war. He bribed, lied to, intimidated, fired, and shot his generals until he had a loyal cadre who would support him completely—the same goal he had about Germans in general. He believed that politics and war should both be approached by having a clear vision of and fanatical commitment to in-group domination, as well as expulsion or extermination of all people not fanatically loyal to that vision.
And, because of those beliefs about belief, rhetoric, and war, he lost the war.
As an aside, I’ll mention that there are lots of other examples of leaders in both business and politics whose insistence on only listening to people with fanatical commitment to the vision led them to disaster, whether it’s the disaster of the USSR, or of Theranos.
We like to believe that evil people, and I think Hitler was evil, know that they are evil. But they don’t. Hitler thought he was on the side of Good. He sincerely believed that the world was facing an apocalyptic battle between Good (Aryans) and Evil (Jews and their stooges and tools). And, because he was on the side of Good, anything he did was good. That’s Machiavellianism—the means (even if they’re actions or policies we would normally condemn as immoral) are transmuted to morally good if our ends are good. But we all think our ends are good. Hitler’s weren’t, but he thought they were.
There is a long battle in western European philosophy grounded in what some (including me) would argue is a misreading of Plato: philosophy is the study of what is, and rhetoric is the study of what people can be persuaded is. Since Plato employed Aristotle to teach rhetoric in his Academy, I don’t think Plato was as dismissive of rhetoric as some philosophers would like to think. But, in any case, there is some justice to the characterization of rhetoric as the study of what and how people can come to believe that a particular way of seeing the world, a restricted range of our policy options, this representation of that group, what it means to be loyal—that is, how people come to believe. After all, we don’t go to war because of what the world is, but because of what we believe the world to be.
And we’re often wrong.
While we aren’t Hitler, we’re all people who engage in self-justification, self-servedness, short-term grasping, and in-group favoritism, and those tendencies don’t help us make good decisions. Those impulses constrain our abilities to listen to others, treat others fairly, imagine other experiences, reflect effectively on our own commitments, reason usefully about our policy options, consider unpleasant data, hold ourselves to the same standards we hold others. This book is about how and why we do that, especially when it comes to the question of war.