Tag: demagoguery

Pray away the guns

Many people who call themselves Christian, and think they represent all Christians, believe that, when communities are living by God’s word (which they understand, unequivocally, from God’s mouth to their ears, so to speak) then that community will not be punished with terrible things. Thus, they reason, if there are terrible things happening, we just need to get back on the right path, and those things will go away. That’s the argument being made by a lot of people about gun violence.

It’s a kind of bastardization (as Kenneth Burke would say) of the Jeremiad. The Jeremiad is a rhetorical narrative—our culture was once in touch with God, and following God’s laws, and we were prosperous and happy and there was no disagreement; but, we have fallen from God’s law, and now we are suffering bad things (especially disagreement, but also violence), and so we need to purify our culture from practices that God condemns, and then our problems will be solved.

The Jeremiad depoliticzes political issues. It makes all policy issues not issues about what policies we should have but issues of personal will and out-group presence.

The American fascination with the Jeremiad is usually attributed to second generation New England Puritan preachers saying that things were great with the first generation–who were pure of heart–, but now they’re bad because people aren’t pure enough. What’s really odd about that argument is that the first generation wasn’t good. They saw people drop like flies. They bickered over everything, and sued one another like the lawyers they were. A large part of The History of Plymouth Plantation was about their lawsuits.

There never was a golden age in American Protestant religion when people weren’t dying, killing, suing each other, and, for that matter, buggering various animals (the most entertaining part of The History of Plymouth Plantation). The Jeremiad is a historical narrative (people followed God and things were great, now we don’t, and things are terrible) that is indefensible as an argument about history.

MAGA is a Jeremiad, especially when connected to notions about how when “In God We Trust” was on our money things were better, and crime has been going up ever since we banned prayer from schools (it hasn’t, and we didn’t).  But, okay, let’s run with that argument. Things were better when there was slavery? Things were better in the 50s?

One thing I think we should ask white Christians engaged in Jeremiads about how we need to go back to when America was great, in the fifties, is: could they please explain how that time was better? What, exactly, was better, and more in line with what God wants, about segregation, about a time when people posed cheerfully in front of a castrated, flayed, and burned black body? Was that when America was great? When a man could rape his wife, even if they were legally separated, and he could know he would suffer no consequences? When employers could pay POC and women less for the same work? Where is that in the Bible? When “conservative” rhetoric could criminalize the very people employed in order to break unions?

Christians engaged in Jeremiads about how times were better and we used to follow God’s law are generally engaged in what I like to think of as narcissistic ethics (the world is good or bad as it is good or bad for them and people like them) and what others have called naïve realism (something is true if it seems true to you). Personally, I don’t think either of those is much in line with what Jesus said, but I’ll set that aside just to emphasize that, if you try to engage someone making this argument about how things were better when you could have a picnic while lynching a black man who hadn’t done anything, they’ll talk about abortion or gay marriage.

This isn’t an argument about history; this is a statement of personal commitment to an irrational political agenda that is supposed to stand for a relationship with Christ.

It also a statement of personal commitment to an irrational narrative of causality. The dumb version of the Jeremiad says that things used to be great because people used to follow God’s law (and there is a short and ahistorical list of what that meant—we prayed in schools [no that didn’t happen everywhere], we had “In God We Trust” on our money [the history is pretty complicated], but appalling practices from those “good old days” are cheerfully ignored), and now things are all bad (they aren’t).

Thus, people who believe this false narrative say, the bad things that are happening to us are not because of policies for which we have voted, or the politicians we have voted to put in place, but because we have stopped following God’s laws, and so those things will go away if we all become more righteous.

Here things get a little murky. There are people who believe that gun violence is a scourge God has put on us because we allow abortion. (So, why wasn’t there this level of gun violence before abortion was outlawed?) Thus, the white supremacist Trump supporter drinking deep of toxic masculinity who could easily get a weapon that would enable a mass shooting is just an agent of God, not a consequence of white supremacy, toxic masculinity, the eliminationist and victimization rhetoric he regularly consumes.

A person who says he is engaged in mass shooting because he believes his actions to be what right-wing pundits say he should do (like Jim Adkisson) has nothing to do with right-wing rhetoric. It’s about lack of prayer in schools. But, the same people who claim that right-wing shooters aren’t inspired by right-wing rhetoric will blame any shooter who can be labeled as leftist on leftist rhetoric (James Hodgkinson).

In other words, if there is a shooter, the first move for mainstream “right-wing” media (by which I mean Fox, Limbaugh, and the other main sources of information for many people—the most mainstream media there is) is, if possible, to say the person was a “lefty.” If that isn’t possible, say he was mentally ill, an anomaly, and it would have been prevented had there been good guys to shoot him.

But you also get the argument that he was an agent of God because bad things happen when we do not follow God’s law.

People say we politicize gun violence when, after a shooting, we want to talk about policies about guns, and many of them mean that because they sincerely believe that, if we all just believed what they believed (which they describe as having faith in Christ) then no one would do anything bad. They believe that we can pray away the gay and we can pray away the guns.

They believe that gun violence would simply end were we a culture in line with their vision of Christ. Therefore shooting isn’t a political issue (that is, one that could be solved through a change in policies), but an issue of personal faith and cultural commitment. Gun violence can’t be solved through policies about guns, but only by a spiritual rejuvenation.

Note, however, that they don’t think they can pray away abortion. Abortion is a political issue that can be reduced, they believe, through a change in policies. (It can, but not the policies they’re advocating.) They say they think gun violence is bad, and they say think abortion is bad, and so they are working (and have been working for years) to change the policies on abortion.

That’s because, they say, abortion is a violation of God’s will. And gun violence isn’t?

The political power of the irrational rhetor

There are, loosely, two ways to think about what disagreement means in a democracy (or, really, any other group). For some people disagreement is productive because, in fact, we really do disagree, and disagreement means that those different ways of thinking about a problem are being openly discussed. These people view disagreement in a democracy as a necessary condition because no individual can have enough information to know the right solution—in fact, there is no right solution because people really and legitimately disagree. There is no plan that is perfect for anyone, let alone for everyone.

But other people believe that disagreement is unnecessary because, not only is there a plan that is perfect for real Americans (or Germans, Venezuelans, Austinites, Christians), but it’s perfectly obvious to everyone of good will and even moderate intelligence what that plan is. We end up with imperfect plans because there are people involved in the process who are dumb, selfish, misled by evil people. People like this believe that those dumb and selfish people should be ignored, disenfranchised, or expelled—they shouldn’t be able to participate in deliberation.

People who believe in this democracy without disagreement see themselves as supporting democracy, but it’s democracy of the “real” people (Jan-Wenner Muller explains this all beautifully). In what they think of as a “good” democracy, there wouldn’t be disagreement; there would just be quick and efficient enacting of the perfect plans.

It’s well-documented that people faced with a loss (or even uncertainty) tend to demand greater in-group purity (much of this research is summarized here). And, consistently, in the train wrecks in public deliberation that I study, people respond to clear evidence that their plan is bad by deciding that they just need to recommit to that plan with greater will (e.g., how Hitler and his generals spent mid-1943 on).

I am oriented toward solving problems, believing that our political situation is usefully complicated by our being a pluralist society with people who have genuinely different points of view, different short- and long-term interests, and fundamental disagreements about values. I also believe that the right answer to all political questions is not obvious to anyone (the false model of the “universal genius”—a different post). I am a “liberal” in the old sense of the word—a person who believes that we shouldn’t be striving to enact policies that are obviously true to us, but that we should have a world in which we consider a lot of arguments “good enough.” That is, we can say something is a good argument even if we think it’s wrong—it’s good enough.

A “good enough” argument is one that is fair to its opposition(s), is internally consistent logically, and is grounded in sources that are also fair to the opposition(s) and internally consistent. A good enough argument might still be wrong, but it’s good enough to be taken seriously in public deliberation.

My appreciation of “good enough” arguments came from teaching argumentation, in which it was important that students who disagreed with me could get good grades, and that students with whom I agreed might not, but more importantly from my awareness that very smart people often disagreed, and that I was often wrong—being right and agreeing with me (or being a member of my in-group) were not the same.

Our goal in political deliberation shouldn’t be to have a sphere of public discourse that is only people who agree with us, or policies only informed by people who think like we do. Democracy requires good enough arguments.

It also requires that people compromise, listen to one another, and  don’t expect always to get what we want. If we accept the premise that people really disagree, and that people really have different interests, then we have to accept that no policy will be the one we want.[1] Or, as Jan-Werner Muller argues, democracy is about pluralism, and accepting that we are in a pluralistic society means that we accept “a commitment to try to find fair terms of sharing the same political space with others whom we respect as free and equal but also as irreducibly different in their identities and interests” (What is Populism 82).

But, a lot of people don’t think democracy is about people with different interests and legitimately different points of view trying to find ways to live together. In a course on how to teach argumentation—entirely for people getting their PhD at a prestigious institution–, I asked the teachers to identify arguments with which they disagreed but that they thought were good arguments. A non-trivial number of teachers said there was no such thing.

In other words, the irrational insistence that only arguments with which you agree are “good” arguments is not a question of how educated you are.

It’s just a bad way to think about democracy. And a bad way to think about decision-making, but that’s a different post. People who think that only their political ideology merits consideration are all over the political spectrum, all over levels of education, and all over areas of expertise.

I’ve been at Faculty Council meetings where world-famous scholars stood up and argued against a policy because it didn’t fit how they teach, or who argued in favor of it because it would force everyone to teach as they did. (In the first group was a scholar of rhetoric, and in the second a scholar of democracy.) The irony was not lost on me, but I think my snorting on the back row did not win me friends.

Unhappily, far too many Americans have that model of democracy, and it is really not democracy—it’s inevitably authoritarian. That notion of good democracy not requiring compromise, and deliberation not benefitting from agreements means that our public discourse creates a kind of tragedy of the rhetorical commons in which it is in the short-term benefit of far too many political figures and pundits to advocate irrational policies.

Here’s why:

Sarah Binder and Frances Lee, in a chapter called “Making Deals in Congress,” describe the problems faced by members of Congress. One of them is the problem presented by “’intense demanders,’ who are critical to politicians’ fundraising and activism base” (243). These people feel passionately about an issue, but

“often have little understanding of what is and is not possible in Congress. Constituents will not be happy to hear that they must settle for less than what they wanted or that they must make unpalatable concessions to achieve desired goals….Rather than accept disappointment, they may prefer to listen to other voices—such as those of activist group leaders or congressional hardliners—who tell them that a better deal was possible. As a consequence, lawmakers must continually cope with constituencies, activists, and supporters who push them to take a tougher line and refuse compromise.” (243)

Bind and Lee quote Congressional rep Barney Frank, “On both sides, the task is dealing with all the people who believe that insufficient purity is why their party hasn’t won more elections” (qtd. 243-4).

And it isn’t even new.

I read an entire year of Congressional debates (long, complicated story)—if memory serves it was 1835-36, but that might be wrong—and I wish I had kept track of the number of Senators or Reps who stood up and called for war against other countries (I do remember Spain, England, and France, being among them, but I think there were others).

The rhetor who stood up and did an impassioned speech for war with England didn’t really want the US to declare war on England—I think he knew that would be a disaster. He was like the jerk in a bar who threatens to get into a fight, and yells to his friends, “HOLD ME BACK!” because he does, really, want them to do exactly that. The Senate or Rep who called for war on England wanted to look like someone willing to die on that hill, but he really wanted other people to hold him back. He was trying to garner support among the folks back home by looking  irrationally committed to a policy they liked. But, he really knew was a terrible idea and hoped he wouldn’t persuade the House or Senate to adopt his stance.

This particular performance of in-group loyalty requires that other people hold him back. Someone else has to stand up and explain why that’s a bad idea. But we can get into a kind of rhetorical tragedy of the commons, in which rhetors get short-term gains by rabidly advocating policies they don’t really want enacted, and no one will take on the unpopular position of saying that the situation is complicated, the solution isn’t obvious, and the immediately satisfying “Let’s show THEM! We’ll declare war!” position is actually unwise.

The term “tragedy of the commons” comes from the observation that, if you have a common area in which people in the community can pasture their cattle, people will make short-term benefit decisions that hurt everyone—including them—in the long run. Here’s how it works.

Imagine that the common area can support ten cattle easily—if there are ten cows, then each cow gains ten pounds. If there are eleven, then each cow gains nine pounds. If you’re the person to put that additional cow on the commons, then you’ve now got two cows and a gain of eighteen pounds. It sucks for everyone else, though (since they’ve all lost a pound per cow). If there are twelve cows, then each cow gains eight pounds—again, bad for the community as a whole, but good for the person who put on an additional cow on. At this point, any sensible person would put as many cows on as possible, to the point that the commons is destroyed, and no longer providing food for any cows. This is called the “tragedy of the commons.” [2] The short-term best interest of any individual is not in the long-term best interest of any individual. But, because people believe that others in the community will only think in terms of their immediate best interest, then everyone is racing to destroy the commons on which they all depend.

It is tragic because it is always in the short-term best interest of someone to screw over the community as a whole—if everyone behaves that way, then everyone loses. (This is related to what is sometimes called the “free rider problem”).[3]

The economy of attention, a world in which there are always too many things demanding our attention, means that a pundit or political figure who makes hyperbolic and fear-mongering claims will get more attention than one who says the situation is complicated. That is the tragedy of the rhetorical commons—that irresponsible rhetors will benefit, in the short term, even if their short-term benefit means the destruction of the our common rhetorical and political space.

Our rhetorical world is a tragedy of the commons. We have a public that, on the whole, only rewards demagogic media (through viewing, clicks, sharing), and that has far too many voters who, having only paid attention to media that says “This is a battle of good v. evil, and we should only vote for people who refuse to compromise,” only wants politicians or pundits who will die on this hill. And that hill. Every hill in fact. And the politicians are pundits who decide they want the short-term benefits of pandering to that irrationality about politics are the people putting the extra cow on the commons—it gets them the short-term benefit of getting votes, but it trashes our ability to make good decisions.

We are in a world in which there is considerable political power to being openly an irrational rhetor who refuses to compromise, refuses to acknowledge legitimate disagreement, and dies on every hill. This destruction of our common world will only stop when voters and consumers stop voting for political figures and consuming media who say, “It’s all very simple, and we just need to refuse to compromise.”

We need to stop rewarding the irrational rhetor. As long as we reward the irrational rhetor, we can’t complain when the commons can’t sustain any cows, that our rhetorical commons is an argumentative desert, and we have a lot of dead people on hills. We made the short-term choices that got us a long-term outcome we don’t like. We have only ourselves to blame.

[1] I’m not saying that all compromises are good, nor that we should never refuse to compromise, but simply that, as Muller says, “democracy is a system where you know you can lose, but you also know you will not always lose” (79).
[2] Unhappily, some people have this concept to make an internally contradictory argument about immigration. That’s a different post.
[3] 3] That is why there are no magnificent natural features preserved in private ownership in the US—because it’s never in the short-term best interest of someone to preserve the natural features. (This is also why “the market” should not be allowed to determine everything, since it is not actually rational in the long-term.)

There aren’t two sides on political issues

There aren’t two sides on abortion. There aren’t two sides on gun control. There aren’t two sides on immigration. There are far more than two. But reducing a complicated issue to two sides is politically useful—as Hitler noted, it’s easier to persuade people if you make issues very simple, and as people have noted about Hitler’s rhetoric, that’s most effectively done by reframing the policy issue as simply one instance of the war between Us and a common enemy (Them). That reduction of complicated issues to “us v. them” is appealing to people and therefore profitable for media.

I’m not saying that everyone who uses that method is Hitler, since we all do that when it comes to issues that trigger what is often called “hot cognition”—that is, trying to make a decision about an issue that pushes a lot of your buttons, that gets you hot under the collar. It isn’t just that these issues set off all sorts of passions (fear, anger, desire for revenge, outrage) but that they are issues (or settings) that suggest connections between this argument and beliefs central to your sense of self. In conditions of hot cognition, we tend to think in binaries.

For instance, if your being a dog owner is important to your sense of self—you often describe yourself that way to others, you post a lot about your dogs on social media, you see yourself as someone who loves dogs–, and you read an article about an abusive dog owner, you’re almost certainly in the realm of hot cognition because a dog being abused is very upsetting, and another dog owner (an in-group member) has behaved badly. You’re triggered in three ways: your feelings about dogs, your in-group membership, your need to condemn bad behavior in public (virtue signaling).

People trying to think in the midst of hot cognition tend to rely on binaries, and the binary in this case is likely to be the defensiveness/outrage one. If you take the defensiveness track, you might respond with #notalldogowners (as though that needs to be said), that person was not A Real Dog Owner (the no true Scotsman fallacy), or that person didn’t really abuse the dogs (which, by the way, might be true—this is the person who will go into deep research to find out what really happened, and they might then find that the media coverage is false, or they might end up in embarrassing pedantry).

If you take the outrage track, it might be outrage that an in-group member behaved badly, a need to vent, a need to show that not all dog owners behave that way (so #notalldogowners has two options).

If you aren’t a dog owner, you aren’t necessarily responding differently. If, for instance, dog owners are an out-group for you, then you’re also in a world of hot cognition—this story triggers your sense of yourself as good because not a dog owner. So, you are likely to take this story as an example of how all dog owners are bad without any consideration of whether the report is valid, credible, internally consistent.

If you are a dog owner but that isn’t important to your identity, or you aren’t a dog owner but don’t see dog owners as an out-group, you don’t care. You didn’t click on the link.

Also, if, in fact, it was a really complicated situation, and it’s hard to tell whether this is really is a case of abuse, and media reported it that way, then only that third person—willing to try to figure out what really happened—is going to click on the links.

In other words, topics that trigger hot cognition simultaneously get our attention more effectively than ones that don’t and they trigger binary thinking.

And here is how I’m not sure how to describe it: it isn’t actually the topics; it’s how those topics are presented and interpreted. In a for-profit media, the best way to get the most readers (and therefore, have the best advertising revenue) is to present issues in ways that trigger hot cognition in as many ways as possible.

For instance, imagine that Millard Filmore has been accused of abusing his dogs. An article about Millard might note that he is Irish, Libertarian, left-handed, a member of Toastmasters. Or, it might note that the person accusing him of abusing his dogs is Irish, Libertarian, left-handed, a member of Toastmasters.

If you are running a media outlet in a community (or world) in which pro- or anti-Toastmasters triggers hot cognition you will mention if anyone is in Toastmaters. (If you aren’t, you won’t.) In a community polarized by membership in Toastmasters, an article about a Toastmaster will get more clicks, even if Millard’s membership in Toastmasters is irrelevant to the question of his treatment of dogs (or the reliability of the critic) or transient (he was a member for a brief time years ago). An article about Millard Filmore that gives no information other than that he is accused of abusing dogs only gets those people for whom “dog owner” is in- or out-group.

The world is not actually divided into pro- or anti-Toastmaster, and Millard may or may not have abused his dogs, a question that has nothing to do with whether he is a member of Toastmasters.

But, and this is important, the media has no motivation to report what happened in a nuanced and non-Toastmaster way. That won’t get them clicks.

More important, why should we care about Millard? Does he represent some bigger issue about how dog abuse cases are handled? If the case of Millard exemplifies a common case, then let’s use it for the bigger policy issue. If not, let’s include Millard in our Two Minutes Hate (during which we emphasize his out-group membership) and go on. Or maybe we could skip the Two Minutes Hate, or at least recognize it for what it is.

There are two problems with Millard’s case: first, if we are in an informational enclave, we let our in-group media frame the question of Millard’s behavior as part of the zero-sum argument between pro- and anti- Toastmasters. Second, once that’s the issue, then anyone who does a little research and finds it’s more complicated than what our in-group media says gets condemned by the people in in-group enclaves as Them.

Talking about a complicated issue in terms of outrageous behavior on the part of Them (out-group) is more profitable for media because we don’t click on things that say, “Here is the complicated situation regarding dog abuse.” That doesn’t trigger hot cognition.

The issue of dog abuse isn’t us v. them. Almost no one is in favor of abusing dogs, but there are lots of complicated arguments about how to define it, write laws about it, enforce those laws, finance the enforcement of those laws, prevent it. That argument is boring. Who clicks on links that are nuanced explanations about the vexed situation of animal control?

Who clicks on links about how awful Millard Filmore is?

I’m not saying that being passionate about dog abuse—or politics in general—is bad. It’s great. What I’m saying is that being passionate about dog abuse should mean we know that we are prone to thinking about the issue as a binary, and we need to step back from that. We should care enough about dog abuse that we try to find a policy solution not grounded in hot cognition. We need to be so passionate about preventing dog abuse that we don’t think about it as a binary of two positions.

If, however, thinking about dog abuse effectively and politically (that is, in terms of our policy options) gets filtered by the demagogic assumption that all policy issues are really a zero-sum battle between us and them, then it all gets mixed up with virtue signaling or performances of in-group loyalty, and we’ve got a train wreck. We’ll only get information from in-group sources, we’ll make Millard out-group (and thereby not only condemn him pre-trial, but never have the more important argument about dog abuse—it isn’t and never has been an in- v. out-group issue).

My point is simply that political issues are complicated, and assuming that anyone who disagrees with you does so because they’re bad means that you lose, as a citizen, from understanding other points of view, and our community as a whole loses, because we all slouch into demagoguery. It’s fine if you have a short list of individuals (Uncle Fubar), contexts (Thanksgiving dinner), or positions (I never engage with 9/11 truthers—there’s no falsifiability), but, if you never have the confidence in your beliefs to expose them to argument with people who deeply disagree with you, and who show all the signs of being willing to engage in good faith argumentation, then even you are admitting that your beliefs are indefensible.

Racism and the false binary of shame/pride

Showing the GIS results of "beautiful hair"

It’s really hard for us to have a good conversation about racism for a lot of reasons, but mostly because we have a lot of false assumptions about what racism is and how it functions. I’ve mentioned elsewhere the false notion that you aren’t racist if you’re talking about culture—racism has always really been about culture. I want to mention three other beliefs here.

First, we should talk about racist actions, but instead we talk about whether a person is racist. We believe that racist actions are the consequence of deliberate decisions to be racist on the part of people who consciously decide to engage in an action that they themselves believe to be racist because they are racists. In other words, we think there are some people who are racist, and everything they do is deliberately racist.

Second, we think there is a binary between racist (really bad) or not (good).

Third, we also have a binary of shame v. pride—we tend to assume that you are either proud of yourself (meaning you haven’t done anything really bad), or you think you’ve done something bad (in which case you’re ashamed of yourself). This applies to your sense of your group—you can either take pride in your group (meaning it’s great), or you can think your group has behaved badly (in which case you should be ashamed of your group).

Imagine that someone says to you, “Hey, I think what you just did there was kinda racist,” or “America has a racist past,” or “The Confederacy was racist.” If you believe the three false assumptions above, then here’s what you hear: “Hey, you are a bad person who should wallow in shame because you decide to be racist every day and every way.” Or, “As an American, you should wallow in shame about the US and spend your whole life apologizing because America and Americans are entirely evil for their deliberate racism.” Or, “If you live in a CSA state or are descended from anyone who fought for the CSA, you should do nothing but wallow in shame and hate your ancestors because they were completely evil.”

You hear someone making a claim about racist behavior as an accusation of your being an evil person (or part of an evil group) who should be filled with shame, wandering around beating your breast, and hating yourself and everyone in your group.

You might believe that because you consume media that tells you that’s what SJW believe, and they might even find a quote from someone they say is an SJW that kinda sorta maybe could be interpreted as arguing that you are condemned to a life of shame. That’s because your media is engaged in inoculation.

There isn’t a binary of shame v. pride—to take pride in something, it doesn’t have to be perfect. And shame is not a particularly useful response to criticism (in fact, it shifts the stasis from what you did to who you are—which is sidetracking).

Racism is an instance of in-group favoritism—the tendency to think that members of your in-group are entitled to more than members of out-groups; that in-group members have good motives, and out-group members have bad motives; that the world (or your nation, culture, community) would be better were it only in-group members; that most of our problems are caused by the out-group; that the in- and out-groups shouldn’t be held to the same standards.

So, for instance, I live in an area that has a lot of cyclists come to time themselves for races. Many of them run stop signs, yell at pedestrians, and are generally jerks. I am not a cyclist. At a certain point, I found myself thinking that cyclists are all jerks. But, once I thought about it, I had to admit that every day I see one or two cyclists behave like jerks, and I see twenty or more cyclists. Every day, I see a much higher percentage of drivers behave like jerks, but I never came to the conclusion that drivers are jerks. That’s how in-group/out-group thinking works—your mental math is different about in- and out-group members, so you always think that your judgment of the out-group is grounded in empirical data—those two jerk cyclists—but it isn’t, because that data wouldn’t cause you to condemn your in-group (drivers). That’s in-group favoritism.

You take bad behavior on the part of an out-group member as proof that they are basically bad people.

Racism takes in-group favoritism and “naturalizes” it by associating that bad behavior with culture, “race,” ethnicity, or some inherent and inescapable character of a group. My irrational assessment of cyclists wasn’t racism not just because I never said or thought the word race, but because “cyclist” isn’t a category associated with an ethnicity, race, country of origin. Once that cyclist wasn’t on a bike, I wouldn’t assess them as out-group. Racism has two parts: it is in-group/out-group thinking that makes out-group an inescapable identity; also, it is the world in which privileges are (generally unconsciously) given to the inescapable identity of in-group.

Those two things are equally important. Trump’s racist tweets are a good example of the first; google image searching “beautiful hair” is a great example of the second. (That picture is above.)

Racism isn’t about people getting up and thinking about ways to express their conscious hate of that race. Racism is about relying on the cognitive bias of in-group favoritism; it’s about thinking that people like us are normal, and people not like us don’t merit consideration; it’s about how we explain behavior; it’s about our unconscious framings.

There isn’t some binary of being racist (bad, shameful) and not racist (good, pride). Racism isn’t about who we are; it’s, to some extent, about what we do, but even more, it’s about how unconscious biases on the part of many people have a particular outcome. No one got up in the morning and said, “How can I be racist today?” and decided to make sure that a GIS of “beautiful hair” was racist. But you can see the results show that how we think about beauty is racist.

Racism is a cultural phenomenon and, in my experience, very rarely a conscious hostility. It’s people who value standardized test scores when there’s no evidence that those scores are predictive of success in a field; it’s people noticing errors in resumes when they think the applicant is African American; it’s a teacher or school who treats a children of color differently from white children who did exactly the same thing; it’s a director who has few POC in their films; it’s our culture’s reliance on racist tropes.

Racism isn’t really about hostility as much as it is about forgetting and assuming.

That means that racism isn’t about a racist twisting his mustache thinking about how to be extra racist today. It means that racism is about how a culture works, and not necessarily the conscious intent of individuals. It means that an individual being racist is like an individual being greedy, or selfish, or irrational.

My husband makes fun of my family because, as he says, “They are always one step away from fame doing something mildly disreputable.” And, really, that’s true. One ancestor involved in the Revolutionary War was such a terrible commander that he got removed from active duty and was put in charge of a prison. When I joined a genealogy group, I found a relative who tried to make him out as a great man and hero of the war. It wasn’t. She was lying.

If you try put everything into the shame/pride binary, you either have to condemn him, which is odd, since he did support the Revolution, or you have to deny his being appallingly incompetent (her choice). Maybe just say he did some good and bad things, and take pride in the good things.

If you accept the shame/pride binary, and you accept that being racist is not good, then you either have to condemn your ancestors, or you have to deny they were racist. Because, let’s be blunt, not only would it be hard for most of us to say we have never been racist, we would have an even harder time claiming that no one in our ancestry was racist.

The world is not a fight between your in-group (obviously and always good) and everyone else (obviously and always bad). The world is a complicated place in which we are always failing to be as good as we would like, but in which we might be better than we are.

Policy argumentation

Image from here.

Policy argumentation involves several steps:

First, identifying the issue (the stasis). This is where so many arguments go wrong—our impulse is to make all issues personal, and either about whether we are being respected enough, or whether our in-group is being respected enough.

Shifting the issue to other stases thus helps us get out of who in the argument is the better person.

These are better stases:

Need:
• What, exactly, is the problem?
• Is it serious?
• Will it go away on its own?
• What caused it (what is the narrative of causality)?

Plan:
• What, exactly, is the plan?
• How will that specific plan solve the problems identified in the need (solvency)?
• Is the plan feasible?
• How does this plan compare to other possible solutions?
• Will there be unintended consequences worse than the need?

Most of our political discourse is about the need, and there isn’t even an attempt to connect the plan with the specific need.

One of my favorite examples of the ways that policy arguments go wrong is when a Texas state legislator proposed banning “suggestive cheer leading.” His need was that teen pregnancy is bad. And it is, and it’s persisted long enough that it will not go away on its own. But his narrative of causality made no sense—he couldn’t possibly claim that teens only had unprotected sex because they were driven wild by cheerleaders.

The plan of banning suggestive cheerleading had no real details; there’s no reason to think it’s feasible—how would the term “suggestive” be defined, how would it be enforced, who would enforce it? Cheerleading can lead to college scholarships, so if the standards hurt students’ abilities to compete effectively, it could have unintended consequences of hurting Texas cheerleaders’ chances of getting college scholarships.

Where the plan thoroughly fails is in terms of solvency. Texas cheerleaders could be required to lead cheers in personal tents, and it would have no impact on teen pregnancy. None.

There are other plans for reducing teen pregnancy, many, and many of them are much better in terms of all these stases.

So, his case completely fails as far as policy argumentation, but it has a certain cunning rhetorical power. It’s hard to point out that this is a stupid argument without sounding as though you’re a perv who wants to watch teenage girls dance suggestively and don’t care about teen pregnancy.

And that’s how most people hear policy arguments. We focus on need; we need to keep in mind all of those stases.

Democracy and Inoculation

Showing that politics is not a continuum, but more like a scattershot

Were I Queen of the Universe, no one would graduate from high school without knowing the difference between causation and correlation, and no one would graduate from college without understanding the rhetorical concept of inoculation.[1]

Democracy requires understanding opposition points of view. Our current media undermines democracy by relying heavily on inoculation—regardless of which “side” your media is on. It makes you think you know the opposition point of view when you really don’t. It presents you with a weak version of an argument, so that you won’t even listen to the stronger version—you will reject as stupid someone who disagrees with your party line.

It does that through two strategies.

First, most media relies on the false frame of there being “two sides” (Dem v. GOP) to every issue. There isn’t. There is no issue that is accurately bifurcated into two sides, let alone two sides that map onto the two major political parties. That false frame takes the rich, entangled, and nuanced world of policy options, and reduces it to an identity issue—do you see yourself as liberal or conservative?

In our current world, all politics is identity politics.  And it’s a deliberate evasion of policy argumentation.

That’s a bad world, a damaging frame for democratic politics, and a different post. Here I’ll just use the example of what to do regarding drug addicts to point out it isn’t a Dem v. GOP issue. There are people who are opposed to legalized abortion who prefer rehab to jail for drug addicts—are they conservative or liberal? There are people who want no government restrictions on the “free” market who also want no criminal penalties for drug use—conservative or liberal?

Let’s just walk away from the notion that there are “two” sides on any issue. There aren’t. There isn’t even a continuum. There are people who really disagree.

The second strategy builds on the first. It’s inoculation. Once you’ve persuaded your audience that the complicated world of political decisions is actually a zero-sum fight between us and them, then you need to persuade your audience of a particular construction of Them. This is a little complicated. You have to acknowledge that there is a group that disagrees with your group’s positions, but you know that, if your audience looked into the issue with any effort, they’d find it’s more complicated than you are trying to pretend it is—they’d find there are lots of people who disagree, and those people have some good arguments. So, you’ve got the tricky task of making your audience believe that they know what They believe while persuading them that they shouldn’t actually look into Their argument in any detail.

You rely on inoculation.

Vaccines, inoculation, work by giving the body a weak version of a virus, so that, when the body gets the stronger version, it shuts that shit down.

Con artists often use inoculation. They tell their marks that there are people out to get them, and give a weak version of the criticisms, framing it all as part of their being the real victim here, and it often works. The mark refuses to listen to criticisms of the person conning them on the grounds that they know what that critic will say, and they already know it’s wrong. They don’t. They haven’t listened. Inoculation is about persuading someone not to listen to anyone else because you believe (falsely) that you already know what they will say (you don’t.) It works because the con has established what feels like a real connection with the mark.

That’s how it works in politics and media too.

People who inhabit rabidly factional enclaves believe that they are not rabidly factional—they believe that they have impartially considered “both” sides (mistake number one—there aren’t only two sides) because they believe they are thoroughly informed as to what “the other side” thinks.

They aren’t. Matthew Levendusky has shown that factionalized media spends more time talking about how awful They are than they do defending their group. So, it doesn’t actually argue for a policy; it argues against an identity. And it does so in a way that makes people feel good about themselves (we aren’t as dumb as those assholes) while trying to ensure that the audience doesn’t try to understand why people disagree.

What I’m saying is this: the biggest problem in our political situation is that we rely on media that spends all of its time with two messages: we are good because those people are assholes; they’re such assholes that you shouldn’t even listen to them but repeat these talking points we are giving you.

Here’s what I think. People really disagree. The real disagreements in our world are not usefully divided into two groups. You should never rely on an in-group source to represent any out-group argument accurately. You should try to find the smartest versions of opposition arguments.

I love vaccines. I think, when it comes to biology, we should all get vaccinated. When it comes to politics, we shouldn’t. Polio might kill you; a different political point of view won’t.

[1] I’d also insist that Billy Squier’s “Stroke Me” be put on mute for a couple of years, just because I’m really tired of it. I’m open to persuasion on this.

Freedom, tolerance, and fairness

Image from here.

The political theorist Isaiah Berlin famously identified two very different ways that people talk about freedom: for some people, “freedom” is the freedom from being told what to do; for others, “freedom” is the freedom to do things. Thus, for example, joining a union restricts your freedom from rules (you have to pay dues and go on strike if the union says) but increases your freedom to get better wages and working conditions.  

For a long time, I thought Berlin was right, and I used his categories. But, having spent an equally long time (perhaps too long) crawling around the digital world arguing with assholes, I don’t think his division is right. I think, actually, that everyone uses the term “freedom” to mean the same thing.

Cicero, the brilliant Roman orator, said that if you have a controversial thesis, you should delay it, and so I will.

Let’s start with an old argument: from about 1644 to 1652, John Cotton (a 17th century Massachusetts Bay Colony minister) and Roger Williams (generally considered the founder of the Baptist Church) got into a nasty and wordy argument about many things, but especially whether Williams’ eviction from the Massachusetts Bay Colony was just.

I happen to have read the whole long exchange, and what struck me as interesting is that they agreed on the stasis.

In rhetoric, it’s generally agreed that a good disagreement has people agreed on the stasis—the hinge of the argument. A good door has a hinge that connects it to the wall. If there is no hinge, then either there is no door, or the door just falls in. Most really bad disagreements are the consequence of not agreeing on the stasis. If you snoop and find that your partner is cheating on you, you will want the stasis to be their infidelity, but they will want the stasis to be which of you is the better person, and, they will then try to make the issue your snooping. (In rhetoric, this is called deflection.)

But Williams and Cotton agreed on the stasis: they agreed that a good government allows freedom of conscience. Williams argued that his freedom of conscience had been violated because he hadn’t been allowed to have the religious beliefs and practice his conscience told him were right.  

Cotton agreed that “freedom of conscience” meant the freedom to do what your conscience told you was right, but, he insisted that Williams must have violated his conscience since he did something that Cotton thought was wrong. In other words, as Cotton said, “freedom of conscience” is the right to do what’s right. By that, he meant the freedom to do what he thought was right. Cotton believed that every action is either right or wrong, and that the right course of action and the right set of beliefs (his) is obvious to everyone. Thus, he said, Williams wasn’t just wrong, but knew he was wrong—there is, Cotton said (and sincerely believed) no real disagreement on issues of religion. This is one instance of what is called naïve realism.

Naïve realism is the belief that the truth is obvious to everyone of good will, that if you want to know if something is true, you just ask yourself if you’re really perceiving things correctly. It’s the notion that perception is accurate, and that bad judgment happens because you then deliberately distort those perceptions to justify actions you kind of always know are wrong, or because you’re blinded by your commitment to a group. This is all false. That isn’t how perception works at all, but let’s leave that aside and go back to Cotton and Williams.

Cotton’s notion about how people perceive things—that everyone really has the same beliefs  he does, but they deny them, that he is the person whose beliefs are entirely right (his epistemology)—was what made his political stance (banishing Williams) seem not just reasonable, but a way of honoring the principle of freedom of conscience. Cotton believed everyone should be free to be just like him, and he should be free to force them to do so.

Cotton said that freedom of conscience meant the freedom to do what your conscience told you to do. And he sincerely believed that your conscience told you that you should do what he thought you should do. Because, of course, he sincerely believed he was right, and he couldn’t imagine that, given how certain he was about his being right, that anyone really believed anything different, let alone that he might be wrong. Cotton confused that sense of certainty with an unmediated perception of reality. A lot of people do. The problem with Cotton wasn’t what he believed, but what he believed about his beliefs.

That’s a weird sentence, but it’s everything about democracy. Democracy thrives not when people believe the same things, but when we know other people really believe other things, and we want them treated as we would like to be treated. Cotton didn’t really think anyone disagreed with him. Cotton believed that freedom meant the freedom for him to force others to do what he thought was right because he believed everyone really knew he was right. Our problem now is that our political world is filled with John Cottons.

Williams recognized that Cotton was sincere in his beliefs, and believed that Cotton was wrong, and that’s why the founder of the Baptists believed in the separation of church and state. Williams believed that people sincerely disagree. Williams believed that freedom meant the freedom to disagree with him.

I think the notion that our always deep, rich, and entangled pluralistic political world can be put into a binary of left v. right or a continuum is like saying that all motorized vehicles are either trucks or compacts, all pets are Siamese cats or Labradoodles, all fonts are comic sans or Calibri. Taking those false binaries and making them a continuum doesn’t make them more nuanced; it just reinforces the stupidity.

So, I’m not making a claim about both sides being flawed (a claim often made by the person who watches the trolley and hopes someone else makes a decision).

I’m making this claim: our political discourse has a very consistent use of the word “freedom”. and it’s the one Cotton used: “freedom” is the ability to do whatever you think is right, and the freedom to force everyone else to behave as you think they should.

Freedom and tolerance are both claims that come from our own perspective, our own sense (our Cotton sense) that our position is the position of truth. Williams wasn’t a relativist; he believed in truth. But he tried to work toward a world of fairness, a world in which we value disagreement.

We need to stop talking about “freedom” (or “tolerance” which is similarly vexed), not because those are bad values, but because the way we’ve been using that term is so muddled and entangled with in-group favoritism that we just need to walk away from the terms for a while.

Instead, we need to talk about fairness. We’ve got a good source in that Jesus (a prophet for Muslims), and so many ethical systems say that ethical behavior means reasoning past in-group preference.

“Fairness” does not mean being equally critical of “both sides” because the wonderful world of our policy options is neither a binary nor a continuum.

We are in a world of demagoguery, a world in which every issue is falsely framed as a zero-sum contest between us and them, a world in which we are free to do what’s right or they restrict our freedom.

What that really means is that we are in a very nasty moment when “freedom” means the freedom to force everyone else to do what we know to be right. That’s what Cotton sincerely believed. That’s also what Stalin sincerely believed. That’s what a lot of people believed who turned out to be totally wrong.

Freedom shouldn’t be seen as the right to be seen as right, but the freedom for all groups to be held to the same standards to which we hold ourselves. Freedom is only freedom if it’s grounded in fairness of standards, not niceness, and not in a binary.

Trump’s racist tweets

Donald Trump said:

“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run… Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

And the question is: is that racist? And the answer is yes. The more important point is that this is a great moment for talking about how racism actually works, since racism continues because people don’t know it when they see it.

A lot of people look at what he said, and say, “This isn’t racist, because he never mentions race, and he’s talking about culture of origin, not race.”

The notion that something isn’t racist as long as you don’t explicitly mention race is like saying it isn’t cancer as long as you don’t say that word out loud.

A lot of people believe that a racist action happens because a person (who is racist in every single encounter) gets up in the morning and says, “I sure do have an irrational hate of X race. How can I be more racist toward that group every day and every way?” And, when that person engages in a racist action, s/he says, “I am doing this to you purely because you are X race.” Thus, as long as someone isn’t deliberately hostile, or their hostility isn’t irrational, or they don’t explicitly mention race, they didn’t do something racist.

In that world, someone saying that what you did is racist is accusing you of being that kind of really awful person. And so you are offended, and then the conversation shifts to how you feel about getting accused of getting up every morning and ironing your hood. (This is called “white fragility.”) So, you point out that you didn’t use racist terms, you have friends of X race (which might or might not be true), you have done un- or anti-racist things. None of that–your feeling of having been disrespected, your avoiding racist terms, your friends, your past behavior–is actually evidence that this you just did was not racist.

Think about it this way. You’re driving along, and someone (call him Chester) changes lanes into you and causes y’all to crash. Your car is really damaged. And Chester gets out of his car and you have this conversation:

You: You just changed lanes into me.
Chester: No, I couldn’t have done that because that would make me a bad driver and how dare you call me a bad driver! I am a good person. I foster blind owls, and teach a literacy class at the local public library, and pick up trash on the road.
You: Um, that’s all great, but you did change lanes into me.
Chester: I couldn’t have done that because I’m a good driver. I have never been given a ticket (because I treat police officers with respect, unlike some people), I think terrible things about very unsafe drivers, and I always check my blindspots. And I think the real issue here is that you’ve accused me of being a bad driver.

You wouldn’t say, “Oh, wow, well, yeah, that’s all evidence that you are a good driver, so you can’t possibly have just changed lanes into me.” That would be an absurd conclusion. You would say, “I don’t really care if you’re normally a good driver. I don’t care who you are–I care about what you just did.”

Yet, when someone does something racist, and someone else points it out, we have the “I can’t have changed lanes into you because I’m a good driver” argument.

And that’s how this argument about Trump is going.

But, let’s take seriously the argument that he isn’t racist, but xenophobic. He isn’t xenophobic—his wife, in-laws, and father are or were all immigrants—he is not opposed to immigrants. He’s perfectly fine with engaging in chain immigration, which he has condemned in the abstract, for his family, and his wife’s visa is problematic. And, this isn’t really about immigrants—this is about what counts as a real American.

Keep in mind that all of the women he criticized are Americans. That’s the country they’re from. So, he just said the US has a government that is a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world.

Perhaps we should take him at his word. Or, in other words, paging Dr. Freud.

There are only two ways to interpret what he said—either he is unintentionally showing what he thinks of his own government, or he believes that those women should be seen as coming from the countries from which their parents came. Three of them, after all, were born in the US. And he sees their ethnicity—their parents’ country—as what matters about them. And that is what makes it racist. That is how racism works—as seeing some groups as not really American.

That’s really common among racists. Americans gleefully put Americans of Japanese descent into camps (as they were called at the time) because the assumption was that, if you were second generation Japanese you weren’t really American, an assumption not made about the Italians, Germans, Romanians, or other Nazi countries in the 1940s (but made about all of those groups at some point). That was a political, and not biological, decision. All the decisions about who gets to be white have always been political and not biological.

Again, that’s how racism works. Until the rise of biological racism, “race” was always country of origin. Even after the rise of biological racism, there was a lot of “science” that showed that people from various countries (or continents) were inferior—the Irish, the Poles, the Italians–, biological racism never had a coherent biological definition of race.

Some scholars use the term cultural racism, but I’m not wild about that term, since all racism is and always has been about country of origin (sometimes going back pretty far, as with Latinx whose families have been in the US far longer than Trump’s, or Native Americans who are oddly framed as not native to the US). The Jews are not a race.

So, saying that Trump was talking about country of origin and not race means he’s perfectly in line with how racism typically works.

Trump has had a lot to say about what’s wrong with America, and how the government is awful. In fact, a lot of his base believes there is a Deep State trying to work against him. Trump and his supporters are the ones telling everyone how the government should be run.

So, Trump and his supporters have no problem with someone going on and on about how awful the government is—they think that’s great. That’s what makes them love Trump.

And, really, if you want to have an example of viciously telling people things, Trump’s tweets would be up there.

Again, that’s how racism works. When an in-group member engages in a certain behavior—let’s say disrupting coffee shops with protests—you defend it as required by external circumstances, and the consequence of good internal motives. When an out-group member disrupts coffee shops with protests, you say it wasn’t necessary, and it was the consequence of bad motives.

If you believe that disagreement is useful for a democracy, if you believe that people really disagree, if you believe that we should argue with one another—in other words, if you believe in the values on which the US is founded—then you would attribute someone’s disagreement to their disagreeing.

Either criticizing the government is okay, or it isn’t. And if it’s okay for you, then it’s okay for others. And if you say that someone’s argument should be dismissed because of their race, ethnicity, or country of origin, you’ve made a racist argument.

How the fallacy of motivism tricks us into demagoguery

[Image from here]

Russell Brand once said: “When I was poor and complained about inequality they said I was bitter; now that I’m rich and I complain about inequality they say I’m a hypocrite. I’m beginning to think they just don’t want to talk about inequality.”

In other words, people dismissed his arguments on the grounds that his arguments were coming from bad motives, simply because they didn’t want to think carefully about his argument.

It isn’t just about people who don’t want to talk about inequality. Just in the last month, I’ve seen people dismiss Pelosi’s reluctance to impeach Trump as motivated by nothing other than her ambition, Pence’s support of Trump as motivated by nothing other than his ambition, skepticism about anti-vax claims attributed to people being in the thrall of Big Pharma, my city’s bike plan for bike lanes as being in the thrall of Big Bikes (not really—I still can’t figure that one out), the scientific consensus about global warming as motivated by sheer greed, people putting plastic bags with dog poop in them into a trash can as being motivated by sheer selfishness. These are all ways of refusing to engage with people who disagree with you by believing, just on the basis that they disagree, that they must be bad people for disagreeing. It’s motivism.

Demagoguery is

a discourse that promises stability, certainty, and escape from the responsibilities of rhetoric through framing public policy in terms of the degree to which and means by which (not whether) the outgroup should be punished for the current problems of the ingroup. Public debate largely concerns three stases: group identity (who is in the ingroup, what signifies outgroup membership, and how loyal rhetors are to the ingroup); need (usually framed in terms of how evil the outgroup is); what level of punishment to enact against the outgroup (restriction of rights to extermination). (Demagoguery and Democracy)

Here’s another way to put that: democracy presumes (and requires) that citizens work to develop informed opinions about our shared policy options. Democracy requires imaginative and reasonable argumentation about policy. Democracy presumes that people really disagree, that no solution is perfect, and that we have to consider policy issues from various perspectives. Demagoguery says we don’t need all that work. It says that we should instead think about politics as a zero-sum battle between us and them. And it’s zero-sum in the sense that, any benefit is a loss for the other side, and any loss is a benefit for the other side. So, we can win just by making them lose.

Demagoguery relies on the belief that there is one right answer to every political issue, and it is obvious to every right-thinking person (sometimes it’s only obvious to the leader in whom we should put all our faith—that’s when it’s cult demagoguery). Demagoguery undermines democracy because it means that the appropriate response to disagreement in a culture is to silence the people who aren’t saying what every right-minded person believes. And they can and should be silenced because their argument has no merit—they aren’t engaged in “good faith argumentation” (explained below). They’re only disagreeing because they’re bad people with bad motives.

“Good faith argumentation” is the term that a lot of scholars use for when people are disagreeing with one another honestly, trying hard to make reasonable (and internally consistent) arguments, listening to one another and representing the others’ views fairly, and are genuinely open to having their minds changed on the issue.

This is a useful concept because it helps you make decisions about whether to argue with a family member over Thanksgiving dinner (is Uncle Fubar willing to engage in good faith argumentation? if not, just change the subject), some rando on the internet (who might be a bot, a hatebot, or a paid troll), your boss (who has weird ideas and might punish you for disagreeing), someone concern-trolling you, or various other people with whom it isn’t worth your time to argue.

So, there’s a difference between deciding that someone is not engaged in good faith argumentation and therefore not worth arguing with because you have clear evidence that they aren’t, and dismissing all significant opposition arguments on the grounds anyone who disagrees with you must have bad motives. That second move is motivism.

And motivism reinforces the way that people there is only one right and simple answer to every complicated issue, and it’s obvious to everyone, explain disagreement. If you believe that, then how do you explain disagreement?

There are two ways: one requires metacognition, and the other doesn’t.

One requires that you think to yourself that you might be wrong, that your position might be right from your perspective, but wrong from other perspectives (and, no, that isn’t relativism[1]), that what is best for you is not best for others—that requires that you think about whether how you’re thinking about this issue is a good way (metacognition). And so you would try to find ways of making and assessing argument to which you will hold all groups, and which you would think a good way of making and assessing argument if an opposition used it (so, if your way of assessing is, “Do I think it’s true,” then you’d have to say that’s a good way for your opposition to assess arguments, and now you’re the relativist).

This way involves perspective-shifting, and listening. It requires that you really try to understand the oppositions’ arguments and why they would seem to make sense to them. Sometimes you discover that their arguments don’t make sense, that you’d reject them if they were in-group arguments, or that they aren’t engaged in good faith argumentation, but you do that on the basis of engaging with the way they’re arguing and imagining them arguing that way for your position.

The other says that anyone who doesn’t see that you’re right (since you can keep looking at the situation and see that you are) must be rejecting the obvious good course of action because of bad motives.

That’s motivism. Motivism is when you refuse to treat opposition arguments as you want your arguments treated on the grounds that their disagreeing means they must have bad motives, and could not possibly be engaged in good faith argumentation.

It’s fine to decide you won’t argue reasonably with someone because you have determined they aren’t engaged in good faith argumentation. But you determine that by how they respond to disagreement. It’s pretty unusual that on the basis of their simply having made a claim you can decide they aren’t engaged in good faith argumentation. [2]

There is, of course, a really simple way to decide if they are: ask if they’re willing to change their mind. At that point, you can decide they aren’t able to engage in good faith argumentation, but they might still have good reasons for their position. You might be the one who is being unreasonable. You can only know if people who disagree with you have good reasons by paying attention to their reasons.

You can only know if a policy argument is terrible by trying to find the smartest arguments for it and seeing if they’re terrible.

But, assuming that simply because someone disagrees with you their position is the consequence of their bad motives means that we can’t argue together. Demagoguery says that the world really is us v. them and anyone who disagrees with you should be silenced, expelled, or exterminated.

And democracy requires that we argue together.

[1] Despite what common media say, there are many kinds of relativism, and the one attributed to “liberals”—that all views are equally valid—is not held by anyone over 14 who is not smoking very bad weed. I only know of two major philosophers who advocated that position (Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Paul Feyerabend), but, since they both argued that people are wrong not to be relativist, that would be the pragmatic fallacy. (That’s the same problem with people who say, “You should never judge anyone,” which is a pretty judgmental thing to say.) Saying that people have genuinely different understandings is not saying that positions are equally valid—it’s saying that many positions other than the one I have are worth being treated just as I want my opinion treated. It isn’t that all positions are equally valid, but that all positions should have the same validity tests applied.

The notion that there is no single position from which the absolute truth is obvious is not an endorsement of any of the kinds of relativism. It’s actually a kind of realism. It is really true that, if you’re a sheep rancher, then you have certain interests, and those interests aren’t the same as someone who wants to redirect your water supply for their cornfield. People really disagree.
[2] But it happens. It happens when you’ve looked at the best sources making that claim, tried to find the best arguments for it, and determined that this claim has never been defended through good faith argumentation.

Were the Nazis leftists? No.

A lot of people believe that the Nazis were leftists. These are people who believe that the complicated and vexed world of thoughts about politics can be divided into an us (right wing/conservative) and everyone else, whom they think of as leftists. And that our current categories of politics go back through eternity.

The “Nazis were lefties” argument is also attractive  because we want to believe that the Nazis share no group identities with us. That’s why it took me so long to admit that Hitler was vegetarian and a dog-lover. I just couldn’t admit that someone in two of my important in-groups could be that bad.

I kept trying to argue that Hitler wasn’t really vegetarian. But the “Nazis were lefties” argument goes one step further–it says that because Hitler couldn’t possibly have been conservative, he must have been lefty. [1] If conservatives wanted to argue that Hitler wasn’t really conservative, or he wasn’t conservative in the way we use the term now, that would be an argument to make. But, if you’re going to divide the world of politics into right-wing or left-wing, Hitler was right wing.

The solution is not to engage in mendacious or silly arguments, but to rethink the notion that the vexed and complicated world of political philosophies can be usefully divided into right- v. left-wing.

Instead of the example of Hitler being a reason to rethink their easy (and false) binary of politics, the people who say Hitler was a lefty want to reduce the uncertain world of politics to certainty–they want to believe that if you have these values, you can be certain that you are right and will never be wrong. So, this isn’t really about Hitler–it’s about their need to believe that they can be certain in the goodness of their political ideology.

Nazis self-identified as a right-wing group, they were aided exclusively by right-wing politicians, and they enacted right-wing policies (unless I’ve persuaded you to abandon the right- v. left-wing false binary, and then we can have a much more interesting discussion about Nazi beliefs), and thus they present a problem for this notion that commitment to right-wing conservative politics necessarily means you’re always on the side of good.

And, so, people who want to believe that a commitment to conservative “right-wing” values is always right have to explain the Nazis. (They don’t just have to explain the Nazis–they also have to explain away US slavery, segregation, company towns, children dying in factories.) At this point, someone committed to “my group is always right” is thinking, “Leftists did worse.” Perhaps, but that doesn’t make conservatism always right. Whether conservative political ideology is always right is orthogonal to the question of whether lefties are ever wrong. Perhaps neither is always right or always wrong. Perhaps politics is not usefully thought of as a binary of us v. them.

Hitler was conservative; he said so. He hated leftists. He said so. He said they were responsible for the loss of WWI. He said lefties were all Jews, and that was a major reason for making Germany “free of Jews”–it would free Germany of Marxists. He was entirely and exclusively supported by the conservative parties. The leftist parties–the communists and the democratic socialists–were the only ones who voted against his being dictator. When Hitler came into power, the first group he went after were communists. Every scholar of Hitler, Nazism, and the Holocaust says he was a right-wing authoritarian.

But, there are people who say he was leftist, and there are four ways they make that argument.

1) They haven’t read Mein Kampf, any of Hitler’s speeches, or any scholarship on Hitler. And, let’s be blunt, they won’t. They know that their belief that the Nazis were lefties is a fragile little gossamer wing that couldn’t withstand any consideration it might be wrong. I think this is interesting (it’s like people who say the CSA wasn’t about slavery and won’t look at the Declarations of Secession). They’d rather be wrong and loyal than right. I think these people kind of know they’re wrong, but they think that expressing loyalty to a claim even they know is irrational is the greatest loyalty there is.

2) They say that Nazis were socialists, and socialists are lefties. This one makes me sad. It’s taking the categories of our current political situation and assuming they’ve applied through time–like trying to think about the Trojan War conflict in terms of which group was Democrats and which group was Republicans. The answer is neither was either. Socialism predated Marx. That’s why he spends so much time in Communist Manifesto trying to persuade other kinds of socialists to become Marxist–because there were non-Marxist socialists, and there continued to be non-Marxists for a long time. There is good scholarship about the very weird economic philosophies of volkisch theorists, and the way that many conservatives hoped for an economy that had no one making money on the basis of interest (a conservative Catholic position)–sometimes that position was called “Christian socialism.” It had nothing to do with Marx. The notion that the market should be freed from tariffs and protectionism was, in the 19th and early 20th century, a liberal notion.

3) It says socialist in their name. And socialists are lefties. I run across this a lot. It has all the problems of the first two (it’s ahistorical), and another level of being hilarious. Okay, if we’re going to say that a word in your name being used by someone else shows who you really are, then let’s talk about Republicans. The R is USSR is for Republic, so, by their argument about socialist, Republicans are Stalinist.

They’ll never admit that–but, and this is the point, that means that they don’t have a rational position open to counter-argument. They want to believe that conservatives could never do what Hitler did, and they will scramble around to find any argument that enables them to swat away evidence that shows their faith in conservativism as necessarily and always good and never associated with anything bad is false.

4) Shoddy writers like D’Souza tell them they’re right. D’Souza’s argument about Hitler being a kind of communist relies on never quoting Hitler on the subject of communists, not citing any scholars of Hitler, bungling the history of communism, contradicting himself, and sometimes openly lying.

And, really, if someone who liked his argument ventured out of their informational enclave, they would see how wrong he is. That Hitler was a conservative is not a left/right debate.

That doesn’t mean he was a Republican. It’s nonsense to try to take our current (falsely binary) categories of politics and try to impose them on another era, country, and culture. American politics right now is not actually a binary of “leftists” v. “conservatives”–it’s silly to think that a binary that is false now would become accurate if applied to a different era.

What the Nazis meant by “socialism” was a vague notion that making money from interest was bad, the rigid German aristocratic system should be changed in favor of a class system based on race rather than class, the state should be able to call upon industries to help with the war effort. While some Nazis remained committed to that vague notion (e.g., Goebbels), there’s debate as to Hitler’s notions about domestic economy and whether he had coherent ones. There is no debate–and no debate possible, given what he said and did throughout his political career–as to whether he was “leftist.”

The argument about Hitler being a leftist isn’t about Hitler. It’s about whether loyal conservatives are willing to be so loyal that they will believe and repeat a claim that they aren’t willing to subject to rational argumentation.

Oddly enough, when I make this point with “Hitler was a lefty,” they will often say, “But lefties do that too.”

Well, as it happens, I think that people who aren’t loyal to “conservative” politics also have their irrational beliefs they protect from disproof. I don’t think all non-conservatives are lefties, and, more important, I believe that someone else believing a lie doesn’t make your beliefs true. It just means you’re both believing a lie.

Hitler was a right-wing authoritarian. If you’re going to divide the world into left- v. right-wing, that’s what he was.

That doesn’t mean all right-wing authoritarians are Hitler, nor that only right-wing authoritarians are bad (let’s talk about Stalin or Pol Pot).

It means something more complicated–and that’s why right-wing authoritarians try to make Hitler a lefty–it means that having a particular political commitment doesn’t guarantee that you are ethical, or correct, or just. It means the world isn’t right- v. left-wing. This isn’t about right or left politics; this is about people who want to believe that certainty is possible in a vexed and nuanced world–that if you have the right ideological commitments, you will never be part of injustice. That isn’t how our world works.

[1] I can’t resist pointing out that this is like arguing that, since Hitler wasn’t a dog, he must be a squirrel. If you think the world is divided into dogs and squirrels that would seem to make sense.

Maybe the world isn’t divided into dogs and squirrels.