Tag: demagoguery

People teaching argument need to stop teaching the rational/irrational split

If you had said to a theologian in the era when Aristotle was considered the authority that, perhaps, the substance v. essence distinction was not useful, you might have found yourself with burning wood at your feet. You certainly would not have been popular. Yet we now think it was a thoroughly useless distinction—meaning we now think they never needed to make it, and that they only did so because they thought it was important to Aristotle, and he was The Authority, and working within that odd binary was what you did.

We now consider the substance/essence binary kind of a joke since it really only made sense within Aristotelian physics, which was wrong.

Scholars and teachers of writing can sit smugly in our chairs and smirk at those dumb people who worked so hard to make things work within what we now see as the false binary of substance v. essence, while we work, write, teach, and assign textbooks that work just as hard to promote the equally false binary of rational v. irrational.

You can tell it’s a false binary by asking someone to define what it means to be “rational.” They will describe five wildly incompatible ways of determining rationality:
1) the emotional state of the person making the argument (whether they seem emotional);
2) which is determined by linguistic cues, such as what linguists call boosters (words like “absolutely,” “never”)—generally whether the tone of the argument seems to the reader more extreme than the argument merits;
3) whether the argument “appeals to” data, “logic” (this is generally bungled);
4) whether what they say is obviously true to reasonable people;
5) whether the argument appeals to expert opinion (or the author is an expert).

These five criteria for determining rationality are, loosely, the person making the argument strikes us as rational kind of person, whether they’re emotional about the issue, whether they have data, whether what they say seems true to the reader, whether there are experts support the claims.

Those are all useless ways of trying to figure out whether an argument usefully contributes to deliberation about any issue.

Granted, those are the characteristics common usage dictionaries identify, although in a different order from mine. Dictionary.com provides this definition of rational:

1. agreeable to reason; reasonable; sensible: a rational plan for economic development.
2. having or exercising reason, sound judgment, or good sense: a calm and rational negotiator.
3. being in or characterized by full possession of one’s reason; sane; lucid: The patient appeared perfectly rational.
4. endowed with the faculty of reason: rational beings.
5. of, relating to, or constituting reasoning powers: the rational faculty.

And every side (there aren’t just two) says that the problem is that our public discourse is irrational, by which they mean the other side is irrational. That’s irrational twice over—they reduce the complicated world to us v. them, which is irrational, and in that irrational argument, they accuse the other side of being irrational, based on a definition that is irrational. We are in a culture of demagoguery because we believe that there is a binary of rational/irrational, and we think that people who are irrational don’t really need to be taken into consideration when we’re arguing about policies. In fact, they shouldn’t be allowed to participate. We believe that democratic deliberation requires that only people on the rational side of the rational/irrational split really count.

The rational/irrational split is not only a false dilemma, but a thoroughly incoherent and profoundly demagogic way to approach any decision. We are in a culture of demagoguery not because they are irrational (from within the that false rational/irrational split) but at least partially because we (all over the political spectrum) accept that false and demagogic binary of rational v. irrational.

Far too often, we assess arguments as rational or not on the basis of whether the person making the argument seems like a rational kind of person, they’re making the argument with an unemotional tone, whether they have evidence, whether what they say seems true to us, and whether the person speaking can cite authorities.

And we don’t always require that last one. We often treat argument from personal experience as rational evidence, especially if it’s our experience.

For instance, since I have the bad habit of reading comment threads (I know, I really should stop), I ran across a comment on a thread about why you should be hesitant to call the police if you have POC neighbors who get on your nerves, and one commenter said something along the lines of, “I’m a 60-year old white woman who has never had any issues with the police.”

I noticed that comment in particular because I’m a 60-year old white woman who has never been badly treated by the police, and I know so many POC who have, and therefore the experience of someone like me is proof that there is disparate treatment of white women and POC. So, I thought her comment would go in that direction. But it didn’t. Instead, she went on to something like, “So, you just have to treat them with respect.”

It’s important to note that she was using her personal experience to discount the personal experiences of POC who report problems with the police. So, her one argument from personal experience—that they treated her well—was, she thought, proof that they treat everyone well. She was treating herself as an expert, on all experiences with the police.

That’s irrational. But it isn’t irrational because she’s an untrustworthy person, she was emotional in the moment, she failed to provide evidence, or what she was saying would come across as obviously untrue to everyone. Her argument would look rational to someone like her, and to someone who thought as she did.

But it’s a really bad argument. Her experience as a white woman doesn’t refute the claim that POC are treated differently by police than are white women.

Her argument is irrational, but not by the dominant way of thinking about what makes a rational argument. The rational/irrational split is just another instance of confirmation bias—if you agree with the argument she’s making, then her argument will seem rational. If you don’t, it won’t.

I agree that democratic deliberation requires that people take on the responsibilities of rational argumentation, but rational argumentation isn’t about false binaries regarding identity, affect, evidence, truth, or expertise. It’s never about feelings v. emotion, so it isn’t about calm or angry, nor is it about data or not.

People teaching argumentation need to run screaming from the rational/irrational split, and from textbooks and teaching methods that reinforce it.

There are scholars who set high standards for rational argumentation, and others who set low standards. I’m on the low standards side: people are engaged in rational argumentation when we
1) can be very specific about the conditions under which we would change our minds—in other words, what we believe is open to falsification;
2) have internally consistent arguments (that is, basically, we have the same major premises for all our arguments);
3) hold the opposition(s) to the same standards in regard to kinds of proof and logic as we hold ourselves. Thus, if cherry-picking from Scripture proves we’re right, then cherry-picking from Scripture proves we’re wrong. If a single argument from personal experience proves we’re right, then a single argument from personal experience proves we’re wrong. Arguments from Scripture or personal experience aren’t necessarily rational or irrational—but how we handle them in an argument is.

This way of thinking about what makes a rational argument means we can’t assess the rationality of an argument without understanding the argumentation of which it is a part.

An argument—a single text—can’t rationally be assessed as rational or not on the basis of just looking at that single text.

Or a single personal experience. If you think about rational argumentation this way, then things like arguments from personal experience are part of the deliberation, and they are datapoints we have to assess just as we would a study. If there is a study that contradicts a lot of other studies, we don’t immediately assume it’s right, nor do we immediately assume it’s wrong. We look at its methodology, relevance, quality relative to the other studies; we look at whether it’s logically relevant to the case at hand.

We treat personal experience the same way. A white 60-yo woman who has always had good experiences with the police is a datapoint. One that shows that white women are treated well by the police. It shows nothing about POC experiences with police.

I think it is useful to characterize arguments as rational or irrational, or, more accurately, to talk about the ways in which they are rational and irrational (since many arguments are both). But, dismissing an argument as irrational simply on the grounds of surface features of a text (the argument is vehement, contradicts what we believe) or purely on in/out-group grounds (the source is irrational because out-group, it contradicts beliefs I think are true), or categorizing the argument as rational because of surface features (it has data, it seems calm, it makes gestures of fairness, it cites experts) or purely on in/out-group grounds (it confirms what I believe, the person seems in-group)–that’s irrational.

[The image is from Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, as this is all thoroughly grounded in Booth’s argument.]

Hyperbole and the publicking of the private

It’s common to sit around with friends in your living room or a bar and watch a game, movie, debate, TV show, or whatever and make snarky comments. You’re making those comments for the other people in the room, and it’s all about being snarkier, more clever, more funny, and more loyal to the in-group. This isn’t some nuanced discussion of how reffing or basketball or movies or whatever work. You’re watching a game, and you make a snarky and hyperbolic comment about how bad that ref’s call was.

And perhaps it really was a bad call. Or perhaps not.

But whether it was really a bad, good, or ambiguous call isn’t really the point. The point is to have fun by talking trash about the opponent, confirming in-group attachment, gaining the approval of the other people by offering hilariously clever comments, hyperbolic statements (generally, but not necessarily, about the out-group). That whole experience is about bonding with others, about creating and fostering an in-group.

And that’s fine. It’s fun to say something snarky, unfair, hyperbolic about a ref, player, plaintiff on Judge Judy, competitor on Bachelorette, candidate in a debate, actor in a movie. And, as long as you’re saying it to your circle of friends, it’s fine.

Because it’s directed at your friends in the room, all norms of civility, decorum, respect, and fairness are not norms that apply to you and the candidate on Bachelorette, but to you and the friends in the room. The operative norm is whether your friends like it. And that’s fine in your living room.

The problem is that we have social media that are sort of your living room and sort of not. You have a youtube, Instagram, or whatever account with 20 followers, so it feels like the living room (even if it’s technically public). Or you have a twitter or Facebook account with 800 friends, but about 20 interact on any regular basis. You think you’re in your living room, making snarky, unfair, and hyperbolic comments about the ref, to a known and in-group audience, but you might not be. You might be. You might only continue to have 20 followers, or 20 people who interact, but something you say that you intended for that known audience might get publicked, and then you’re out there in the world.

Jon Ronson has written about this a lot, and about how to handle it. He shows that people can have their lives destroyed because they think the audience of their normal social media communication is the only audience they imagined when they wrote the text, but it reached a much broader audience (in rhetoric, this is called the “intended” v. “actual” audience).

Social media enables the gerfucking of the rhetorical situation of me talking trash with my small group of friends and me taking a very public stance. Social media publicks that trash-talking, when I never consciously intended to make as a public, context-free, statement. Ronson is interested in the personal consequence of that gerfucked publicking of the two audiences: the intended and actual. And it’s a good book.

I’m more interested in the political implications of that gerfucked publicking.

Just to be clear: the snarking in the living room isn’t intended to be a thoughtful contribution to public deliberation. The snark in the living room about the ref isn’t offered as some kind of reasoned contribution to political deliberation about refs, the three-point rule, corruption in professional basketball. It might, at best, be a kind of “YEAH ME TOO! I LOVE MY IN-GROUP!” moment of performance of in-group loyalty that a person is fine being publicked (they’re happy letting the entire world know that they’re passionate about the Cubs, Gwyneth Paltrow, Republicans). But it also might not. It might be a more hyperbolic, unfair, snarky take on the situation than the person really wants to defend were s/he participating in public deliberation.

Snarking in the living room and making a thoughtful contribution to public deliberation are, and really should be, different.

And that is the challenge of our current world of social media.

Imagine that we’re in a living room, and someone says, “That ref is fucking blind shithead who must be getting paid well for how bad his calls are.” And imagine that someone responds with, “I’m not sure that’s entirely fair. Research shows that refs make a consistent number of bad calls, and they tend to be evenly distributed, but we only notice the bad calls that hurt our team.” That measured, thoughtful response, even if accurate, would be considered a party foul. The living room is not a place for rational deliberation, and that’s fine. It’s a place where rants that are completely and totally unfair, unhinged, and unreasonable are welcome, as long as they’re about someone not present, they’re funny, clever, and/or mobilizing. They don’t contribute to thoughtful political deliberation because they aren’t intended to. That isn’t the function of this space.

Social media feels like hanging in the living room making snarky comments for the pleasure and approval of the like-minded, and we all treat it that way. But it’s also the only place in our informational world in which we might argue policies. It’s the only place in which we might argue with people who disagree with us about politics. It’s the last place of political deliberation.

Good decision-making requires that we look at the situation from perspectives other than our own. I work in a building built in 1953. I have watched an EMS team be completely unable to get a stretcher up to a classroom because, when that building was built, no one looked at it from the perspective of someone trying to get a stretcher to someone in need. The viewpoint of EMS workers, people who can’t walk up stairs (there are stairs everywhere that are actually unnecessary), fire marshalls—all sorts of people should have been included in the deliberation about the building.

I was in a long series of deliberations about the building of a unit, and the architects really wanted a “pony wall” in a particular place. We kept saying, “Take out the fucking pony wall” and they would say okay, and it was still there. I was feeling really victimized until I noticed that a particular guy would show up from time to time and say something along the lines of, “Not enough doors.” Finally, at one meeting, he said something along the lines of “I am the Fire Marshall, and your design is illegal because it violates fire code. You must have doors here and here, or this building will go no further.”

The architects were ignoring me, not because they thought me unimportant, but because they thought everyone unimportant. They couldn’t look at their design from any perspective other than their own. Including the guy in charge of making sure people can get out quickly in case of fire.

We need to hear from people who disagree with us, even if they ruin our beautiful design. Cultures in which groups can keep from hearing criticism of their arguments are cultures cheering themselves off a cliff (WeWork and Theranos would be good examples of that). Believing in yourself, believing in your own beliefs, believing that you’re right—those are all great bumper stickers, but they aren’t actually great ways to reason.

Various research in political science (including Uncivil Agreements and Ideology in America) show “cross-cutting voters” to be, if not the heroes of democracy, at least pretty close. These are people who listen to various sources of information, who have friends of various political affiliations. We should all be cross-cutting voters; we should all be listening to points of view that disagree with us, and not representations of opposition positions, and not hate-watching.

But a depressing amount of empirical research shows that few of us talk about politics with people who disagree with us (Ideology in America, How Partisan Media Polarizes America).

Before cable, and when the Fairness Doctrine was in place, we used to be forced to watch centrist news, but the internet has allowed people to fall in enclaves of deeply pure in-groups. Enclaves of in-group ideology become increasingly extreme. It’s not uncommon, when I’m trying to talk to people who self-identify as conservative, for them to say that they don’t watch Fox because it isn’t in-group enough for them, and I once fell into the informational enclave of anti-globalism, a self-identifying lefty group which has sub-groups promoting the notion that the Holocaust was a hoax and the Protocols is a legitimate document. There are informational worlds of youtube videos, private Facebook groups, Instagram enclaves that are entirely in-group amplification, in which the goal of the discourse is nothing but cheering the in-group team and yelling about the other team. That’s a party in which furniture gets broken, and someone wakes up naked on the front lawn.

That’s a different post, but my point here is that far too many of us reason from within informational enclaves so refined that we spend all our time arguing about who is more purely in-group.

We are all thinking in a world of people who think like us, while we think we know what they think because our in-group enclave inoculates us, whereas good deliberation requires including the views of people who don’t think like us. We can’t make good decisions about anything without trying to think about how and why we might be wrong. There is no position from which the universal right is accurately perceived. (Again, a different post.)

Democratic deliberation requires that there is some place that the decision-makers engage in rational-critical democratic deliberation. The people who wrote the constitution imagined a series of proxy deliberations—people would select a person they thought had good judgment, who would then go to a place in which people deliberated together, rationally, inclusively, and absent of factional commitment. In such a world, citizens don’t deliberate about what policies to follow, but about who deliberates well. It didn’t work, and quickly turned into exactly the kind of factional system the people who wrote the constitution were trying to prevent. Our political system has shifted that place of deliberation from elites (who deliberated just as badly as any other group) to “the people.” That is, to us. So, now we need to engage in rational-critical policy deliberation.

And rational deliberation includes listening to the best arguments of the oppositions.

Social media, especially Facebook, google, and twitter, are places in which we might engage in points of view other than our own, but the algorithms help us to avoid difference. I have to work to find political arguments from out-groups. There are other places–comment threads on places as varied as Slate, WSJ, captainawkward, FARK, WaPo, NRO—that have a dominant ideology (an in-group point of view) and out-group views get piled on (and the whole genre of commenting isn’t inviting for good deliberation). Those comment threads are not places in which people thoughtfully engage the best arguments of the opposition. They are places in which in-group hyperbole is allowed—they are the living rooms in which the furniture isn’t broken, but in which “I’m not sure that’s entirely fair. Research shows that refs make a consistent number of bad calls, and they tend to be evenly distributed, but we only notice the bad calls that hurt our team” is still not a welcome argument.

I am not saying that all comment threads must be equally welcoming of all points of view. I think that having site-specific informal norms is to be expected when people are looking for a place to vent, be entertained, snark about the ref. I’m saying that, for all of us, social media is the living room in which we try to make statements that resonate with people who already agree, that are clever and funny snarks about out-groups. And we pick our living rooms.

But where is the hard work of democratic deliberation? Of paying attention to the person we really don’t want to hear who says that we’re being unfair, hyperbolic, and irrationally dismissive, who says it isn’t a zero-sum battle between two sides, who insists that we pay careful attention to people we think are intellectually and morally bankrupt?

If social media isn’t that space, what is?

“They always say that”: Radicalizing the opposition

As someone who has been teaching argumentation for a long time, I’ve found puzzling a lot of the ways that people approach and think about argument. One of them is the tendency to radicalize the opposition argument, taking an opposition argument that has hedging and modifiers (often, sometimes, rarely, frequently, occasionally, infrequently, tends) and recharacterize that argument as an extreme claim (“sometimes” becomes “always” and “infrequently” becomes “never”). So, if Chester claims, “The squirrels tend to try to get the red ball when it’s easy,” Hubert says, “Chester believes that the squirrels never do anything but try to get to the red ball.”

Notice two things about that recharacterization: Hubert has framed the issue as a question of Chester’s beliefs, not his argument, and he’s radicalized Chester’s argument.

At first, I thought it was because I was a grad student teaching in the Rhetoric Department at Berkeley. That department attracted a lot of aspiring lawyers, and many (most?) of them had had debate experience. I thought students to often radicalized opposition arguments was because radicalizing your opponent’s argument was debate weeny move 101 (and one any good judge or opposition team would catch).

But then I moved to colleges where debate training was rare, and I noticed how common that shift from a modified claim to an extreme one was still common. I caught myself doing it (especially when angry or frightened), as well as colleagues (in rhetoric, who should know better), pundits, editorials, people complaining about spouses, partners, room-mates.

Perhaps because of my training, I had always thought of it as a deliberate misrepresentation of the opposition, a conscious use of the straw man fallacy.

But then I ran across relationship advice that said, essentially, if you hear yourself saying (or thinking), “You never…” or “You always….” you aren’t in the realm of talking to the person in front of you. It’s pretty unlikely that the person in front of you—spouse, partner, room-mate—has literally never done the dishes, or helped around the house, or taken out the trash. They probably washed a glass here and there, or wiped off a spill, or took out one piece of trash. It’s unlikely that they always interrupt you, leave dirty dishes in the sink, or talk on the phone. There are hours in the day when they aren’t, at that moment, interrupting you.

Because those accusations aren’t true, a person who treats relationship arguments in bad faith (they’re just trying to get their way and not solve the problem) can dismiss your claim by pointing out that they once did dishes, or are not, at this moment, interrupting you. A person who treats relationship arguments in good faith has a really hard time figuring out how to respond to such hyperbolic claims. That’s really good relationship advice—listen to yourself when you’ve radicalized their behavior.

It doesn’t work for people who see relationships as zero-sum battles between the two people, and who like it that way; it takes the fun out for them. They like the big blow-up arguments that are all about throwing hyperbolic accusations at one another (and sometimes physical objects) and the makeup sex afterwards. YKINMKBYKIOK

But I found it to be good advice for me—to pay attention to when I was radicalizing someone else’s argument. And then I realized it’s really good advice for policy deliberation. And I don’t mean just national politics, but I noticed that intra-departmental policy arguments (what should we do about the photocopier) often triggered all-or-nothing thinking in some people. In faculty meetings, a person would say, “I’m concerned because I think this policy might lead to [this outcome] under these circumstances,” and someone would respond with, “So you’re saying [this outcome] would always happen,” and then they would engage in a long speech about how silly it was that their opposition would think it would always happen. Smart people, people trained in close reading, radicalized the claims of people with whom they disagreed. And they hadn’t been trained in debate.

And, working individually with students, I found that they could read a nuanced argument, and, if it was in-group or confirmed their beliefs, they could read it with nuance, but if it disagreed with them, they radicalized it.

The tendency to radicalize what they believe, in my experience, is pretty rarely a strategic and conscious rhetorical choice. I’ve come to think it’s entirely sincere. I’m not going to say that “both sides” do it, because I think the whole notion that our nuanced, vexed, and rich array of political options can be reduced to two sides (or a continuum) is not only empirically false, but proto-demagogic.

I will say that many people all over the political spectrum, and in the realm of non-partisan policy issues (such as what policy should we have in our house about doing dishes), radicalize the beliefs of anyone who disagrees with them, and all of us often radicalize the beliefs of people who disagree with us, especially under certain circumstances.

My crank theory is that there are various conditions that make people prone to radicalize the opposition:
1) That’s how some people think. Honestly, this is, I think, the most common explanation. There are people who can’t think in nuanced terms, or understand probability. They think in extreme terms. They’re the kind of people who, if the weather predictors say, “There is a 90% chance of rain,” and if it doesn’t rain, they say the weather predictors were wrong.

Lots of people in our muckled public/private realm engage in hyperbole, and so do these people. If something is bad, it’s the worst thing ever; if something is good, it’s the best thing ever. But these people talk that way because that’s really how they think—their in-group is entirely good, and made up of good people who all agree as to what is good, and anyone who doesn’t agree with them is entirely bad. You are either in-group (double plus good) or out-group (double plus ungood).

They have a lot of trouble admitting that in-group people are deeply flawed or out-group people have any virtues at all. Because they think everyone thinks in such all-or-nothing terms, they project that way of thinking onto everyone else. They read “often” as “always” because that’s what it really means to them.

2) That’s how all of us think in situations when we have been effectively inoculated against the opposition. Inoculation https://www.patriciarobertsmiller.com//2019/07/28/democracy-and-inoculation/ works by giving us a weak version of “the” opposition argument. It’s generally paired with training us to associate certain terms or positions with one opposition (so, all feminists are lesbians who want to convert all women to lesbianism, if this woman says she thinks women are unfairly treated, she must be a feminist lesbian missionary).
3) It’s also common if we’re naïve realists—if we believe that our position is the only possible reasonable position, then we are prone to reframe all opposition arguments as arguments. That is, we radicalize them.
4) If we believe that there are only two positions on every political issue, then we’re going to throw all unreasonable positions into the “other” side. We all tend to think of our in-group as nuanced, heterogeneous, and diverse, but the out-group as essentially all the same. So, if I believe that vaccines are great, and someone says they’re not wild about the HPV vaccine, I’m likely to assume that they’re opposed to all vaccinations.

I think the unconscious (and sometimes deliberate, when it’s part of inoculation) of “the” opposition is one of the major contributors to our culture of demagoguery.

It’s common now to say that we’re in a bad situation because civics is no longer taught, and there certainly seem to be an awful lot of people who don’t seem to understand some of the basic features of our governmental system (all over the political spectrum), but I think more important is that we don’t teach logic.

I don’t mean formal logic, but the very straightforward, and yet very challenging, skill of teaching students to recognize various fallacies, like straw man, not when those people engage in it, but when we do.

That there is a legitimate need doesn’t mean your policy is right

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. It worsens 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]

Two ways of thinking about politics

I have a visceral aversion to binaries, and therefore to any argument that claims something can be divided into two. Yet, the more that I study train wrecks in public deliberation, the more that I think there really might be a binary.

It isn’t, though, that there are two kinds of people, or our political options are usefully divided into two (or a continuum of the two), but that it might be that the ways that people assess claims can be (more or less) divided into two.

Imagine that I say that Chester Burnette is the right candidate for President. That’s a claim.

We can assess  that claim through the filter of  assuming that the in-group is the only group with legitimate claims, objective views, good evidence. So, we look at a claim and accept it (as “objective” or “true”) or reject it (as “biased” or “false”) purely on the basis of whether it supports/contradicts what we already believe, and/or is from a source we consider loyal to the in-group.

We stride through our vexed, complicated, nuanced world confident that we, only we, are people who see things clearly. And we see things so clearly that we refuse to see things that might suggest we aren’t seeing things clearly.

Most of us spend most of our time striding through social media this way.

We assess arguments and claims on the basis of whether the people making them are in-group or out-group, they support in-group v. out-group beliefs.

Or, we can assess every political argument on the grounds of the stases of policy argumentation, which means that we apply standards of rational argumentation equally across groups.

If you look at our political landscape through the lens of proto-demagoguery, then you spend your political life drinking deep from the genetic fallacy (any information that complicates or contradicts the in-group talking points or that criticizes an in-group political figure can be dismissed because it comes from a non-in-group source).

I think there are times that the source of information is relevant to assessing the information, but it’s always a secondary consideration. The first consideration is what their evidence is.

Imagine that you have a cousin who always has a new get-rich-quick scheme. After two or three of those schemes have blown up and lost him a lot of money, you can conclude he has bad judgment and ignore him. It’s the genetic fallacy if you refuse to consider his evidence because he supports Trump; it isn’t the genetic fallacy if he’s consistently been wrong, repeatedly shared false memes and debunked claims, and often misrepresents things he’s read. It’s rational to abandon a source, not because it’s out-group, but because it’s consistently irrational.

After you’ve been burned a few times by a source, you can conclude you won’t rely on it anymore (for me, that would be RawStory, The Drudge Report, PETA, Mother Jones, The Blaze, Rush Limbaugh, and various other sources). I still read them, but I never believe anything I say without checking their sources (which is complicated if they don’t give their sources, and some of them don’t).

I think it’s valid to conclude that PETA is just completely unreliable as a source. But, concluding that PETA is completely unreliable (and, honestly, I think it is) doesn’t mean that criticisms of animal testing, Big Agra, or our reliance on beef are invalid.

To argue that all criticisms of animal testing are invalid because those criticisms are made by PETA and PETA can’t make a rational argument to save its life is an irrational argument. And yet that’s how far too much of our political world works. And, just to be clear, PETA cannot make an irrational argument to save its life. It’s kind of a bad car crash for me–if I want to find an example of a fallacy, and I’m teaching, I just go to PETA. I know I’ll find it there.

And I say this as someone committed to animal rescue, opposed to (almost all) animal testing, vegetarianism.

Our world is not PETA or no restrictions on animal experimentation. Our world is not the NRA or Obama personally kicking down your doors to take your guns. Our political world is not a world of binaries and identities. You don’t have to choose between PETA and all animal experimentation all the time; you don’t have to choose between the NRA and Obama personally kicking down your door to take your guns.

I don’t believe we are in a political world of left v. right. I think that model is not only false, but toxically so. I think it’s like saying that all colors are either yellow or blue. You could organize all colors that way, just as you could organize all the things in your house as square or round, or all animals as bunnies or ants. You could do it, and that binary would be self-fulfilling, but the important questions would be: why that binary? Is that a useful binary? If it’s useful, to whom?

The binary is self-fulfilling insofar as, were we in a world in which all animals were categorized as bunnies or ants, then that would seem natural.

Our political world is no more “left” v. “right” than the animal world is bunnies v. ants.

And here is the important point: so what? Even were our world actually bunnies v. ants that wouldn’t mean we should argue about policies in terms of a zero-sum between bunnies and ants.

I shouldn’t assess the claim that Chester Burnette would be a great President purely on the basis of whether in-group media supports him, nor whether he feels in-group to me. I should consider his policies, whether his voting record suggests he really supports those policies, and what various media say about him. And I shouldn’t decide to dismiss any criticism of him on the basis that only bad people criticize him.

It’s perfectly fair to decide that some sources are engaged in bad faith argumentation, but that they are critical of the in-group or an in-group candidate is not adequate evidence. If I firmly, thoroughly, and completely believe that squirrels are evil because they are trying to get to the red ball (the basic belief of my favorite dog) that doesn’t actually mean that it is rational for me to frame my entire world in terms of pro- or anti-squirrel.

It’s fine for me to be passionate about squirrels; it’s fine for me to ask every political figure about his stance on squirrels. I have that right. But having that right and having a rational argument aren’t the same thing.

If you dismiss every source (or rhetor) who disagrees with what you think is true without considering their arguments, then you are not engaged in rational argumentation. (It’s fine to dismiss some sources and rhetors, either because they’re consistently wrong and you’re done with them –me and PETA–or because they never engage in argumentation to support their point. Oh, wait, that was PETA again.)

All sources should be held to the same standards. If a source consistently fails to represent the opposition(s) fairly, engage in internally consistent arguments, make falsifiable claims, you can decide it’s an unreliable source, not engaged in good faith argumentation. But you’re making that assessment on the basis of how they argue, not what they argue or who they are.

If you read something that says your admired political figure has done something wrong, and you dismiss it as “biased,” since it was critical of your admired political figure, you’re the one who is biased. If you aren’t willing to listen to the most fierce criticism of your political group and figure, then your political position is not a rational position about policies. You’re just a person screaming in the bleachers for your team.

“Clinton opened the door, and Trump just walked through.”

One of the rhetorical puzzles in our current situation is how people who advocated impeaching Clinton now argue that impeaching Trump would be nothing more than trying to undo the 2016, and is therefore not a legitimate position. There was a similar puzzle during the Clinton impeachment trial as to how people who hadn’t wanted Reagan impeached (for the Iran-Contra decisions) did want to impeach Clinton. It’s a little hard to say that they had a principled position about impeachment, and there certainly was the accusation that it was nothing more than trying to undo the 1994 election.

While, with every case, there are and were people operating on the basis of principles they applied across faction, at play in every case were open statements of sheer factionalism on various sides, justified (sometimes pre-emptively) by the factionalism of “the other side.” Impeaching Clinton was justified because “Democrats” would do the same. Refusing to consider impeaching Trump, regardless of the evidence, is justified because “they did it too.”

In other words, “They did it too, and so it’s okay for us to do it” (with “it” being “pretending to have principles while acting out of purely factional motives”). Thus, factionalism is justified by factionalism (“it’s okay to be this factional because the other faction was this factional first or would be this factional if they had the chance”).

The line that I’m hearing (and reading) on this is: “Clinton opened the door, and Trump walked through.” Sometimes it’s “The Dems opened the door, and Trump walked through.” The argument is that the defense of Clinton was nothing but factionalism, as any principled person would have voted (or did vote for) conviction; thus, Trump supporters believe that they have a “get out of impeachment free” card since Dems did it first.

What’s interesting to me about this defense—it’s okay for us to do it because you did it first—is that it’s engaged in by people who raised children.

Anyone who had siblings, who raised more than one child, or even just spent an entire day with multiple children knows that it’s just a question of time till you have this conversation:

You: “Stop hitting Alex!”
Terry: “Alex hit me first!”
Alex: “Well, Terry stole my cookie!”
Terry: “Terry stole my bike yesterday!”

If you let it go on, they will be arguing about events that happened in the Pleistocene.

How many adults under those circumstances say, “Well, Alex, you opened the door and Terry walked through!”?

I’ll wager few or none.

No sensible parent would say that because saying that “you opened the door and Terry walked through” is either opens the door to a world of tit-for-tat, in which case that parent is going to have to go through that whole history of injuries to one another to determine what the score is. Or else they are saying  “Well, this kid hit the other, so now hitting is okay” is a family choosing to live in a world of violence, theft, and anarchy.

Sensible parents respond in one of two ways.
1) They say, “I don’t care who started it. It stops now.”
2) They try to look into situation and figure out the rights and wrongs, being fair to both children, and not immediately taking the side of one child.

Most parents do the former. Sometimes they say, “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” meaning that Alex hitting Terry doesn’t make Terry hitting Alex right, because hitting is still wrong.

Personally, I think Clinton should have been censured. But, I’m not Queen of the Universe. One thing that is true, though, is that the failure to convict was not factional. Five to ten Republicans voted against the articles of impeachment.

But, here is the more important point:
1) we can decide that Clinton (or Reagan) “opened a door” and that no President should ever be impeached;
2) we can admit that we only want out-group Presidents impeached, and that we reason entirely factionally;
3) we can look into the rights and wrongs, weigh the various things that Reagan, Clinton, and Trump did, and try figure out the math of the tit-for-tat;
4) we can say that we don’t care who started it; treating impeachment as a purely factional issue stops now.

The first and second put us in a world of hell, and it doesn’t matter if the other side does it too. That the other side reasons rabidly factionally doesn’t make our rabid factionalism okay—two wrongs don’t make a right.

We’re all still in a world in which we need sensible policies, and hating the other side doesn’t get us sensible policies.

The third is complicated, time-consuming, and, in the long run, does it matter? We can spend a lot of time arguing about the tits and tats of Reagan v. Clinton. But would that math change what we should do now? Would it change how you, as the adult in the room, managed the kids hitting each other?

I mentioned earlier that the “it” in this case is reasoning and acting entirely in service of our faction. If we choose to behave the way most sensible adults do, that would mean that we, all of us, assess carefully the accusations against Trump, and, if we like him, we hold him to the same standards we would hold an out-group President, and, if we don’t like him, we hold him to the same standards we would hold an in-group President. (So, Dems and Republicans should ask: if Obama had done these things, would we have advocated impeachment?)

Our whole political world right now is tainted by the genetic fallacy, in which you reject information on the grounds that it came from a “biased” source (by which you mean “the other side”). That’s is a fallacy with damaging political consequences—making a good decision should always involve listening to other points of view.

Making a reasonable decision about the accusations against Trump means reading “the other side”—directly, not relying on mediated versions (and not relying on the “other side” spokesperson on your otherwise factional media, so watching the clips that Rachel Maddow presents or watching Shepard Smith doesn’t count).

Neither Clinton nor Reagan opened a door. If what you’re doing is unethical, that someone else did it doesn’t magically transform it into ethical. Wrong remains wrong.

Why I think impeaching Trump now is not a good choice

I think Trump should be impeached. I’d think a Dem who had a similar history of violations of emoluments, security, dishonesty, relations with foreign entities should be impeached. (I’d want a Dem with this history of emoluments violations alone impeached.) Supporters of Trump would want a Dem impeached for far less than what Trump has done.

But the GOP is the party of Trump, and there is no reason to think that the GOP Senators will assess the evidence rationally or non-factionally. I see no reason to think the Senate will impeach Trump because, as many Senators and many Trump supporters say, there is literally no evidence that would cause them to support an impeachment conviction because he (and his supporting media) has persuaded many people they are at war, and so we are in a state of exception.

There are enough Senators who have made it clear that they would not support an impeachment conviction regardless of what comes to light that impeachment cannot win with this Senate.

Impeachment hearings could bring enough evidence forward to put pressure on Senators in purple states, but that pressure is most likely to work if the hearings are happening close to the election—before the GOP Propaganda Machine has time to spin the information. If the hearings end with a Senate that votes against impeachment, and the evidence is good enough, it might mean that people will vote out Senators who voted not to impeach Trump, but, again, that’s most likely to be effective if it’s just before the election.

As much research shows (much of it summarized in Democracy for Realists) a large number of people vote purely on the basis of in-group identification, and another large group votes purely on the basis of what happens just before the election. Thus, if we want the Senate’s impeachment vote to be representative of what Americans want, then we want it to happen close to the election when voters will hold the Senate accountable about impeachment.

If impeachment happens long before the election, then other issues will intervene.

I might be wrong on this, but I think I’m right.

I think people who are arguing for impeachment now are wrong, but their disagreeing with me doesn’t mean they must be irrational or have bad motives; I disagree with them, but I recognize it’s because of how they weigh various factors. I disagree thoroughly, deeply, and completely with people who think we shouldn’t impeach Trump at all, but there are versions of that argument that I think are legitimate and sincere—even if I think wrong. Democracy requires that we do that hard and unpleasant work of distinguishing between arguments that we think are entirely wrong, awful, offensive, even unethical and yet within the realm of arguments we need to consider, and arguments we think are entirely wrong, awful, offensive, and entirely in bad faith.

Being very clear that you’re right doesn’t require believing that no one else could possibly have good reasons or good motives. Believing that democracy requires deep and unpleasant disagreement doesn’t require that we abandon all standards of what arguments we consider.

We are, I believe, at an important point for democracy, but the urgency of our situation does not mean are exempt from the responsibilities of democratic deliberation regarding our policy options. We are not suddenly in a world with only one reasonable option.

This is policy argumentation 101: we might agree on the need, but that doesn’t mean there is only one possible plan.

Rational argumentation and whether Dems should impeach Trump

I’m getting really tired of lefties slamming Pelosi for not insisting on impeaching Trump. A far too common argument is that impeaching Trump is the obvious thing to do, and she is too corrupt, craven, cowardly, or corporate to take the obviously correct line of action.

This is a standard—and profoundly anti-democratic—position that people all over the political spectrum take about all sorts of policy disagreements: that the correct course of action is obvious, and anyone who disagrees with that position does so out of bad motives. This position assumes that politics is simple, that there is not legitimate disagreement (at least on this issue), that the person making this argument has perfect perception and knows everything necessary, that, in other words, there are not other legitimate needs or perspectives. That’s in-group authoritarianism. Democracy presumes that we have to argue together because no single individual (or group) can see an issue from every possible perspective—we need input from multiple perspectives.

I have no problem with people believing that impeachment is the right course of action. I have no problem with people passionately believing that they are right, and arguing with vehemence about how right they are. I have no problem with people getting frustrated at not getting their way. I also have no problem with someone coming to the conclusion that an interlocutor is a bad actor, acting in bad faith. But I do have a problem if people are arguing irrationally . The rationality of an argument is determined by how the argument is made, not the emotional state of the people making the argument, nor even (in general) what the argument is.

There are irrational ways of framing a debate, such as beginning with a false binary. One of my least favorite false binaries is the “do this now or do nothing ever.” There are not two sides on whether to impeach Trump, even among people who believe he has committed acts that should cause any President to be impeached.

The Dems could impeach Trump now, begin impeachment hearings now (and impeach any time between now and his reelection), begin impeachment hearings in January 2020, not begin impeachment hearings at all unless he gets reelected. Any one of those positions can be defended through rational argumentation.

What can’t be defended through rational argumentation is the argument that impeaching right now is so much the obviously right thing to do that anyone who disagrees must be corrupt.

Impeachment cannot succeed with this Senate. There aren’t the votes in the Senate, and there is no reason to think—at this point—that that will change in the near future. Even if you think Trump should be impeached (and I do believe that the GOP would be screaming for impeachment had a Dem President done what Trump is doing), that doesn’t mean impeaching him now is right.

If impeaching Trump would be a futile effort because the Senate would never convict, but it starts a cultural conversation about demagoguery and political corruption, it could be the right thing to do.

But, if it doesn’t start that conversation, costs a lot of money, and enables Trump to get reelected, then it isn’t necessarily the right thing, even from within the set of premises in which preventing Trump’s reelection is right. When you passionately (and perhaps rationally) believe that an end is absolutely right, you can get suckered into skipping arguing about the means–it can seem that doing something is better than doing nothing. But it isn’t; doing nothing is better than doing the wrong thing. (There’s a wonderful part of The Phantom Tollbooth about exactly this.)

Doing  something doesn’t mean doing this thing. That’s how Bush argued for invading Afghanistan and Iraq–we had to do something. We did the wrong thing. For people who believe that Trump needs to be removed, that our political world needs to acknowledge the depth and consequences of his corruption, impeachment now is not the only option. It might be the right option, but it isn’t the only one. We were not in a world of invading Afghanistan and Iraq or doing nothing about terrorism. We are not in a world of impeaching now or doing nothing about Trump.

There is something odd to me about people who have never managed to get themselves elected to Congress deciding that they know that Pelosi is making the wrong move. She has her flaws, but she is better at politics than many of her critics. Does that mean she’s right? Nope, but it does mean that argument from person conviction that Pelosi is wrong is just that and nothing else—it is not an argument from authority, nor rational support for a claim.

I’m not saying that people who disagree with Pelosi are irrational. I’m not saying that people appalled by Trump’s corruption are obviously wrong to argue for impeachment now. I’m saying that we are not in a binary of the obviously right position and all other obviously wrong positions–about Trump, about raw dog food, about bike lanes, about much of anything.

I’m saying that we are in a world in which being passionately and rationally committed to your position (and it’s possible to be both at the same time)—about impeaching Trump, immigration, raw dog food, abortion, Billy Joel, bike lanes—requires acknowledging that the situation is not obvious, that it is not a binary, and that no one died and made you God.

If you believe that our policy options about Trump are a binary of your position and everyone else, and you believe that only your position about Trump is legitimate, and that the people who disagree with you are irrational people with bad motives, then whatever your position is about Trump, it is not coming from a place of respecting or protecting democracy.

#notallingroupmembers as sometimes doing useful political work

 

[Image from here]

A crucial concept in political science, sociology, social psychology, neuroscience and various other fields is that we maneuver through our world by identifying every person we meet as in-group or not. In-group doesn’t mean the group in power—it means the group we’re in. That is, as scholars of rhetoric would say, the first move when we meet someone is that we unconsciously try to decide what kind of rhetorical relationship we’re in—is this going to be a friendly, hostile, amorous, commercial, weird interaction? Do we need to be skeptical about this person, or should we assume good faith? And we intuitively answer those questions by categorizing the person as in-group (trustworthy) or out-group (untrustworthy).

In other words, is this someone with whom we identify (in which case we lower our guard) or not (in which case we raise our guard)? That’s a normal initial reaction.

It’s also normal to be in an ethical world in which we are called to treat others as we would want to be treated. Thus, if we’re ethical, we are open to reconsidering our initial impulse to categorize, we know we have it and resist, we don’t treat all non-in-group members as hostile or dangerous, we meet a non-in-group member and find that an inviting and interesting opportunity, we have more reasonable ways of assessing danger than just in- v. out-group. To be ethical means not to rely on our in- v. out-group impulses.

Some people, however, never move past that initial in- v. out-group response. I mentioned this incident in another post, but it’s relevant here too. Many years ago, I was at a wedding shower, and one of the guests was going on about Jewish women being pushy. I said (because I was raised by wolves and don’t know how to behave at wedding showers), that I thought she was being antisemitic. She said, “You’re just saying that because you’re Jewish.” I said I’m not Jewish. She said, “Oh you probably are and don’t know it.”

She believed that only Jews object to antisemitism, so my objection meant she categorized me as Jewish (out-group). Instead of a counter-example causing her to rethink her premise (that only Jews object to antisemitism), she made the counter-example (me, a non-Jew objecting to antisemitism) something that proved her premise (I had been pushy by objecting to her comments). Of course, were I Jewish and didn’t know it, I wouldn’t have objected to her antisemitism, but that was a level of logic beyond her.

A disturbing number of people, all over the political spectrum, enter every political argument the way she thought about Jews. For her, you only object to slurs about your in-group, and no one applies standards of behavior across groups. Everyone is only out for their own group.

For many people our vexed and complicated political world is a zero-sum game between US and THEM, and every political issue or event is not something that challenges us to think inventively about our policy options, but an opportunity to prove that US is better than THEM. Instead of our arguing with people with whom we have a shared future and with whom we face multiple policy options, and, therefore, with whom we should be working together with our various perspectives to find the best policy option for all (which is a policy that hurts everyone in some way), we are people at a football game screaming at each other. If they gain ground, we lose; if they lose ground, we win. It’s as though all public discourse is a football game with refs who have wandered off for a beer.

For people like that, call them rabid factionalists, an in-group member behaving badly is almost an existential threat—it threatens the identity of the in-group as essentially better than the out-group. If being a dog-lover is important to me, I will want to find a way to manage that, by all accounts, Hitler was genuinely a dog lover. I might respond by saying that Hitler wasn’t really in-group (not a true Scotsman—Hitler didn’t really love dogs). Sometimes they respond by saying #notallingroupmembers—by which they mean that this bad behavior on the part of an in-group member shouldn’t be taken as indicative of the goodness or badness of the group (Hitler’s being a dog lover doesn’t mean much about all dog lovers).

That second move, Hitler isn’t indicative, is a much more complicated argumentative move than I think a lot of people realize, and more significant. It’s significant in that it signifies how someone is reasoning.

A passionate vegetarian might argue that Hitler’s vegetarianism shouldn’t be used to condemn vegetarianism, and that Stalin’s being an omnivore shouldn’t be used to condemn not being vegetarian. That’s a principled stance about how to reason. People who demonstrably and openly hold the in- and out-group to the same standards undermine our culture of demagoguery.

#notallingroupmembers can sometimes do important political work in another way. It can say that this person claiming to speak for all Christians/Republicans/vegetarians/Texans/teachers is not actually doing so. That kind of #notallingroupmembers can be important for times when the NRA claims to speak for all gun owners (it doesn’t), bigots claim to speak for all Christians (they don’t), some rando claims to speak for all Americans (no one does). By pointing out that demagogues who claim that all [group] support [policy] are lying, this argument can undermine our culture of demagoguery. 

But #notallingroupmembers can also just be another instance of our culture of demagoguery. A passionate vegetarian might argue that Hitler’s vegetarianism shouldn’t be used to condemn vegetarianism, but Stalin’s being an omnivore (or not vegetarian) is a relevant example for arguing that non-vegetarians are bad.

That’s motivated reasoning, and an irrational stance. That’s how people argue in a culture of demagoguery.

If you are willing to take a single example of bad behavior on the part of an out-group individual as indicative of the moral status/intelligence of the out-group as a whole, but don’t take a single example of bad behavior on the part of an in-group individual as indicative of the moral status/intelligence of the in-group as a whole, then you are not thinking about politics rationally. If Stalin proves that non-vegetarians are bad, then Hitler proves that vegetarians are bad.

Or, perhaps, arguing from single examples is a bad way to argue in general. Perhaps, even, treating politics as a zero-sum argument as to which group is better is a bad way to think about politics.

If you make the argument that this one guy proves that the out-group is bad, and yet you reject single examples of in-group behavior as irrelevant, then you aren’t engaged in policy argumentation. You are just some irrational fanatic in the stands cheering wildly for your team with no internal or external ref.

Be nicer to Hitler, and he’ll stop being Hitler: The Marquess of Londonderry’s Ourselves and Germany (1938)

In March of 1938, The Marquess of Londonderry published an argument that Britain had failed to respond to Germany’s often (and still) outstretched hand for peace, that Germany wanted nothing but that to which it was due, and that Hitler was a leader with reasonable goals that could be met (although Londonberry also mentions that he frequently asked German leaders to list their policy goals explicitly and clearly, and it never happened). Londonderry’s argument was that British foreign policy had caused Germans to be extremist because the British hadn’t been accommodating enough to the Germans who only wanted [keep in mind he’d never gotten German leaders to say what they wanted].

Londonderry published two versions of this book. One after the “Anschluss,” when Hitler forcibly annexed Austria (something Londonderry blames on Kurt von Schuschnigg, basically for resisting). While the annexation appears to have been popular in both Germany and Austria, the celebration consisted of extraordinary brutality toward the Jews. That violence was very public.

March 1938 was also long after the Nuremburg Laws (1935), after Hitler’s violations of various treaties and agreements and his going back on multiple promises, and over ten years after he published Mein Kampf, which clearly lays out his eliminationist, militaristic, and hegemonic goals. That agreement is generally considered a disaster, that emboldened Hitler, betrayed Czechoslavkia, and cemented his popularity with Germans.

Penguin published the book in October of 1938, with a new preface. On September 30, 1938, Chamberlain had signed the “Munich Agreement,” which gave Hitler a large chunk of Czechoslovakia because Hitler promised, for realz this time, that he wouldn’t try to get any more territory and wanted peace.

Londonderry says, in that preface to the October 1938 edition, that the disastrous Czechoslovakia agreement represented “the fulfillment of my hopes,” that “the international barometer […] is at ‘Set Fair’,” and “ I can only have a feeling of great happiness at this moment that all I have advocated has been brought about in a moment of time” (xi, xiii). He believed that the events of September proved he had been right all along. He had the outcome he had long wanted, the outcome he thought was success, and so he concluded the process—relentless appeasement on the part of Britain—was a good one.

Londonderry is a great example as to why what might be called “folk pragmatism” (“the proof is in the pudding”) is a disastrous way to think about policy deliberation.

Londonderry’s argument was that the Versailles Treaty dishonored Germany (he wasn’t making an economic argument), and denied Germany the right to be treated as an equal in regard to decisions about Europe. (t’s interesting to think about why Londonderry assumed that Germany was entitled to be treated as an equal to France and Britain.) There are, and have long been, lots of arguments as to why WWI (aka, “The Great War”) happened, and the scholarly consensus is that it wasn’t mono-causal, but the consensus is also that Germany bore a large portion of the responsibility. There is also a consensus that the conditions imposed on Germany were no worse than what Germany had imposed on Russia, in the Brest-Litovsk Treaty,  or on France, after the Franco-Prussian War.

Londonderry wasn’t the only major British political figure who supported the policy of appeasement, and the British policy of appeasement was supported for very complicated reasons (best explained by Benny Morris, Abraham Ascher, Tim Bouverie, and Ian Kershaw). But Londonderry’s argument wasn’t particularly complicated: Londonderry accepts the Nazi victim narrative that Germany being treated as it had treated France is so dishonoring of Germany that its putting Hitler in power is the fault of the British. Londonderry argues that Nazis want to be the friend of Britain. Nazi Germany can be an ally, and that we need to stop engaging in rhetoric that alienates them. Londonderry’s argument is, at its heart, an argument about feelings: the Versailles Treaty made Germans feel bad; Hitler is acting the way he is because he feels bad; if we make him and Germans feel better, they’ll have different policies. We can changes their policies by changing their feelings.

Londonderry postures himself as a reasonable person willing to look at both sides, but notice that France’s position is not one of the “sides” that needs understanding. He doesn’t need to understand the feelings of the French or the people opposed to his policies.

In fact, he argues that Germany and Britain have far more in common than Britain and France because “There are many points of similarities between our two countries [Britain and Germany], and there is a racial connection which in itself establishes a primary friendly feeling between us which cannot be said to exist between us and the French” (19).

Not only is that statement racist, but it’s typical of how incoherent racism is. “Racial” categories are always just politically useful ways of grouping people that racists want to believe are real. Madison Grant—the man who wrote “Hitler’s Bible,” whose arguments about race meant we sent away boats of Jews trying to escape Nazi Germany, and who was still being cited as an expert in the 1960s–was very clear that “race mixing” was bad, by which he meant a “Nordic” and a “Mediterranean.” For Grant, and people like him, Italians, Poles, Czechs, Romanians weren’t really white, so a Pole marrying a Brit would lead to the downfall of civilization just as much as a Brit and an African. I mention this just because I routinely run across people with Polish, Ukrainian, Greek, or Italian last names who claim praise Grant as a credible source.

White supremacists aren’t very good at reading comprehension.

But, back to Londonderry. He has two points to his argument. First, the current problems between Britain and Germany, he says, can “only” be solved “by a sympathetic understanding” of the German position.

As far as the first, Londonderry’s book makes clear something I’m not sure he himself saw—he repeatedly asked Nazis to say exactly what they wanted, and they never did. Yet, he insisted that Germany had continually extended the hand of friendship to Britain, and it had been rejected. In other words, Londonderry thought the world of politics was one in which people need to feel good about each other, and feel respected by one another. And that was his mistake. He thought the problem with Germany was not that its culture had a victim narrative of being entitled and encircled, that powerful political groups (including the Catholic party, communists, monarchists, fascists, and nationalists) wanted to make sure that democracy failed, but that Germans felt bad, and therefore they advocated aggression. If we treated them more honorably, they wouldn’t feel bad, and so they wouldn’t be so aggressive.

I’m all for understanding exactly what the other sides are saying. I believe to my core that effective deliberation—political, personal, professional—requires that people really understand the arguments that other people are making. Understanding those arguments doesn’t necessarily mean that you think they have any legitimacy; understanding how a bad argument works is like understanding how a bridge collapsed. But that isn’t what Londonderry means.

And it’s interesting to think about just what arguments he argued needed understanding. Hitler’s arguments about honor needed understanding. Arguments about Nazi genocidal policies didn’t. Londonderry exemplifies one way that people argue for a dodgy in-group policies. Londonderry argued for “fairness” regarding Nazis because he didn’t really have any problem with their political agenda, as far as he understood it.

He includes in his book, after a long description of how charming his 1936 visit to Germany was, a letter to Ribbentrop he wrote February 21, 1936. In that letter he says,

“As I told you, I have no great affection for the Jews. It is possible to trace their participation in most of those international disturbances which have created so much havoc in different countries, but on the other hand one can find many Jews strongly ranged on the other side who have done their best with the wealth at their disposal, and also by their influence, to counteract those malevolent and mischievous activities of fellow Jews” (97)

This is a perfect example of someone making what appears to a gesture of fairness, but is actually just a tone of fairness, all the while endorsing Nazis. Fairness shouldn’t be a tone, but an ethic.

There are people (and I try to be one of them) who can say, “I disagree completely with this argument, but it is a valid argument.” This is kind of old-school logic: being true and being valid aren’t the same. That appeal to fairness is wildly different from what Londonderry is here doing. He is engaged in the kind of bothsidesism that nurtures genocide. He is saying that, on the whole, the logic of the Nazis genocidal policy is legit, but don’t go overboard.

Londonderry argued for listening to Nazis, not because he was, in principle, committed to listening to all groups, let alone holding all groups to the same ethical or rhetorical standards—he didn’t try to be fair to the French, let alone to Churchill. He didn’t argue for listening to Nazis in order to understand how to argue against them. He argued for sympathizing with Nazis because he didn’t really have a problem with their wanting a country free of Jews.

As it turns out, being nice to Hitler didn’t change Hitler’s policies. It rarely does. Hitler’s rhetoric (public and interpersonal) was all about feelings; he was all about making “Germans” (his supporters) feel that he was looking out for them, and he enacted policies that got his supporters short-term benefits. He was like a con artist who seduces someone by wining and dining them, all the time on the credit cards he’s stolen from the mark. What mattered about Hitler wasn’t how he felt about Germany, whether he made people feel proud to be Germans, or even, really, how he felt about Jews or Poles or Sinti or Slavs—what mattered is that his policies ensured that Germany would find itself in a two-front war, a kind of war it couldn’t win, unsustainable economic policies, serial genocides. As they say, fuck Hitler’s feelings.

When someone says we should be nicer to Nazis as though that will persuade Nazis to be less Nazi, they’re saying they don’t really have a big problem with Nazi policies. What’s wrong with Nazis isn’t how Nazis feel; it’s the policies they support. We should stop arguing about Nazis’ feelings, and just oppose policies that help Nazis. Fuck their feelings.