Tag: demagoguery

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.

The Sacred Band of Thebes and gays in the military

I’ve never read Plutarch cover to cover–just the parts relevant to the topics and people I teach or write about. And I’ve tended not to read much about Thebes. Still and all, I think it’s embarrassing that I didn’t know about the Sacred Band of Thebes.

Plutarch (CE 46-120) talks about them relative to the Battle of Leuctra (July 371 BCE), a battle between Thebes and Sparta. Paul Davis’ 100 Decisive Battles (a really fun read, btw) says that the “Theban victory broke the power of Sparta” (23) and, perhaps more important, “the prestige of the Spartan army had been broken” (26).

This is what Plutarch (CE 46-120) has to say about the Sacred Band of Thebes (this is a 1917 translation, so bear with me–if you really can’t stand it, just skip the long quote):

“This battle first taught the other Greeks also that it was not the Eurotas, nor the region between Babyce and Cnacion [that is, Sparta] which alone produced warlike fighting men, but that wheresoever young men are prone to be ashamed of baseness and courageous in a noble cause, shunning disgrace more than danger, these are most formidable to their foes.”

The sacred band, we are told, was first formed by Gorgidas, of three hundred chosen men, to whom the city furnished exercise and maintenance, and who encamped in the Cadmeia; for which reason, too, they were called the city band; for citadels in those days were properly called cities. But some say that this band was composed of lovers and beloved. And a pleasantry of Pammenes is cited, in which he said that Homer’s Nestor was no tactician when he urged the Greeks to form in companies by clans and tribes, “That clan might give assistance unto clan, and tribes to tribes,” since he should have stationed lover by beloved.

“For tribesmen and clansmen make little account of tribesmen and clansmen in times of danger; whereas, a band that is held together by the friendship between lovers is indissoluble and not to be broken, since the lovers are ashamed to play the coward before their beloved, and the beloved before their lovers, and both stand firm in danger to protect each other. Nor is this a wonder since men have more regard for their lovers even when absent than for others who are present, as was true of him who, when his enemy was about to slay him where he lay, earnestly besought him to run his sword through his breast, ‘in order,’ as he said, ‘that my beloved may not have to blush at sight of my body with a wound in the back.’ It is related, too, that Iolaüs, who shared the labours of Heracles and fought by his side, was beloved of him. And Aristotle says that even down to his day the tomb of Iolaüs was a place where lovers and beloved plighted mutual faith. It was natural, then, that the band should also be called sacred, because even Plato calls the lover a friend ‘inspired of God.’

“It is said, moreover, that the band was never beaten, until the battle of Chaeroneia; and when, after the battle, Philip was surveying the dead, and stopped at the place where the three hundred were lying, all where they had faced the long spears of his phalanx, with their armour, and mingled one with another, he was amazed, and on learning that this was the band of lovers and beloved, burst into tears and said: ‘Perish miserably they who think that these men did or suffered aught disgraceful.’” (2.14: Plutarch, Pelopidas 17-19)

Or, in other words, it was a band of 150 homosexual male couples, and they were fierce, and they were feared.

It’s been a while, but, when I was crawling around homophobic corners of the Internet it was around the time there was a lot of pearl clutching about letting openly gay men into the military. And one of the arguments made, in addition to that there would be sexual harassment (I could never figure out whether the people who made that argument were thereby admitting that women in the military are sexually harassed), was that it would weaken the military because gay men can’t fight.

As Codex Melcher says on their blog, “People often ask when LGBTQ concerns arise ‘Why are tons of people suddenly gay/trans/not like me when it’s never existed in history before now'” and the answer is “They’ve always been here.”

I wish I’d know about the Sacred Band when I was trying to argue with homophobes.

Rhetoric, Respect, and Institutional Racism

A few months ago, I was talking with a lot of rhetoric scholars trying to identify the qualities of good rhetoric, and it was suggested that one of the important characteristics is respect—that people need to respect each other. I was completely incoherent in my response.

Arguing that respect should not be considered a criterion for good rhetoric sounds like attacking Santa Claus, baby bunnies, or apple pie. One thing I couldn’t make clear is that I wasn’t saying the respect is bad, but that it’s setting an actively harmful criterion, for four reasons:

  1. It’s setting the bar too high—if the parties respect each other, we’re probably in good territory anyway. We need to figure out how to have productive arguments when the people involved don’t respect one another. If respect is required for productive argumentation, then we’re saying that instances of conflict without respect have to go to violence. So, by setting the bar too high, this criterion truncates the possibilities of argumentation.
  2. It makes the common mistake of thinking that our problem is the consequence of bad feelings for others—it’s like the civility argument. Respect is an affect; it’s a posture. We tend to judge it by whether we feel comfortable with the tone someone is using. Therefore, as long as someone is using a tone we find comfortable, we’ll infer respect. That tendency to infer respect by what feelings of ours are (or are not) being triggered (comfort/discomfort) means that we are more likely to get prickly and defensive about how someone is disagreeing with in-group members than out-group members. It’s inevitably a non-reciprocal standard—it is never applied equally across interlocutors.
  3. And, hence, and this is the point I couldn’t get across, respect as a standard will always get entangled in hierarchies of power and authority. We don’t ask that parents treat children with the same respect as children are supposed to treat parents; we have different standards of respect for how students treat teachers than vice versa. Respect is always going to benefit people who have cultural, political, or legal authority more.
  4. There’s another way it isn’t an equal burden on all parties, and this also is a consequence of “respect” being something we infer through affect and tone—like the notion of “civility,” it puts a higher burden on rhetors arguing for major social change or who are the victims of institutional oppression and violence. There was no way for abolitionists to make a “respectful” condemnation of slavery, because it was always taken as an attack on slavers (some of whom were euphemistically called “slaveowners” or “slaveholders”).

You see this issue with accusations of institutionalized racism—the people who benefit from the current system feel themselves attacked by such condemnations, and they inevitably express that they feel disrespected. And they do feel disrespected. So, if we’re going to say that respect is a requirement of productive rhetoric, then powerful people feeling disrespected ends the argument. In that world, how can someone raise the issue of institutional racism?

They can’t. Or, they can, but their argument will be dismissed as disrespecting people who deserve respect. And then we’re on the identity stasis, arguing about the goodness of the people who felt criticized. Political rhetoric spends way too much time on the feelings of the powerful.

And notice that this, again, doesn’t apply equally across all parties. Slaveholders, surprisingly enough, could use a language and posture of respect for their attitudes toward slaves; racists always use a language of respect for their feelings toward other races. It’s not uncommon for them to claim to respect the other group more than that group respects themselves—that they are the ones who really understand that group, and who can see what that group really needs. If you assess respect by tone and the feelings it triggers in the judge, then extraordinarily disrespectful discourse can slide through by looking calm and rational; patronizing dismissal doesn’t set off disrespect alarms in other in-group members.

We don’t know one another’s hearts, but more powerful people think they do (asymmetric insight is worse for people with power). So, what I wish I’d said is, “Making ‘respect’ one of the criteria for productive rhetoric guarantees that we won’t be able to have the hard arguments—because we’ll end up with the more powerful people focused more on how they feel disrespected than on whether we need substantial change.”

Banning abortion and the strong family

I long ago learned that, when someone makes a claim about how everyone thinks or acts, pay attention to the logical implication. Socrates would have liked the syllogism:

Everyone is just out for themselves.
The person saying this is included in the category of “everyone.”
Therefore, this person is out for zirself.

It’s generally turned out to be true: people who say that “everyone lies when it’s useful,” “everyone is good at heart,” “everyone will screw you if they can” may not be making a claim that is factually true of “everyone,” but it’s true of them.

That observation was particularly interesting when homophobic groups argued that allowing gay marriage would end the human species (by ending human reproduction) and destroy families because, presumably, once gay marriage is an option, everyone will opt for it. That’s interesting. It isn’t true of everyone, but I’ll believe it’s true of the people making the claim.

That isn’t to say that every person who makes that argument is living in a plexiglass closet, in which they’re the only person from whom the truth is hidden, and that they are all barely resisting from gay relationships. But it is a silly argument—that isn’t what has happened anywhere gay marriage was legalized—and it is saying something really interesting about them. What it’s saying is that they believe that everyone is only, with great will, keeping themselves from SIN, and that all sins are the same. So, if they slip up and stop engaging in rigid self-control, it’s just a question of time till they’re giving a blowjob, while shooting up, gambling, aborting babies, molesting children, and voting Dem. They believe that sin is the consequence of lack of self-control, and if you loosen up on self-control, then you have no control at all. And you do ALL THE SINS.

I don’t think the kind of people who make that are argument are gay, but I do think they believe that they have to be incredibly rigid about their values, commitments, and policies, or else all hell breaks loose. They believe they could commit all the sins. That’s interesting.

That some people believe that, if the government allowed any sinful action they consider sinful, then everyone (including them) would instantly stop everything for some kind of very lame porny bacchanal is not actually minimally good policy argumentation. It’s a reason for them to get therapy. They don’t have political issues, but personal ones.

But, we’re in a world in which people like them believe that they should take their personal issues about sin to the larger political sphere.

They believe that something they consider a sin should be prohibited by the government.

And, to be blunt, everyone thinks that.

That’s how democracy works. It works when the things that we all think are sins get to be argued—when we engage in policy argumentation. A system that divides every issue into a zero-sum contest isn’t a culture engaged in democratic deliberation.

That is our world. We all think we are completely and obviously right, and that anyone who disagrees with us is either a dupe or a villain. That’s good. We should care about our politics.

Good political deliberation isn’t about being emotional or not; it isn’t about whether you do or don’t have evidence to support your claims; democratic deliberation is and should be about policy argumentation. And the ban abortion argument fails to make its case in terms of policy argumentation.

If you want to reduce abortions, and you have a rational argument, then you could make your case pretty clearly. Here is the ban abortion case (as far as I can figure):

There is a need:

It’s bad (women are killing babies)
It’s not going away (women have been legally allowed to kill babies since Roe v. Wade) [note the slippage between pre- and post Roe v . Wade]

Narrative of causality:
I have to admit that I can’t figure this one out. If you want to reduce abortion, the narrative of causality is empirically clear: increase access to accurate information about birth control.

So, what, exactly, is the “reduce abortion by enacting polices that don’t reduce abortion” argument?

Just to be clear: were the “reduce abortion” actually the most important value for people who want to ban abortion, then they would do anything that would reduce abortion. But they don’t.

There isn’t a zero-sum contest between people who think abortion is awful (and should therefore be banned) and people who think abortion should be legal. A lot of people who think abortion is awful think it shouldn’t be banned. They think banning is the wrong policy.

And that is the argument over which ban abortion people find themselves doing everything to avoid policy argumentation. Were abortion argued in terms of policy, the “ban abortion now” forces would lose. They can’t defend their position through policy argumentation.

Despite what “ban abortion now” rhetors say, no one is pro-abortion. Everyone wants to make sure that women rarely are even presented with the decision of abortion. The “abortion” argument isn’t about abortion: it’s about how you prevent women getting to the point of even thinking about getting an abortion.

And there are, loosely, two stances on that: one is grounded in empirical data about what actually reduces women finding themselves in a situation in which they might want an abortion; and the other rejects everything about policy argumentation in favor of a belief that if people beleeeeeve strongly enough then good things will happen.

The abortion argument isn’t about policies and outcome and data (nor is the climate change argument, or bathrooms bills).

Relatively recently, the topos  of “banning abortion strengthens the family” popped up. That was new. Once I fell down the rabbit hole of the “strengthening the family” argument, what I found was that there are two different ways that people try to make that connection—that banning abortions strengthens the family. One is the very old argument that [this policy] is good because we believe it is the policy God wants us to advocate. It doesn’t matter if the policy is practical—what matters is that we are enacting God’s will, and therefore God will reward us. Since strong families are good, then banning abortion will result in strong families.

The second one is that banning abortion will strengthen families because they believe that the only strong family is one that is controlled by a male who controls himself rigidly. One of the most important things for him to control is the sexuality of the females in the family. Legal access to abortion not only gives women autonomy regarding reproduction, but separates sex from the consequence of pregnancy. And, of course, the solution that actually reduces abortion—access to effective birth control—also increases women’s sexual autonomy. So, for people who believe that strong families require male control of women’s sexuality, this solution is just as bad as abortion.

It’s very clear what banning abortion does: it doesn’t reduce pregnancies that are the consequence of rape, that endanger women’s lives, that involve teens. It certainly doesn’t end abortions. When abortion was illegal in most states, rich women could always get an abortion by going to a state or country in which it was legal (and they did), and women without enough money could try back alley abortions.

My rabidly GOP father (if a person drove badly, he’d say, “Probably a Democrat”) had one point on which he rejected the Reagan and post-Reagan policy agenda: abortion. He was a pathologist, and, after the second autopsy of a woman who had died from a botched amateur abortion, he could not support making abortion illegal.

The people who want to ban abortion call the other side pro-abortion, but, if you oppose effective birth control and accurate sex education, you are pro-abortion—you are supporting the policies that contribute to abortion.

The abortion argument is a great example to show how public discourse about policies evades policy argumentation. If you think abortion is bad, and you want to reduce it, then you think abortion is an ill, and you should be willing to support policies that demonstrably reduce abortion. If you aren’t, then this all really isn’t about abortion. And this isn’t. It’s about women’s sexuality.

[Normally, I try to provide links, but I’m really uncomfortable giving these groups any clicks.]

Trump supporters/critics and policy argumentation

I spend a lot of time in public and expert realms of political dispute. And, one thing I’ve noticed in the last two years is that, in the public areas, supporters of Trump have stopped engaging in rational argumentation about him, but they used to. They’re not even engaging in argumentation at all. They’ll sometimes do a kind of argumentative driveby, popping into a thread that’s critical of Trump in order to drop in some talking point about how he’s a great President, and then leaving. Sometimes they give a reason for refusing to engage in argumentation, and it’s an odd reason (critics of him are biased). This is worrisome.

We’re in such a demagogic culture—in which people assume that the world is divided into fanatics of left v. right—that I have to say what should be unnecessary: not everyone who supports Trump is just repeating talking points. In fact, I can imagine lots of arguments for Trump’s policies that follow the rules of rational argumentation (and I’ve seen them, but not in the public realm).  I think Trump’s policies can be defended rationally. Apparently, his supporters don’t.

And that is what worries me.

What I’m saying is that there are people who do just repeat talking points (all over the rich and varied place that is the public sphere) and the kind of people who have always just repeated pro-Trump talking points used to be  following advice on how to engage in argumentation, and now they’re not. That kind of Trump supporter has stopped engaging in argumentation at all.

Just to be clear: I mean something fairly specific by the term “rational argumentation” (not how “rational” is used in popular culture, and argumentation, not argument—this will be explained below). While I’m not a supporter of Trump, I do think his policies can be defended through rational argumentation—that is, a person could argue for them while remaining within the rules described below. That means, oddly enough, that I don’t think Trump’s policies are indefensible, but his followers seem to think they are.

That’s worrisome.

I’ve spent a lot of time wandering around the digital public sphere, and thinking a lot about politics. And I’ve come to think that we are in a culture of demagoguery, in which every policy question is reduced (or shifted) to a zero-sum battle between “us” and “them.” That reduction is false and damaging. There are not two sides to any policy issue—there are far more. And our political culture is not a binary.

Personally, I think a useful map of our political culture would be, at least, three-dimensional, and even then you’d have to have different maps for different issues. But that’s a different post.

In my wandering, I’ve noticed that you can see talking points created by a powerful medium that are then repeated by people for whom that medium is an in-group authority. This isn’t a left v. right thing. (No issue is.)  The talking points on “get rich fast” shifted when James Arthur Ray killed some people; the same thing happened on the “get laid quick” sites after the Elliot Rodger shooting. The talking points on dog sites changed after a study about taurine came out. I know what Rachel Maddow said on her show without watching her show; the same is true of Rush Limbaugh.

The pro-Trump (like the pro-HRC or pro-Sanders or pro-Stein) talking points used to be a mix of what amounted to tips on what to say if you’re engaged in policy argumentation and what amount to statements of personal loyalty (“s/he is a good person because s/he did this good thing”).

And you could tell what the talking points were by what your loyal pro-Trump or pro-Stein (or pro-raw dog food) Facebook friend (or Facebook group) asserted.

What worries me about the driveby dropping of a pro-Trump talking point and refusal to engage policy argumentation is that it suggests that the pro-Trump sources of argumentative points have abandoned policy argumentation. These people aren’t even trying. That’s puzzling.

What makes arguing in some digital spaces interesting is that people are now often arguing with known entities—I’m watching someone make arguments about Trump whom I watched make arguments about Clinton or Obama.

What I’m seeing, in places that used to have rational-critical argumentation in favor of Trump, is that people aren’t even trying. (So, just to be clear, anyone saying that my argument can be dismissed because I’m not pro-Trump is showing that I’m right.)

What I want to use as the standard for a “rational” argument is van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s ten rules for a rational-critical argument. They are:

    1. Freedom rule
      Parties must not prevent each other from advancing standpoints or from casting doubt on standpoints.
    2. Burden of proof rule
      A party that advances a standpoint is obliged to defend it if asked by the other party to do so.
    3. Standpoint rule
      A party’s attack on a standpoint must relate to the standpoint that has indeed been advanced by the other party.
    4. Relevance rule
      A party may defend a standpoint only by advancing argumentation relating to that standpoint.
    5. Unexpressed premise rule
      A party may not deny premise that he or she has left implicit or falsely present something as a premise that has been left unexpressed by the other party.
    6. Starting point rule
      A party may not falsely present a premise as an accepted starting point nor deny a premise representing an accepted starting point.
    7. Argument scheme rule
      A party may not regard a standpoint as conclusively defended if the defense does not take place by means of an appropriate argumentation scheme that is correctly applied.
    8. Validity rule
      A party may only use arguments in its argumentation that are logically valid or capable of being made logically valid by making explicit one or more unexpressed premises.
    9. Closure rule
      A failed defense of a standpoint must result in the party that put forward the standpoint retracting it and a conclusive defense of the standpoint must result in the other party retracting its doubt about the standpoint.
    10. Usage rule
      A party must not use formulations that are insufficiently clear or confusingly ambiguous and a party must interpret the other party’s formulations as carefully and accurately as possible.
      These are rules for rational-critical argumentation, so these rules aren’t ways that people have to engage in every conversation.

For instance, I’m not saying that people involved in a discussion can never say that some arguments are off the table, or that people can never refuse to engage with another party (although both of those moves would be violations of Rule 1). I’m saying that, when that rule is violated, the person whose views were dismissed and the person doing the dismissing are not engaged in rational argumentation with each other. They might still have a really good and interesting conversation, or a really fun fight, but it isn’t rational argumentation.

And what I’m saying is that in various places I hang out, supporters of Trump used to engage in argumentation to support their claims, but they’re doing it much less—in fact, not very often. If they don’t do a driveby (one post and out), they say that they won’t argue with anyone who disagrees with them because that person is biased.

Both of those moves—one post and out, and refusing to engage with counter-arguments because the very fact of their being counter-arguments makes them “biased”—is a violation of Rule 1. While they assert that criticizing Trump means a person is so biased that their views can be dismissed, that’s a thoroughly entangled and irrational argument (it’s even weirder when the accusation is “Trump Derangement Syndrome”–it’s weird because many of the people who fling around the accusation of Trump Derangement syndrome still suffer from Obama Derangement Syndrome).

That’s a misunderstanding of what “bias” means and how it functions in argumentation. Of course people are biased—that’s how cognition works—but, if a person is so biased that it’s distorting their argument, then their arguments will violate one of the ten rules. Dismissing a position because the person is biased is a violation of Rule 1. It’s a refusal to engage in rational argumentation.

More important, this move is a rejection of argumentation, and democracy. Rejecting criticism of Trump on the grounds that criticizing Trump shows that the critic is biased is not just an amazingly good example of a circular argument, but a move that makes it clear that the person doesn’t want to listen to anyone who disagrees. Argumentation and democracy share the premise that we benefit from taking seriously the viewpoints of people with whom we disagree.

We are in a culture of demagoguery, in which far too much public discourse, all over the political spectrum, is about how you shouldn’t listen to that person because s/he is biased. And the proof that they’re biased? That they disagree.

If a person is biased, and we are all biased, but their arguments can be defended in rational-critical argumentation, then their arguments are worth taking seriously, regardless of the bias of the person making the argument.

Jeremy Bentham, in the 18th century, identified the problem with dismissing an argument because you don’t like the person making it. Sometimes it’s called the genetic fallacy, and sometimes it’s motivism.

In any case, any person who supports Trump refusing to engage anyone who criticizes Trump on the grounds that that person is “biased” is engaged in the fallacy of motivism (so a violation of Rule 8), and violating Rule 1. (And, so is anyone refusing to engage a Trump supporter if it’s purely on the grounds of their being a Trump supporter.)

Dismissing a person’s position as irrational because they do or don’t support Trump is the admission of an inability to have a rational argument with that person. If I refuse to engage in argumentation with any Trump supporter, purely on the grounds that they support Trump, then we have to start wondering about whether my criticism of Trump can be rationally defended. And, while I see many people who make exactly that move—dismiss the person, not the claims, from even the possibility of rational arguments, because the person supports Trump—I do often see people trying to engage in argumentation with Trump supporters.

I’m not seeing Trump supporters willing to engage in argumentation. I see them willing to make claims, but not engage their opposition rationally. And, as I said, that’s new.

One of the ways of not engaging the other side that I see a lot of people (all over the political spectrum) use is to violate the third rule. That is, imagine that Chester says he really likes Trump’s 2018 missile strikes against Syria, and thinks those were an appropriate response, it’s unhappily likely that Hubert will respond by saying, “Oh, so you think children should be thrown into concentration camps?” Chester didn’t say he liked all of Trump’s policies, let alone his policies regarding families trying to enter the US.

There are two very different arguments that Chester might be making: “Trump is a good President as is shown by his good judgment regarding the Syrian missile strikes” or “Trump’s missile strikes against Syria were wise policy.” Trump’s immigration policy might be relevant for the first argument, but not the second. An even more troubling way of violating the third rule is for Hubert to decide that all Trump supporters are the same, and, therefore, since some Trump supporters deny evolution, and Chester is supporting a particular policy of Trump’s, to attribute evolution denial to Chester. Interlocutors make that (fallacious) move because they believe that the world is divided into two groups, and that the opposition is a homogeneous group—you can condemn any individual out-group member by pointing out a bad argument made by any other out-group member.

[This is another move that people all over the political spectrum make, and it makes me want to scream.]

Right now, one of the pro-Trump talking points is that the economy is strong, and that shows Trump is a great President. People drop this into arguments about issues that have nothing to do with the economy. Even more troubling is that it seems to me that the people making the argument don’t defend it—it’s often one of the argumentative drivebys—but, more important, it’s often irrelevant.

Most recently, I saw it in a thread where someone had made a comparison between Hitler and Trump, about the comparable chaos in the two administrations. And dropping into that argument was a kind of horrible example of why that move—criticism of Trump on X point is false because the economy is good– was a perfect example of violating the fourth rule (about relevance). Whether Trump has improved the economy doesn’t invalidate the claims about how the chaotic administrations are comparable.

That argument also violated Rule 5, in that the unexpressed premise of that argument is that a political leader who improves the economy is good. And Hitler greatly improved Germany’s economy—for a while. So it was a particularly bungled attempt to disprove a point.

I’m seeing that talking point a lot, made by people who would not give Obama credit for improving the economy—saying that Obama simply benefitted from what the Bush Administration had done. So, when the economy is strong, and it’s a President they like, they attribute the economy to the President; when they don’t like the President, they don’t (this, too, is far from unique to Trump supporters).

That’s a violation of the eighth rule—the argument that “Trump is a good President because the economy is strong” has the unexpressed premise of a strong economy meaning that the current President is good. The people who make that argument for Trump but not Obama (or vice versa) reject the validity of their own premise.

For instance, I’m now seeing people who believed any horrible thing about Obama, who worked themselves into frenzies about Michelle Obama’s sleeveless dress, Obama’s golfing, his vacations, the cost to the US of his vacations, the Clinton’s possibly having financially benefitted from their time in the White House, Bill Clinton’s groping, HRC’s problematic security practices regarding classified information defend a President who has done worse on every single count.

They are not reasoning about what makes a good President grounded in claims that apply across all groups.

This is rabid factionalism. This is being foaming-at-the-mouth loyal to your in-group, and then finding reasons to support that loyalty (such as the one free grope argument).

People who are loyal to their in-group engage in motivated reasoning. And, let’s be honest, we all want to be loyal to our in-group. In motivated reasoning, there is a conclusion the person wants to protect, and they scramble around and find evidence to support it—they are motivated to use reason to support something they really want to believe. That isn’t rational, and it leads to arguments that can’t be rationally defended because a person trying to make a case that way has unexpressed premises in one set of claims that are contradicted by the unexpressed premises in another set of claims.

When it’s pointed out to someone that they can’t rationally defend their claims about Trump, I often see them respond, “Well, [example of a Democrat being irrational or having made an irrational argument].”

This is a fairly common kind of response, as though any bad behavior on the part of anyone on “the other side” cleans the slate of any in-group behavior. This fallacious move (a violation of Rule 7) relies on the false premise that any political issue is really a zero-sum contest of goodness between the “two sides.” Since it’s a zero-sum (as though there is a balloon of goodness, and if you squeeze one side, then there is more on the other), then any showing “badness” on the “other” side squeezes more air into yours.

A Trump critic making an irrational argument doesn’t magically transform an irrational pro-Trump argument into a rational one. Now they’re both irrational. It isn’t as though there is a zero-sum of rationality between the “two sides.” (For one thing, there aren’t two sides.)

This is really concerning in a democracy. Ideally, people should be arguing for policies rationally–which isn’t to say unemotionally—notice that none of these ten rules prohibits emotional appeals. The eighth rule, about logical validity, and fourth, about relevance, imply prohibition of argumentum ad misercordiam—which is not the fallacy of an emotional appeal, but the fallacy of irrelevant emotional appeal.

I’m not concerned that there are people who support Trump; I’m not concerned that there are Trump supporters who are clearly repeating talking points from their media; I’m concerned that those talking points are clearly not intended to be used in policy argumentation; I’m concerned that support of Trump is not even trying to fall within the realm of rational argumentation.
Unhappily, critics of Trump, it seems to me, are also arguing about his identity, and not the rationality of his policies.

Trump has policies. If they’re good policies, they can be defended through rational argumentation. If they can’t, they’re bad policies.

One of the most troubling aspects of the now dominant pro-Trump rhetoric is that it depends on an argument about his “success” as a businessman that is similar to the argument made about the “success” of his proposals. As it has come out that his businesses lost money hand over fist, people are arguing that he was a successful businessman because he personally succeeded financially. This isn’t an unusual argument—I was surprised when I saw it for a motivational speaker whose claims of personal wealth were exposed as completely false. The argument was, if you can rack up that much debt, that’s a kind of success. In other words, it’s saying that, as long as the method is working, it’s a good method.

That’s a little bit like describing falling out of a plane as successful flying—right up to the moment of contact with pavement.

That we are now getting a good outcome is not rational policy argumentation. Nor is that Trump is or is not a good person.

Trump shouldn’t be defended or attacked as a person, and his policies should be attacked or defended regardless of his person. Neither defending nor attacking his policies should be a reason to dismiss the argument being made. We need to argue policies.

How People Think About Voting (Hint: a centrist v. progressive model won’t help Dems)

A lot of people who don’t want to see Trump reelected are arguing about what we should do, and that’s great. It’s a complicated situation, and we should argue.

There are, however, three big problems with how those arguments are going right now. First, there is the assumption that the answer is, and always has been, obvious, and the Dems have been ignoring the obvious answer out of a combination of cupidity and stupidity. Second, there is the entirely false dominant model of politics being a zero-sum between two points on a continuum (extreme left v. extreme right), so that any move is toward the center (and away from an extreme) or vice versa. We need to stop talking and thinking about politics that way.

The third problem is, I think, that many (most?) of the arguments aren’t grounded in the really interesting empirical research out there about voting practices—people have a tendency to assume that everyone thinks about citizenship in the same way they do. So, for instance, if they tend to vote on the basis of policy, they think that everyone else does too. But, what if not everyone does vote on the basis of policy? Then we can’t get people to vote differently by putting forward different policies.

Many people do vote on the basis of policy. But not everyone; in fact, not most people. There is no one way that people vote, and so there is no one obvious solution. Figuring out what to do to get people to vote differently means being as accurate as possible as to how people decide to vote. And they don’t vote in a way that is easily mapped onto the left/right binary (or continuum).

The problem is that people don’t just vote for different people or parties—people think about how to vote in wildly different ways. There are, loosely, eight factors in how people vote, with those factors mattering more or less for different people, different elections, and different candidates. The factors are:

  • sheer in-group loyalty;
  • charismatic leadership (identification–they believe a political leader is like them or really gets them);
  • their immediate well-being (so they vote against the President if things are going badly for them and with the President if things are going well);
  • last minute information;
  • a “throw the bums out” mentality (aka “protest” vote);
  • voting against the out-group;
  • policy.

The empirical research doesn’t show a neat and simple picture, and so I can’t give a short summary of it or a simple statement of what our true solution is. I’d just be repeating the first error above.

Here are some things I’ve been reading that have deeply changed my understanding of voting habits in the US—that caused me to stop thinking that our problems could be solved through nominating fewer or more people anywhere on the false continuum (we need to stop arguing about whether to elect progressives or centrists—that assumes that people care about policies, and not enough people do) or that we need to have a more coherent policy agenda (same problem as the previous). I think that arguments about what to do should be more informed by readings like these (I’ve tried to find short summaries of each of the arguments—hence the links):

Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President, Kathleen Hall Jamieson

Jamieson cites studies, Mueller’s indictments, and a multitude of sources to show that the Russians did engage in considerable hacking, trolling, sock-puppeting, and generally gaming of social media in order to mislead, misinform, and distract voters with the ultimate goal of ensuring that last-minute voters and potential Dem voters mistrusted HRC.

Extremism, J.M. Berger

This non-partisan book builds on notions of in- and out-group mobilization to distinguish between normal and extreme versions of a political philosophy. I intend to use it in my rhetoric and racism class.

How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

Two political scientists argue that Trump is following the playbook for how authoritarians displace democracy.

How Partisan Media Polarize America, Matthew Levendusky

This book is an empirical study of partisan media, comparing Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly, showing that both rely on fear- and hate-mongering about the out-group more than they promote in-group policies (or even political figures). While not a “both sides are just as bad” argument, it does have good data and analysis that makes it non-partisan. This is the book, I think, that shows how the vexed and entangled political lives that people actually live get reduced into us v. them.

Ideology in America, Christopher Ellis and James Stimson

Like the Mason book (below), it argues that policy arguments get trumped by identification. It points out how very rich and complicated our actual political beliefs are, with emphasis on the behavior of voters who cut across conventional groupings. They show various things that are important, such as that people who are unhappy with how “the government” behaves vote GOP, even if the policies they dislike were promoted and voted in by the GOP.

The Rationalizing Voter, Milton Lodge and Charles Taber

This is the book with all the data about how people actually reason about politics (at least in the short term). They show that it isn’t emotional v. logical (the conventional understanding of rational/irrational) but what other people in cognitive science call System I (intuition) versus System II (metacognition). They are fatalistic about political reasoning of voters, but I think their data doesn’t merit that fatalism.

Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs About How Government Should Work, John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse

They are completely persuasive that many Americans reject the basic premises of democracy–that finding the correct solution is complicated, that people have legitimately different interests, that good solutions are never ideal–that people hold the President responsible for things like weather, sharks, and the current situation of the economy. They’re pretty fatalistic about voting, moreso than I think their data merits.

Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, Lilliana Mason

Another empirically-grounded description of how the mosaic of political beliefs became a false binary of identity.

On bias and projection

For complicated reasons, my book was given to a very conservative FOAF, who dismissed it on the grounds that I picked a conservative as my exemplar of a demagogue. The funny thing is: I didn’t. I picked a progressive. The sad thing is: he has been well-inoculated by his media.

This is someone I admire, because I know that he is a loving, supportive, compassionate, and smart father and husband. This is a good person, a kind person, and also very, very smart. And dead wrong. That person was engaged in projection. I didn’t pick a conservative; I picked a hero.

Earl Warren was Republican, yes. And I have rarely, but not never, voted Republican (and I haven’t always voted Dem or GOP). But Warren was a progressive Republican, who did a tremendous amount to clean up politics in California at a time when the California Democrat Party was often pretty awful. Had I been a California voter at the time, I would have voted for progressive Republicans.

Warren’s behavior on the Supreme Court was a bright spot in our nasty history about SCOTUS rulings; he overturned Plessy v. Ferguson; he got a unanimous decision. He changed American history for the better.

My point was that even really good people can find themselves in demagoguery. And so I picked an in-group rhetor—one of my heroes–as an example of demagoguery.

But this smart and good person (let’s call him John) dismissed my entire argument because he thought he had caught me out on secretly picking an out-group example. And I hadn’t. Compressed in that unhappy conclusion is what is wrong with our current political situation. John thinks that engaging in political discourse is not listening to the evidence of people who might disagree with you, but refusing to listen to anyone who might disagree, which he thinks is their being “biased.”

He rejected my argument about demagoguery on the grounds that it must be wrong because he believes I am a liberal, and therefore biased, and therefore my argument about demagoguery is biased. And I mean the term “rejected”—my sense is that he wasn’t even willing to consider it. I don’t care that he disagreed with me; I care that he believes he should not listen to anyone who disagrees with him. But I don’t really disagree with him. He just assumed I did because I’m not in-group. In other words, and this is important, he was biased not to listen to me. And so he didn’t.

My argument is that we all engage in demagoguery, and we are all drawn to engaging in demagoguery instead of engaging in the harder work of arguing about policy. That isn’t an argument he needed to dismiss. He never tried to understand my argument—he assumed that my argument was somehow an argument for my in-group. That was projection on his part.

My argument is that politics should be arguments about policy instead of some bizarre world in which there are only two options, and those two options are identities. Why would he dismiss that argument?

There are two possibilities: either he believes that his group has policies so weak that they can’t be defended through the reasonable standards of policy argumentation; or, he believes that “bias” makes a person’s entire argument dismissible.

He believes that, once you have determined someone to be “biased,” you don’t need to consider their argument. And, while that is what his media tells him, and what he might have learned in college classes on argumentation, that is a really flawed model of bias.

Again, this is a smart and good man, and, had he not been primed to reject any “out-group” information as “biased” and to assume that everyone only praises in-group and only condemns out-group, he might have read my argument differently. That assumption, that you would never criticize an in-group member, was projection.

But he was primed (or inoculated, to use the technical term) to reject any “out-group” arguments, as soon as he could find a way to see me as out-group. And that inoculation happened in two ways: first, he was repeatedly told that his policy agenda was the true body politic (his perception of the situation was objective); second, he was persuaded that the health of the body politic relied on one group being in control, and that anyone who disagreed with his political agenda was a kind of virus, so he shouldn’t even let their (my) ideas into his head.

He was persuaded that we are not in a democracy (in which, as the Federalist Papers, and various other documents argue, we benefit from disagreement) but a situation in which there is only one right policy agenda, and anyone who disagrees with that agenda should be crushed in any way necessary.

That’s really awful. It’s untrue, but I have to say that, crawling around the world of public argumentation, it’s the one thing on which far too many people agree (all over the rich world of non-binary political ideologies): we are in a moment of existential crisis, in which our group—the only good and true group—is threatened with extermination, and therefore anything we do to crush Them is justified; if we cannot win, we should at least make them lose.

We do not have a political world in which our options as a country are in zero-sum between two groups. We have never been there. We never will be there. For instance, many Libertarians, progressive Christians, conservative Christians, fiscal conservatives, and Progressives can agree that rehabilitation is a better choice than prison for first- and second-time drug offenders. If we stop thinking about politics as a binary, then we might also see that there are places of agreement as far as needing better health care.

Had Romney won, would Romneycare (aka Obamacare) have been the law of the land? Would John have supported Romneycare for the country had President Romney advocated it?

I think he would have.

Would many Dems have supported Romneycare had President Romney supported it? Probably not.

And that is what is wrong with our current political discourse.

Would I have voted for Romney? No. I didn’t. Would I have voted for Romneycare for the US. Hell, yes.

Can John say the same?

Does he put policy above party?

Here is the problem with that question: we are in a culture of demagoguery, in which every decision is crunched into a binary and then we can have a zero-sum WWE fight about the two options. We are in a world in which decisions are made badly.

My argument is that, when it comes to politics, John and all the very many other Johns all over the maps of political positions think politics is a zero-sum WWE fight between Dems and [whatever the GOP is currently putting forward as Republican policy]. In other words, I’m saying that John [and all the other Johns, who think that policy follows from identity, and our world is a binary between good and bad people] believe that politics is a question of identity. People in his in-group have good policies, and so should be supported, and people who aren’t in that group should be rejected without considering their arguments.

As it happens, reasoning that way—reduce the choices to two, make the decision on the basis of affective identification—is the basis of a lot of scams. It’s never the basis of good decision-making. But it’s always the basis of profitable media coverage.

So, what if John decided to reason, not by party, but by policy? What if John decided to argue about policies, and not identity? What if John decided that he would ignore party, and instead hold all people and parties to the same standard? What if John decided that he really valued this guy who said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”?

He would stop getting his information from rabidly partisan sources.

He would work to get information from various points of view. He would try to understand why people disagree with his policies. He would treat political issues the same way he would treat other questions.

Imagine, for instance, that there is an argument about how to manage sewage for a large-ish house in an area with clay soil. Would John only listen to experts of his in-group? If so, I have some shares in the Brooklyn Bridge I’d like to sell.

No, he wouldn’t. And he hasn’t.

We are in a world in which media tell us that all issues are questions of good v. bad people. I disagree with John about many things, and I know he is a good person.

I could have done this same post with people on other places on the political spectrum (not binary, or continuum), but I really admire John. He is good people. And I think his policy concerns are legitimate (which isn’t to say I agree with them—I don’t, but I might be wrong, and he might be right). It isn’t that I think his arguments are wrong; I think his way of thinking about politics is wrong—as a zero-sum battle between two identities.

That way is unhappily common all over the digital world, as I unfortunately know.

I won’t say that “both sides” do that, because that’s still accepting the media-convenient but always-demagogic premise of there being two sides.

People have beliefs; people have values. Countries have policies. Let’s argue about them. That someone disagrees with you—which, in our demagogized culture, is reason not to listen to them—is a reason to listen, not reject.

John only criticizes out-group and only praises in-group, and he projected that on to me.

I think we all need to criticize in-group. Warren was a good man. So is John. I think Warren was wrong to support race-based mass imprisonment, and I think John is wrong to support Trump. But I think they are both good people.

Stop calling for civility; lack of civility isn’t our problem, and more of it isn’t the solution

We are, once again, at a moment when people are calling for civility. My persistent complaint about American “political” discourse is that it is so rarely policy argumentation. Policy argumentation requires that participants argue (not just make assertions) on seven points: there is a need (aka ill), it’s serious, it won’t go away on its own, here’s what causes it; here is my plan; my plan will solve the need I identified, my plan is feasible, and my plan won’t cause more problems than it solves. American “political” discourse usually involves people arguing need and how it’s serious and then asserting a plan, and not even touching on the other points. (If that—sometimes they just assert need and engage in fear-mongering about it being serious.)

And the calls for civility are a perfect example of that truncated way of talking about important policy issues.

So, according to the “call for civility” argument, what is the need? Sometimes the need is political: we have a polarized Congress, in which any kind of compromise or finding common ground is demonized, when a Speaker brags about an unprecedented level of obstruction and is praised for it.

Sometimes the need is cultural: we are looking at a level of politically-motivated violence not seen since lynching was always on the table as a consequence-free way to terrorize dissent, with violent protests and calls to silence speakers (and sometimes the speakers are advocates of violence).

Sometimes the need is about tone: Kavanaugh’s temper tantrum was unprecedented and would have put the kibosh on any previous Supreme Court nominee (Dem or GOP), we have an Administration that engages in an unprecedented level of trolling, and major political figures and pundits who have accused the last four Presidents of being fascists, racists, and morally bankrupt. Thanksgiving dinners, social media interactions—it’s all ugly name-calling.

I’m willing to grant that the political and cultural needs are serious; the seriousness of the name-calling is a little more vexed. One of the reasons it’s vexed is that various kinds of “name-calling” are treated as equally serious because the need for this case is a little vague—the need seems to be that people are made uncomfortable, or have their feelings hurt. In this case, the problem with a major political figure saying something racist is that he hurt the feelings of members of that race. That “need” case makes hurt feelings the need/ill. In that case, anyone having their feelings hurt is a political problem that must be prevented. People who are called “racist” have their feelings hurt; people who are told that their information is false feel bad. Thus, if our “political” discourse defines the need or ill as having feelings hurt, then people who are racist, and are told they are racist, can present the ill of their hurt feelings as just as valid as a person who can’t get an apartment because of racism.

That’s a very clear example of the fallacy of false equivalency. But, if you accept the false case about the “ill”:  that our problem is that we have a public sphere in which people have their feelings hurt, it seems reasonable. It isn’t reasonable. Don’t accept that false case about the ill.

Our problem is not that people have their feelings hurt.

Every good policy case has a coherent narrative of causality—what caused our current situation? A few (but not all) of the political and cultural arguments have really interesting and plausible narratives about how we got here. The tone/name-calling argument is a very old and appalling one.

The basic argument behind blaming tone is that violent actions come from two sources: aggressive and defensive. People who have vehemently held beliefs engage in violence, and so vehement rhetoric leads to vehemently held beliefs, and therefore to violence. Therefore, to reduce violence, people need to care less. That’s an actively bad argument—caring passionately about our world is our responsibility. It is not a vice. It does not necessarily lead to violence. And much promotion of violence doesn’t come from people who care very much about the argument they’re making—sometimes passionate rhetoric is just a way to get votes, clicks, viewers, money.

The defensive one is even worse: it’s that vehement (and uncivil) rhetoric on the part of a marginalized group is responsible for the violent reaction on the part of the majority. This is, for instance, the logic behind the 1961 decision, the clergy who opposed King, and the current bizarre notion that saying something racist is just as bad as being called racist.

The whole argument for “civility” is that our problem is that people are vehement, and their vehement claims about their situation make other people get angry, and so now we’re all angry. So, we should all be less angry with each other by using nicer tones and being less vehement.

I see no reason for people not to be angry about the water in Flint, or unemployment rate in West Virginia, the number of unarmed people shot by police officers, discrimination in hiring, the use of torture in convictions, class sizes in public schools, an economy that seems to have no hope for advancement for people born into poverty.

Anger is rational under many circumstances, and many people are reasonably angry that they are not being treated as equals. Many people are unreasonably angry that they are not being treated as privileged. Many are angry that they are being treated badly because of complicated economic factors out of their control—that group is particularly prone to believing incoherent narratives of scapegoating. (For instance, they believe they are losing jobs to illegal immigrants when they’re losing jobs to automation or globalization.)

Our political problem is not that people are angry and therefore vehement and therefore seem uncivil. The “let’s be more civil” plan is completely incoherent—it doesn’t have a narrative of causality that would mean people being nicer to each other is the solution. It fails on the point of solvency.

After about 1835, it was common for people to say that the vehemence of the abolitionists caused slavers to become more entrenched in their position. That’s historically false, but rhetorically interesting. Were that argument true, then either there would have been a way to criticize slavery that slavers would have found persuasive, or a “civil” (as people are using the term now) criticism of slavery was impossible. It’s the latter.

There was no criticism of slavery that would not make slavers feel bad. There was no criticism of slavery that would not be an attack on what slavers were doing—profiting by trading in humans. Thus, if we aspire to a public discourse in which no one is criticized for what they’re doing, or made to feel bad about their actions, we have a discourse in which slavers should not have been criticized for their actions.

As long as we have some vague sense that what’s wrong with our current political situation is that people saying things that hurt the feelings of other people makes politicians engage in obstructionism (a narrative of causality that is tenuous at best) then we won’t solve the problem.

People are getting violent and engaging in obstructionism not because of people being rude, but because major media promote the notion that we are in a war, and that violence is our only possible response. In other words, we are in a world in which public discourse about politics is about a war of two identities—good versus evil. We are arguing about identities and feelings instead of about policies.

Calls for civility—meaning a world in which everyone is nice to one another, and no one’s feelings are hurt–are about a fantasy of a world in which there is no actual disagreement. We don’t need a world in which people feel good. We need a world in which people argue vehemently. But we need a world in which we argue, vehemently, about policies—not a world falsely bifurcated into two sides in a zero-sum relationship. We need democratic discourse.