Tag: demagoguery

The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’ and Hitler’s Rhetoric in Battle: “Where there is a will there’s a ferry”

Eighty years ago, almost to the day (April 28, 1939), Adolf Hitler gave a speech in the Reichstag (albeit directed at the world) in which he promised that he wanted only peace: [Slide 2] “Providence showed me the way to free our people from the depths of its misery without bloodshed and to lead it upward once again.” It was his second “peace” speech of the month; in both, he insisted he didn’t want war; he only wanted to make sure Germany got what it was rightfully due. And a surprising number of people believed him.

Benny Morris’ Roots of Appeasement shows that British policies of appeasement through the 20s and 30s came from the reasonable assumption that any rational person would know that the next war would be unthinkably devastating (largely because of the destructive capacities afforded by aircraft), and so various world leaders kept negotiating with Hitler as though he were a rational person working within what was thinkable. After the non-aggression pact was signed with Poland (April 6), even William Shirer—an American radio correspondent–believed that “this will halt Hitler for the time being” (Berlin Diary 163, a view he abandoned when Hitler tore up the agreement on the 28th). On April 23, Shirer said on his broadcast that, among other things, the Germans believed

that Hitler, whether they like him or not, will get what he wants in eastern Europe, and get it—as he got Czechoslovakia at Munich—without a war.[….T]here will therefore be no war, and that they—the German people at any rate—do not want war. And that war can only come if the “encirclement powers”, jealous of Germany’s success, attack the Reich (42)

In his 1984 memoir of his time in Germany, The Nightmare Years, Shirer would say of the spring of 1939,

Like almost everyone else I still clung to the hope for peace—despite what Hitler had said; despite what he had done, tearing up two more treaties; despite all his deceit. (403)

Hitler, who had, for years, spoken of war as a cleansing and necessary rebirth of Germany, was now saying he wanted peace. One of these two postures was a sincere and authentic expression of his values and the other was manipulative–and people had to decide which was which. A lot of people got the answer to the question wrong.

That same spring, while so many people were hoping for peace, and believed that Hitler shared that hope, Hitler was preparing for exactly the kind of war he had long said he wanted. And Kenneth Burke was writing “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle,’” his analysis of Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric in the book Mein Kampf. Burke wasn’t fooled. He began from the premise of taking Hitler’s rhetoric seriously. And he got Hitler’s intentions right. This talk will take seriously Burke’s taking Hitler’s rhetoric seriously.

As Kathleen Hall Jamieson points out, the distinction between actual rather than apparent identity is a central topos in Americans’ assessment of political candidates, and it has a long history:

Resonant in Western culture at least since Plato’s well-known discussion of shadows in the cave, the appearance-versus-reality lens, in US politics, takes the form of questions about a candidate’s actual rather than presented self, real versus publicly expressed beliefs, diagnosed rather than self-proclaimed health, audited rather than feigned financial circumstances, and lived rather than conjured biography. (186)

A study of Hitler’s rhetoric isn’t just a study about Hitler, but, as Burke aptly said, a study of how he swung a great nation in his wake, and how such a person might come to power in the US. And we might wonder about the role of the appearance v. reality lens in such an ascent.

Part of Burke’s answer is straightforward: he lists the rhetorical strategies (some verbal, some not) that such a rhetor would use on the basis of what Hitler used. Another part is more complicated: he points out that Hitler’s rhetorical strategies were grounded in his and Germans’ ways of thinking and acting. Burke says, “The deployments of politics are, you might say, the chartings of Hitler’s private mind translated into the vocabulary of nationalistic events.” (210). Since Hitler’s rhetorical strategies and political actions were so aligned, Burke wonders, “Is such thinking spontaneous or deliberate—or is it rather not both?” (213) In other words, was Hitler authentic in his rhetoric, given that he lied so much but not always?

Robert Citino refers to the “common notion that the surface Hitler is false, that we must dig deeper to unpack his true motives” (406). But, Citino says,

He rarely lied about his intentions. Of all the world statesman of the twentieth century, he may have been the most honest of all. He proclaimed his goals to the German people and to the world, leaving a dense trail of written statements and public proclamations behind him that are still remarkable for their candor. (404).

He did lie, of course, but he was also absolutely truthful at times, including about his lying. Burke points out an odd paradox of Hitler’s “honesty” in Mein Kampf: he shows all his cards; he’s open about all his rhetorical strategies, including his willingness to lie and mislead. Yet, his being open about being a liar did not undermine his ability to gain and maintain trust: “He could explicitly explain his tactics in his book and still employ them without loss of effectiveness.” (212)

In “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Batttle’,” Burke identified various rhetorical strategies:

    • Strategic misnaming
    • Repetition
    • Uniforms
    • Having thugs beat up hecklers in the audience
    • Unifying a diverse group by identifying a shared enemy
    • Attributing any resistance to him or his ideas as the consequence of the critic being on the side of evil in the apocalyptic battle between good (Aryans) and evil (the Jew)
    • Bastardization of religious forms of thought (i.e., Western European Christian eschatology and soteriology)
    • Appealing to the notion of inborn dignity
    • Describing Germany as in a symbolic rebirth
    • Scapegoating/Projection
    • Toggling between and intermingling material and spiritual explanations of events

In this talk, I want to pursue that question of spontaneous or deliberate by looking for these strategies in situations where there’s no obvious rhetorical gain from using them, where, in fact, they harmed deliberation: Hitler’s decision-making regarding the war he started. If repetition, scapegoating, and so on were cunning and strategic, then he wouldn’t have used them as bases of his decision-making when they hurt the war effort. But he did. And so did his generals, and so did many Germans. Burke didn’t just identify rhetorical moves, but ways of organizing and explaining the world.

Strategic misnmaming. Burke observes that in Mein Kampf, Hitler called his ideology of hate one of love. That strategic misnaming ran throughout his rhetoric: he called his invasions “counter attacks,” his war mongering “bringing peace,” and his chaotic polycratic system orderly. So did the Nazis generally, as in the now infamous Nazi language rules that Victor Klemperer describes so elegantly—language rules that Eichmann and his attorney were still following in 1960 as Hannah Arendt observed with some horror. One of Hitler’s most important misnamings was his persistent representation of himself and Germany as victims—something I’ll come back to later.

Repetition. Hitler was notorious for repeating himself in his meetings and speeches —something about which even his generals complained —but, more importantly, his military strategy was itself grounded in the notion of repetition. [Slide 5] His overall plan was to engage in a short, sharp war, in which Germany would retain the initiative, encircle entire divisions of the enemy, and capture massive amounts of land and material immediately. This is the traditional German/Prussian way of war, which military historians point out was Germany’s strategy dating back to Frederick the Great. In Hitler’s version, it relied on mastery of the air, a version that worked tremendously well through 1940. Hitler insisted on repeating that strategy long past the point when it was no longer working—when, for instance, the Luftwaffe was too weak to provide significant air support (really, any time after 1943), and he was in a defensive war of attrition (on both fronts after June 1944, but much earlier on the eastern front). For example, on December 28, 1944, he told his generals “Militarily, it’s critical that in the West we transition from this unproductive defensive posture to offensive warfare. Offensive operations alone can turn the war in the West in a successful direction” (557)

More important, WWII was itself a repetition of The Great War.
Losing a war should cause a country to reconsider its processes of deliberation—the disastrous outcome should cause a country to try to understand how it made that bad decision, and how to prevent a similar decision in the future. Unhappily, the opposite is likely to happen. Effective deliberation about going to war is stymied by the nearly universal sense that admitting a war was a mistake dishonors those who fought in it, by making their sacrifices all in vain. Thus, we are likely to try to refight a war we’ve lost with an increased commitment to the very policies and values that got us into the war in the first place. WWI was caused by nationalism, irrational optimism, desire for European hegemony and, in the case of France and Germany, the desire to relitigate the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

Many German rhetors (Hitler was just one of them) proposed as a solution to Germany’s losing that war an increased commitment to nationalism, militarism, the desire to refight an old war, hopes of European hegemony, and irrational optimism.

Uniforms. Hitler paid careful attention to uniforms, with help from Hugo Boss, but not necessarily for the motives Burke infers (to convey authority)—I think he really liked uniforms. During his January 27, 1945 meeting with his generals—a time when the Soviets are rolling over German forces in the East and Anglo-American forces are rolling over them in the West, a time when careful thinking was desperately necessary—General Alfred Jodl mentions that Cossacks would participate in an action in the Papuk mountains (in Croatia), and Hitler responds:

The Cossacks are good. But why do we have to put them in German uniforms? Why don’t we have those beautiful Cossack uniforms?
Jodl: Most of them have Cossack uniforms.
Guderian. Red fur hats.
[Hitler]: Do they still have those?
Jodl: They have red trousers with silver stripes.
[Hitler]: We have to leave that. It’s wonderful. (Heiber, 650)

I think we have to consider that the brownshirt uniforms were so carefully designed not because Hitler had a cunning reason, but because Hitler really cared about uniforms, even when that concern was irrelevant, and possibly distracting.

Violence. Hitler continued the practice of public beatings of dissenters, intended to make his base feel like winners and intimidate potential critics.
Unification through common enemy. He unified Germany by making most of the major world powers his literal enemies (which worked up to a point—his popularity probably hit its height in 1941, with many people remaining or becoming loyal to Hitler and the Nazis because of the Allied bombings).
Accusing all dissenters of being Jewish. He, and the Nazis, characterized anyone who disagreed with them as either Jewish (their explanation of Roosevelt’s hostility) or controlled by Jews (their explanation of Churchill’s opposition).

Symbolic rebirth. The trope of symbolic rebirth turned up in virtually every speech, usually at the beginning (as it does in Triumph of the Will), but was also the basis of his remilitarizing Germany.

Inborn dignity. Hitler’s notion of inborn dignity—that Aryans/Germans are divinely entitled to world domination because of inborn superiority—informed his military decisions, to his detriment. As late as 1944, Hitler thought that he just needed one good win to get the US to sue for peace; David Stone says that Hitler

believed that the American soldiers were generally of poor quality, with potentially fragile morale, and were therefore vulnerable to a decisive counterstroke delivered as a complete surprise once they had over-extended the lines of supply upon which they depended. (Shattered Genius 328)

Hitler’s tendency to make bad military decisions on the basis of racist and nationalist stereotypes was shared with others. The Wehrmacht wildly underestimated the USSR because Nazis “looked down on Russians as untermenschen, racially inferior and therefore incapable of outsmarting the master race. As a result, the Wehrmacht continually fell for Soviet deception and was wrong-footed by most major Red Army offensives” (Dick 105-6).

That’s important: the Nazis’ (not just Hitler’s) belief in inborn dignity caused Nazis to make bad decisions, and the bad outcomes of those bad decisions never caused them to reconsider their racist premises.

Projection/scapegoating. Racist and nationalist premises directly relate to Hitler’s, Nazis’, and Germans’ propensity for projection and scapegoating. Germans were drawn to scapegoating Jews for the loss of The Great War partially because they couldn’t imagine that the Allies had superior military forces and strategies. Hitler’s tendency toward projection also meant that he assessed a situation in terms of what he would do, believing that everyone thought exactly like him—thus, the whole basis of Germany’s aggression (the terror of encirclement) assumed that all other countries had the same aspirations for European hegemony, and the same war-mongering goals.

Crucial to Nazi success was that the Nazi party relentlessly promoted a popular and comfortable narrative about its current problems. Germany’s decision to back Austria’s move in regard to Serbia (the catalyst of WWI) was grounded in aspirations for intra-European hegemony and a profound underestimation of their opposition. It was probably unwinnable for Germany the moment it became a war of attrition (after the failure to win the Battle of the Marne, or once the race to the sea turned into a stalemate), but definitely after the 1918 “Spring Offensive” failed (McElligott 21). Although Erich von Ludendorff had come to the conclusion that the war was unwinnable in September of 1918, he later—like Hitler and far too many other Germans–blamed the loss of the war on the mythical “stab in the back” (a reference to the ending of Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods) on the part of a liberal/Marxist/Jewish press and conspiracy.

In other words, projection and scapegoating about WWI were not just rhetorical moves on the part of Hitler in Mein Kampf, but ways of thinking that formed the bases of actions on the part of people long before Hitler even began speaking in beerhalls. Burke identified ways of thinking that informed individual and national behavior not just limited to Hitler.
This leaves the materialization/spiritualization move—the one my students find most difficult and yet, once they get it, most powerful. And, again, Hitler’s shifting and mingling material and spiritual explanations wasn’t just a rhetorical move that Hitler himself sometimes cunningly chose in order to deceive, deliberately, his audience. When he shifted, it was because the shift confirmed a basis of belief beyond argument.

In “Rhetoric of Hilter’s ‘Battle’” and War of Words, Burke mulled over the way that people alternate between spiritual and material explanations of phenomena, and he identified something it would take cognitive psychologists thirty years to acknowledge. Essentially, what Burke noticed is that we can deflect disconfirming evidence and/or resolve cognitive dissonance by reframing our explanations (involving what Wayne Booth would later call “motivism”).

Burke points out the “ominous” temptation of transforming “material interests” into “their corresponding ‘ideals’” (76). This toggling between material and ideal explanations, and the deflecting of material considerations by reframing them as really idealistic, was typical of Nazi rhetoric, perhaps most notoriously in Heinrich Himmler’s “Posen” speech—when he tries to reframe concentration camp sadism as courage and idealism.

Hannah Arendt aptly described the Nazi explanation of the war:

the lie most effective with the whole of the German people was the slogan of ‘the battle of destiny for the German people’ […] which made self-deception easier on three counts: it suggested, first, that the war was no war; second, that it was started by destiny and not by Germany; and, third, that it was a matter of life and death for the Germans, who must annihilate their enemies or be annihilated. (Eichmann 52)

Although she doesn’t use the terms, she’s pointing to deflection through idealization.

Hitler’s careful calculations of material conditions (such as the need for oil, tungsten, and consumer goods) persuaded him that he had to have won the war within three years, and that could only happen if he could avoid a two-front war, or, if worse came to worse, if he could dispatch the USSR within six months. By the summer of 1942, it was clear that he had failed on all three points. He hadn’t won in three years, he had a two-front war, the USSR was holding a line, and, even worse, the US was now involved.

Initially, Hitler’s mastery of material conditions and factors was impressive (from 1933 to 1941)—but, as those conditions deteriorated (1941-1945), he shifted more and more to spiritual explanations, to the point of absurdity.
On December 12, 1942, Hitler discussed with his generals the very grim situation of the Sixth Army encircled in and near Stalingrad. His generals tried to persuade Hitler of the serious material problems in order to get him to order, if not a fighting retreat of the army as a whole, at least a series of strategic retreats that would reduce the number of vulnerable salients. At one point, General Kurt Zeitzler tells Hitler “we have received from here reports of deaths caused by exhaustion—14 cases within 6 days” (19).

Zeitzler goes on to explain that relieving troops wouldn’t be able to get there anytime soon (if at all), and that, despite Goering’s assurances, even the Luftwaffe wasn’t able to solve the issue through delivering supplies. He tells Hitler,

[T]hey have to sit on this narrow front day and night, and they’re on the alert all night and have to get out. An example: the men don’t even take off their pants anymore; they just leave them on. (37)

Hitler responds by giving a lecture about the relative value of the troops in terms of their racial purity (that is, inborn dignity), whingeing about how he was right when his generals were wrong (scapegoating and projection—he had been wrong), and ends with, “I have to say one thing in all of these cases, I get too few suggestions from the Army for the Knight’s Cross” (37).

Hitler appears to believe that the material problems of the 6th Army (cold, severe shortages of food, fuel, and supplies) could be solved if they were given more medals. Material conditions could be overcome with sufficient will (spiritual) which could be fostered by medals (material and spiritual?)

In May of 1943, Hitler’s generals pointed out that there were difficulties getting Nazi troops from Sicily to the Italian mainland because of the destruction of the ferries. Hitler said, “the decisive element is not the ferry, but the will” and “Where there is a will there is a ferry” (137).

Hitler made bad military decisions because he sincerely believed in the power of the will—the spirit’s ability to triumph over material conditions. And he wasn’t alone in that belief. Citino describes the leadership of the Wehrmacht:

One of the characteristics of Prussian-German field commanders over the centuries had been their notion that they were capable of mastering even the most difficult strategic situation, the worst imbalance of men and materiel, and they could do it through sheer force of will (Retreat 26)

One of the odder instances of Hitler’s mingling of material/spiritual frames is the literalizing of metaphors through historical/religious typology.

Burke’s argument is that Hitler’s rhetoric worked because it was a bastardization of religious forms of thought, and I completely concur. Burke didn’t mention typology, another religious concept bastardized by demagogues. Typology is a way of reconciling the Hebrew Bible and New Testament by saying that characters in the Hebrew Bible are types that will be re-presented in the New Testament, and in the end times of Christianity. Oddly enough (or perhaps not), it’s long been a way to rationalize unethical behavior on the part of political and religious figures. For instance, 17th century American Puritans justified genocidal policies toward the indigenous peoples through identifying their in-group figures as the same type as some Hebrew Bible figure who had killed other peoples—such as Joshua or David. And think of the number of religious figures caught in adultery who claim to be David (a seriously flawed use of typology, as even conservatives admit).

Nazi typology regarding Hitler made him religious and historical: he was Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Jesus . As things got materially worse for the Nazis and Germany was clearly losing the war, Hitler seems to have started believing that the comparison to Frederick the Great was not just an analogy, or even metaphor, but a matter of fact—so true that Hitler could make plans based on Frederick the Great’s military career being a perfect prediction of his own. Because the Russian Empress Elizabeth’s death in 1761 caused the coalition of allies to fracture as they were advancing on Berlin (as part of what is commonly known as the Seven Years War), thereby saving Frederick from defeat, Hitler’s strategies for the war in 1945 were to hold out until Roosevelt’s death would cause the same fragmenting of the allies.

Speer describes the scene in Hitler’s bunker April 12, 1945 (less than a month before Berlin was over-run) when Hitler got news that Roosevelt had died:

Hitler caught sight of me and rushed toward me with a degree of animation rare in him these days. He held a newspaper clipping in his hand. “Here, read it! Here! You never wanted to believe it! Here it is!” His words came in a great rush. “Here we have the miracle I always predicted. Who was right? The war isn’t lost! Read it! Roosevelt is dead!”
          He could not calm down. He thought this was proof of the infallible Providence watching over him. Goebbels and many others were bubbling over with delight as they exclaimed how right he had been in his reiterated conviction that the tide would turn. Now history was repeating itself, just as history had given a hopelessly beaten Frederick the Great victory at the last moment. The miracle of the House of Brandenburg! Once again the Tsarina had died, the historic turning point had come, Goebbels repeated again and again and again. (Inside the Third Reich, 549)

It’s as though they lost track of the comparison to Frederick the Great being a typological interpretation—an idea—and saw it instead as a material fact.
As an aside, I should mention that much of his understanding of America came from the cowboy and Indian stories of Karl May, just as his understanding of German destiny was drawn more from Wagner than any historian—the real and ideal were more than a little muddled for Hitler and his followers.

I have to say that the most irritating aspect of this project for me has been Nazis’ persistent propensity to feel sorry for themselves. Eichmann, the Nazis on trial in Nuremberg, the generals in their self-serving and fundamentally dishonest post-war memoirs, Goebbels in his diaries, and Hitler at every opportunity—they all whined. Even Albert Speer, who at least had the grace to be genuinely shocked at the films of concentration camps shown at his trial, whined during his sentence in Spandau Prison, without ever acknowledging that, as boring as his incarceration was, no matter how bad the Russian food, how ugly the paint on the walls, or how petty the rules, it was worlds better than the conditions under which the slave laborers in his factories lived, let alone the conditions of victims in the concentration camps he helped to build.

Arendt remarked on that same “trick” (her term): “So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!” (Eichmann 106).
While I think that some of the victim posture is related to what Paul Johnson has called “the rhetoric of masculine victimhood,” I think that most of it is what Burke calls deflection. And deflection works by breaking one association and creating another.

Ernesto Laclau argued that populist reason works by “equivalential chains”—the demands of various people who are identified as “the people” perceive “an accumulation of unfulfilled demands” as essentially equivalent. Clean water is much like good wages is much like good schools (73). And, as he noted, as we move along the chain, the connections among the links might be tenuous, such as between clean water and good wages (75). He also observes that the creation of equivalential chains is part of a three-part process, including, as the second step, “the constitution of an internal frontier dividing society into two camps” and the third step is “the consolidation of the equivalential chain through the construction of a popular identity which is something qualitatively more than the simple summation of the equivalential links. “(77). That is, the in-group.

It’s that second step—the two camps move—that Laclau didn’t follow up in his discussion of equivalential chains; but it’s important. Equivalential chains, or the associations and identifications that Burke noted, aren’t just about who we are—it’s about who we are not. That insight is acknowledged, but also not really pursued, in Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s explanation of dissociation. To show dissociation, they have pages of maps of the paired terms that someone dissociates—they’re more interested in the dissociation, but I think the concept of paired terms deserves more attention.

What The New Rhetoric notes, although just in an aside, is that a valued term is valued because it is asssoiated with another valued term and it is not the devalued term. [Slide 10] For example, Jamieson describes the rhetoric of the 2016 pro-Trump trolls:

Those who endanger us include Muslims, illegal aliens, Black Lives Matter activists, atheists, demanding women, those who oppose gun rights, and Hillary Clinton, to name a few. Among those cast as ‘we’ were white males, Donald Trump, Christians, veterans, and workers whose jobs are threatened by bad trade deals and job-stealing ‘illegals’. (45)

That’s paired terms.

There are, as Laclau says, terms that are tenuously connected—advocates of the MOAR GUNZ NRA rhetoric are not particularly likely to be Christian, and there are feminist Christians, BLM activists are not necessarily opposed to gun rights, and atheists have little to do with Muslims—out-group terms only share that they are opposed to some value associated with the in-group.

When people make judgments simultaneously by association and opposition, then all sorts of odd things get connected. Burke notes the paradox that Hitler, in Mein Kampf, condemns Jews as both communists and capitalists—that association works because, for his audience at the time, capitalist (meaning people who oppress the working class) and communist (meaning anything to the left of Hitler) were both on the “them” side of paired terms. They aren’t logically associated with each other, but only associated through a similar place in the associational/binary method of reasoning in which we too often engage. I think one of the best examples of this associational/binary method of reasoning is the German/Nazi victim stance.

The set of paired terms that enables that stance is:

Because there are only two possible positions—victim or persecutor—and those two are completely opposed, if you can show that you are, in any way, a victim, you have shown that the other side must be the persecutor.

What the Nazis did, prior to every invasion, was publicize or fabricate acts of aggression against “Germans” (such as discrimination against speakers of German in Czechoslovakia, the faked attack in Poland, lies about the number of Soviet tanks on the border). Any action against any “Germans” (such as German-speaking Czechs) justified any violent response on the part of Nazi Germany—regardless of provocation, regardless of proportion. It’s interesting to me that, even after the war, when every reasonable person would have concluded that the Nazis lied, and nothing they said should be believed, many people still cited Nazi claims of victimizations as justifications for what Germany did. And that included people who believed that they had rejected Nazism and seen the light.

Hannah Arendt argued that language was important for self-deception, and that one kind of self-deception was the failure to think. Her argument on that point was misunderstood and misrepresented—she never said that Adolf Eichmann was an automaton, or mindless, and certainly not stupid. In Life of the Mind, she described what she saw at the trial:

It was not stupidity but thoughtlessness. [….] Cliches, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality (Life 4).

Eichmann thought—he thought very carefully about what trains to use, where to send them, how to rob Jews more effectively, how to send as many as possible to camps. He thought a lot about his career. Hitler thought very carefully about how to conduct a war of annihilation, what weapons should be developed, what troops should be sent where. And his generals also thought very carefully about how to do their jobs.

But, as far as Arendt was concerned, Eichmann wasn’t thinking because he had an “almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view” (48). He, like Hitler, thought he knew what others were thinking, but he didn’t, because he just assumed they thought the same things he did. For instance, he whinged to his Jewish guards about his failure to advance as far in the SS as he had hoped, and he expected the guard to sympathize. He engaged in projection.

The strategies that Burke identified weren’t just deliberate rhetorical strategies of Hitler’s: they were ways of thinking shared with enough people to put and keep him in power. And the notion that Hitler was authentic, despite, or perhaps even because of, his persistent inaccuracy and dishonesty, was important to that success. When we ask if Hitler was sincere or manipulative we ask the wrong question because we falsely assume that there is a distinction between being authentic and being deceptive, and there isn’t.

Jamieson points out the importance of the perception of Clinton as disingenuous and Trump as authentic for voters in 2016:

Unlike Trump, whose freewheeling rhetoric was consistent with the assumption that ‘what you see is what you get,’ Clinton’s wariness of the press, caution when speaking extemporaneously, and discomfort with personal narrative all invited audiences to read between the lines while also asking, what wasn’t she saying. (206)

I’m saying that the concept of paired terms explains the paradox of someone deciding that someone who has a book in which he talks about his reliance on dishonesty to get good deals would seem authentic and trustworthy. Telling someone that you lie to others should make you less reliable, but, as Burke said, by including you in the scam, the scammer might get you to think that he wouldn’t lie to you. A self-confessed liar can seem authentic as long as s/he seems to care, sincerely, about the in-group, and that is signaled through having the right paired terms.

What paired terms enable is the deflection that Burke noted is done through shifting between spiritual and material explanations. Clinton’s admission of saying different things to different audiences is given a different spiritual explanation—it’s a sign of who she is; it’s a consequence of her being a bad person. Trump’s admission of saying different things to different people is explained as made necessary by external factors, as coming from sincere concern for in-group members. Clinton’s deceptiveness means she can’t be trusted; Trump’s means he can.

For in-group members, a logically incoherent argument that plays the paired terms effectively—that signals a shared understanding of in-group and enemy, through what terms are associated, and which ones are set in opposition—resonates with a base looking for someone who really gets them. Whether that leader is being accurate doesn’t matter—his shared in-group identity is authentic, and that’s enough.

There is a conventional view of Hitler as a magician with a word wand who hypnotized, seduced, or scammed passive Germans. He wasn’t. He was a grifter who made millions from Mein Kampf and never paid taxes, who said he would use his personal wealth to pay for various government expenditures (he didn’t, but people might have thought he did), and who persuaded the conservative (left-phobic) elite and middle class that he unapologetically believed in the inborn dignity of whites to dominate in Germany and for Germany to act without restraint on the part of the goals of other countries.

Hitler didn’t magically convert people to that point of view—he gave expression to what a lot of Germans thought. Nazi rhetoric provided ways of thinking about German actions that made people more comfortable with something they already wanted to do. Persuasion is always really self-persuasion, and deception is always self-deception—the rhetoric of others just gives us the tools we can choose to use to persuade ourselves. [Slide 13] In regard to the 2016 election, Jamieson says, “When voters integrate their own assumptions into content, they become accomplices in their own persuasion” (83). Or, in Burke’s words, “

Our job, then, our anti-Hitler Battle, is to find all available ways of making the Hitlerite distortions of religion apparent, in order that politicians of his kind in America be unable to perform a similar swindle (219)

Mo Brooks, the Big Lie, and Bad Hitler analogies

There is a media kerfuffle, and much pleasurable outrage, about an Alabama congressman quoting a foaming-at-the-mouth antisemitic section from Mein Kampf.

As is usual with the media, it’s all outrage, oddly misplaced, and misses the really important point about the incident.

Hitler says that Jews stick to one big lie, and just keep repeating it. Of course, that is what Hitler did, and was doing in the moment of the accusation.

Hitler’s point is that, if you create a big lie, you should stick to it, and insist on it, and people will accept it. And Hitler did that all the time, as in his insistence on blaming all of Germany’s problems on socialists (whom he insisted on characterizing as communist). But there is a performative point that Hitler is making, too, meaning that Hitler’s rhetorical power came not just from what he argued but how he argued.

Hitler blamed everything, including the faults of his own party, on the Jews. That was his big lie. His big lie was that Germany’s problems could be solved by excluding the impure people (Jews, Romas, Sintis, homosexuals, communists, union labor organizers, feminists, immigrants) from the community.

Brooks was, in his speech, repeating the GOP Bit Lie: that Trump didn’t collude with Russia, that it doesn’t matter if he did, and that anyone who is concerned about the issue is a socialist. There is another GOP Big Lie Brooks repeats: that Hitler was a leftist because his party was socialist.

Hitler, in that passage was (as he always was) projecting onto his out-group (“the Jews”) what he was doing in that moment.

And that is what matters about the Alabama congressman. Not that he cited Hitler, but that he was projecting. In a speech that was the repetition of a Big Lie (that Trump did nothing wrong), Brooks condemned the left (whom he called “socialist”) for doing what he was doing in the moment of the accusation: repeating a Big Lie. And that’s important.

But various leftist media instead condemned him for quoting a rabidly antisemitic passage from Hitler (e.g.). That’s an incoherent criticism. He was quoting Hitler in order to condemn anyone who disagreed with him. He wasn’t endorsing Hitler. He wasn’t endorsing Hitler’s antisemitism.

That criticism either assumes a kind of guilt by contact argument, or else assumes that it can invoke the pleasures of outrage on the part of people who won’t click through to figure out what he actually said.

I think it’s probably a bit of both, and I think both are harmful to the left. If it’s the association argument, it’s promoting the notion of pure speech, that doesn’t anything bad. If it’s the pleasure of outrage, it just makes lefties look like dumbasses.

Brooks’ argument was bad faith; it was also incoherent; it was also self-referential. Let’s take him to task for those issues, not for antisemitism.

Demagoguery; Or, the Pleasures of Outrage

Trump is commonly accused of being a demagogue. So were Obama, Reagan, FDR, Lincoln, and, well, pretty much every rhetorically effective President, and so are Keith Olbermann, Rush Limbaugh, Rachel Maddow, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, Michael Moore, Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones. MLK was frequently condemned as a demagogue, which is interesting, since he’s now presented as the civil and moderate choice. I’ll come back to that.

In other words, the term “demagogue” is what scholars of rhetoric would call a “devil term”—it’s a term meaning you don’t like that person.

Using it that way is profoundly factional—demagogues are the political leaders of that party. That use of the word demagogue, I’ll argue, fuels demagoguery. In this talk, I want to consider what it would mean to think about demagoguery in a way that would enable us to identify demagoguery in our leaders, in our way of thinking about politics, in how we argue. And I want to point to some more productive ways to do all of those.

In this talk, I’m going to emphasize three concepts: in-group/out-group thinking; policy argumentation; and demagoguery.

When I began this talk, or perhaps even when you heard I would give this talk, you paid attention to cues as to whether I agree or disagree with your politics. If you decided, on the basis of various cues about my group identity (I’ll explain that in a bit), that I’m in your in-group, then you relaxed, your shoulders might have dropped, and you prepared to listen to what I have to say. If you decided I’m in an out-group, you invoked all of your critical thinking apparatus, you sat up straighter, making even your body reject what I was going to say.

That’s called in-group/out-group thinking.

In social psychology, the “in-group” is not the group in power; it’s the group you’re in. If being vegan is important to your sense of identity—if it’s something you tell others about yourself—then “vegans” is one of your “in-groups.” (We all have many in-groups.) It doesn’t matter that, in terms of cultural and political power “vegans” is a very marginal groups; it’s an in-group for you.

If being a “vegan” is an important identity for you (an in-group) then you probably have some group (or groups) you think of as being opposed to you—an out-group. Perhaps it’s omnivores, Romaine eaters, Nancy Pelosi, Republicans, people you’ve decided are “unhealthy,” lizard men. What matters is whether the pro-vegan groups in which you hang out share a sense that you are an “us.” And that “us” implies some “them” Sometimes there is more than one out-group. At U of Texas, it’s the Aggies (Texas A&M) and Sooners (U of Oklahoma). At A&M, it’s the Longhorns (U of Texas) and the Tigers (LSU). So, they aren’t always perfectly symmetrical.

We attribute far too much importance to in-group and out-group identities—we’re more likely to trust someone we perceive as “in-group” even if the issue at hand has nothing to do with that group. Whether someone else is vegan shouldn’t influence your willingness to buy a car from them, find their stance on immigration more credible, rely on their judgment about technical issues, but perception of shared group membership does exactly that: a person who shares one in-group with us is likely to be more trusted on irrelevant topics. People are more likely to trust and prefer others who share a birthday (Finch &Cialdini 1989; Burger et al. 2004; Walton et al. 2013), a first name (Burger et al. 2004), first-letters of a name (Hodson et al. 2005), facial similarities (Bailenson et al. 2008), even an invented category like sharing a rare “fingerprint type” (Burger et al. 2004) when deciding how to vote, how to distribute money, whether to invest with or buy something from a person—and those shared characteristics are all completely irrelevant.

The in-group is partially constituted by the out-group (we are who we are because we are not them). And someone can activate in-group favoritism by signaling that they feel animosity toward an out-group. My husband is an Aggie, and I teach at U of Texas. More than once a salesperson has seen my husband’s Aggie ring, and said something to both of us about how awful the Longhorns are. One of the more entertaining times this happened, it was when we were buying a car for me. The salesman simply assumed my husband hated Longhorns, and that my husband did the thinking for both of us.

We have a tendency to reason from identity—to look at someone and make a quick assessment as to whether they are reliable, credible, intelligent, ethical. And then, having made that determination, we process other information about them differently. That determination, however, is likely to be largely on the basis of in-group favoritism. And, once we’ve decided they’re in-group and reliable and so on, then we’ll use what social psychologists call “motivated reasoning” in order to try to confirm our initial perception. Our sense of ourselves as good people, and a good judge of people, is now tied up in confirming that our initial assessment of them was correct.

It would be uncomfortable to admit that we were wrong in our assessment of our in-group; it is pleasurable to feel that we (and people like us) are, if not always entirely right, at least never as bad as the out-group.

The dominant model of how we reason is what is often called “naïve realism.” It says that, if we’re going to make a decision, we should first try not to have any preconceptions (this isn’t possible, by the way). We should first look at the data, perceive the information, then reason. You can make sure that you’re right by going through this process again.

That isn’t how it actually works.

Imagine that we meet someone, call him Chester, and we want to figure out if he is ethical and reliable.

This is probably what the process is.

Something happens—you meet Chester. You have various prior attitudes—such as your beliefs about the topics Chester brings up, and the affect you’ll have about Chester/the incident that are incidental (that he reminds you of someone you like, that he looks like you, shares your birthday, you are hangry). These non-conscious factors lead to considerations about which you might be aware (Chester seems nice; Chester seems like a jerk; Chester seems to have the opposite of your politics). You might deliberate about Chester, all the time unaware of the way that your evaluation of Chester is so heavily influenced by those non-conscious factors.

Our determination isn’t emotional, exactly—it’s closer to what Aristotle called “intuition” and what many cognitive psychologists call “System 1” thinking.

Research is clear that we can’t suppress or ignore those non-conscious factors because we can’t do anything about them as long as they are non-conscious. Some cognitive psychologists (including Lodge and Taber) have tried telling people to think carefully, to take their time, to check their reasoning, and yet they still find that people are still significantly (and non-consciously) relying on motivated reasoning that is largely confirming the beliefs and affects that come from the non-conscious signals (triggers, or frames, depending on what metaphor you want to use). I’m much more hopeful about it, because I think Lodge and Tabor are right insofar as they are testing whether people will quickly give up important beliefs—that is, in a single sitting—but that isn’t how political reasoning necessarily works.

A lot of the experiments on these issues about people changing their minds involve bringing people into a psych lab, determining their hot commitments, giving them disconfirming information of those beliefs, and then noting that people don’t change their beliefs (or don’t change them on the basis of rational argumentation). But it wouldn’t be rational to abandon an important belief because someone in a pysch lab gave you new information. People do change our beliefs, for all sorts of reasons and in all sorts of ways, and some of those narratives of personal change involve rational argumentation (such as those in How I Changed My Mind About Evolution).

Let’s set that aside, and talk about demagoguery.

Demagoguery works by appealing purely to those kinds of non-conscious considerations, ratcheting them up with dog whistles, claims of existential threat to the in-group, reframing all policy issues into a war between the in- and out-group that is best won by pure loyalty to the in-group (and whatever leaders happen to best embody the in-group).

Politics is about policies. Ultimately, political determinations are decisions about which policies we should pursue, and it’s relatively clear what is a helpful way to argue about policies—policy argumentation.

Policy argumentation can (and probably should) happen any time people are deliberating a new course of action. There are, loosely, two kinds of cases that participants might make: affirmative (arguing for a particular course of action) or negative (arguing against a course of action someone else has advocated).

The affirmative case has two parts: the “need” (showing we have a problem and need a solution), and the “plan” (where a plan is described and defended.)

Within each part, there are certain “stock issues” (sometimes called “stases”—the traditional term for them).

Need:

      • there is a problem (ill or need);
      • it’s very serious;
      • it is caused by X;
      • it will not go away on its own.

Plan:

      • here is my plan;
      • my plan solves the problem (ill or need) I identified in the first part of my argument (solvency);
      • my plan is feasible (feasibility);
      • my plan will not cause more problems than it solves, or cause a worse problem than it solves.

A negative case refutes the argument on any (or all) of those stases.

What happens in a culture of demagoguery is that rhetors spend a lot of time on the need part of the case—and the “ill” (or problem) is that there is an out-group who is the cause of our problems. They are dangerous. We are, this argument runs, faced with extermination, and we don’t have time to deliberate (this is what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “the state of exception”).

Because the problem is the presence and power of an out-group, the solution is, at least, their exclusion from policy discourse, and perhaps their exclusion from our community, or even their extermination.

The “plan” such as it is (and it isn’t much) is that you should throw all of your support behind me, or behind my party, or behind the plan I propose. Instead of arguing solvency or feasibility, demagoguery shifts back to need, or attacking critics as necessarily “them.”

Let me give an example.

In 428 BCE, Athens was in the midst of a long and nasty war with Sparta. Mytilene, a city-state on the island of Lesbos some distance from Athens, was an Athenian ally that had a pro-Sparta revolt. Athenian had been warned that a revolt would happen (by pro-Athenian Mytileneans), and was able to send Paches, a general, with a fleet to put down the revolt. He succeeded. The leader of the revolt was executed. Paches took prisoner people that seemed to have been the main ones involved in the revolt. The question was what Athens should do.

Athens had various options. One option not on the table was to do nothing—they’d already enacted execution. They could, however,

      • Do nothing further, and restore Mytilene to its somewhat privileged status as an ally
      • Do nothing further, but reduce Mytilene to a client-state
      • Execute everyone associated with the revolt, and restore Mytilene to its somewhat privileged status as an ally
      • Execute everyone associated with the revolt, and reduce Mytilene to a client-state (Diodotus’ argument)
      • Execute all the men of Mytilene, including those who had alerted Athens to the pending revolt, and sell all the women and children into slavery (Cleon’s argument)

Thucydides, a historian living at the time, gives us his version of the debate that occurred in Athens. He says that, initially, the Athenians opted for the third, but woke up the next morning from a kind of rhetorical hangover, like texts from last night on papyrus, and had doubts. The debate was reopened.

Thucydides’ work is the beginning of a shift in the word “demagogue,” from a neutral term (leader of the demes—essentially the middle and working classes) to a negative term meaning a rhetor who argues a particular way. Thucydides didn’t much like Cleon, but he had no objection to leaders of the demes—the hero of his history is Pericles, who was also a leader of the demes. Thucydides’ opposition to Cleon came from his belief that Cleon’s way of arguing was disastrous for democratic deliberation. Aristophanes and Aristotle seem to have thought so too, and they have the same criticisms of how Cleon argued.

Cleon’s argument for mass killing relies on five claims:

    1. Athenians are soft, spend too much time deliberating, think too much, and don’t understand that an empire is based in terror;
    2. mass killing will terrorize all the other Athenian city-states into submission (the first recorded instance of genocide conceived as a rhetorical act). Once they see how brutally Athens responds to revolt, no one will ever dare revolt again;
    3. the Mytileneans hurt Athens and the only way to respond to injury is violence; to do nothing (which he claims is what his opposition is advocating) is to reward Mytilene for hurting Athens;
    4. his argument is so obvious that the only explanation for people arguing against it is that they are secretly in the pay of enemies of Athens;
    5. Athenians might be tempted to fall for those corrupt rhetors’ arguments out of feeling compassion for people who want to kill them.

If you map this argument back on to the “stock issues” of policy argumentation, you can see the problems with his argument.

Need:

      • there is a problem (ill or need); his ill isn’t about the Mytileneans—it’s about how Athenians are weak-willed, too kind, too moved by argument, too prone to thinking about things, don’t act from anger (in other words, Cleon is telling a democracy that their problem is that they are a democracy);
      • it’s very serious; he says Athens will lose its empire unless it toughens up and terrorizes everyone;
      • it is caused by X; it’s caused by Athens having people who like deliberation;
      • it will not go away on its own; he never mentions this.

Plan:

      • here is my plan; he can assume that people know his plan from the arguments on the previous day—mass killing and enslavement;
      • my plan solves the problem (ill or need) I identified in the first part of my argument (solvency); his plan does nothing as far as solving what he identified as the “ill”—that Athenians like to deliberate—the implied solution to that problem is that Athens should become a tyranny with him the tyrant; as far as the problem Athens is actually facing—what to do about its allies and client-states in the long war, he asserts, but doesn’t argue, that mass killing will terrorize the client-states;
      • my plan is feasible (feasibility); nothing;
      • my plan will not cause more problems than it solves, or cause a worse problem than it solves; nothing.

In other words, Cleon isn’t engaged in policy argumentation. Not even a little. Cleon isn’t even really arguing about the case at hand—he just asserts he’s right, and that anyone who disagrees with him is a traitor. Cleon’s argument isn’t about Mytilene—it’s about how Athenians should deliberate, and, he says, they shouldn’t—they should stop thinking and just listen to him. And notice that Cleon makes people who want to deliberate—the basis of democracy—a traitor to a democracy. That’s what demagoguery always does.

His argument isn’t about policy, but about identity. He divides the issue into an us (angry, manly, dominating, clear, decisive, realistic) and them (dithering, too compassionate, wanting to do nothing, deliberating). The first kind of person is right; the second has no legitimate argument to make, and should be silenced.

Cleon is arguing that politics isn’t about policies, but is a zero-sum battle between good (strong, manly, punitive, angry and yet in control, decisive, realistic) people who think in black and white terms and bad (people who believe in the processes of democracy). Cleon’s argument is an argument against democracy itself.

Cleon was trying to pretend his argument was rational, realistic, and clear-thinking, and that the opposition argument was fuzzy and compassionate. He was wrong on both counts.

Cleon’s entire argument was based on two fallacies: a false binary, and straw man (two fallacies often connected in demagoguery). [Go back to slide 7] As I mentioned earlier, Athens had many possible options in regard to Mytiline—no one was arguing for the position Cleon represents as “the opposition.” And Cleon never answers the argument that Diodotus actually makes.

That’s typical of demagoguery—turn a complicated array of possible policy options into a binary of “my way or nothing.”

Diodotus’ argument was for a more punitive position than anything done previously by Athens. Cleon represents it as doing nothing. That’s the straw man fallacy.

It’s also lying about his opposition. In general, when people engage in straw man fallacy, it’s either because they’re ignorant of the opposition argument (that is, they live in an informational enclave) or they know what it is and they choose to lie about it. And, if they lie about it, it’s because they don’t really have a good argument against what the argument actually is.

There was nothing compassionate or soft about the opposition argument. Personally, I find it heartless. Diodotus, his opponent, was arguing for execution of the people plausibly associated with the revolt. Diodotus, argued entirely on the grounds of policy argumentation (he hit the marks, which Cleon didn’t).

And, at least as Thucydides tells us, and is reasonable to infer from history, Cleon was wrong and his opponents were right. As Athens became increasingly punitive and authoritarian toward other members of its empires, it created enemies for itself, and allies for its enemies.

More important, Cleon’s kind of rhetoric became the norm. The most disturbing passage in Thucydides is his description of how the zero-sum factionalism of Greek city-states corrupted deliberation.

Thucydides says that the things previous valued in democracies—fairmindedness, inclusive deliberation, being willing to compromise, listening to various points of view, trying to argue well, striving to think things through, making party less important than polis—have all been lost. Instead, all that anyone cares about is their faction (we’d use the term “party”) winning, at any cost. Things we would find outrageous behavior if done by them we think perfectly fine if we do them; compromise, looking at various sides—that’s just dismissed as being a girly girl; wanting to take the time to think things through and get information, that’s just cowardice; not wanting to take the most extreme action right now—that’s just wanting to do nothing at all. They wanted leaders who were angry, unwilling to compromise, committed to the most extreme proposals, and refusing to work with anyone who disagreed. Blocking the actions of your opponent was just as good as actually getting anything done.

The democracies of this era had become cultures of demagoguery.

This tendency to frame all policy issues as a zero-sum choice between the two major factions would lead to Athens’ just plain dumb decision to invade Sicily, and to do so in such a way that it opened itself up to attack from Sparta. It would be the end of the Golden Age of Athens. That’s what happens in a culture of demagoguery. That’s what it did in Rome; that’s what it did in the various Italian republics; that’s what it’s done in many other democracies—from Germany in the 1930s to Venezuela now—abandoning inclusive policy argumentation in favor of reducing every argument to how your party can trounce the other destroys democracies. And we’re in that culture, and we have been for at least twenty years.

So, what do we do?

Well, there are a few things.

The notion that we can do anything useful about this by creating a third or fourth party won’t work. I used to think that, but reading more about Weimar Germany (which had over six parties) nipped that notion in the bud. Nor will ending straight-ticket voting do anything useful. It isn’t the parties that matter—I’m not even sure it’s how people vote that matters.

It’s how people argue that matters. It’s how you argue.

If you listen to me and think, “Oh, yeah, Those People do this all the time—they’re just Cleon,” you’re missing my point. You’re still engaged in demagogic reasoning. What matters is whether you are engaged in demagogic reasoning.

So, how do you stop that?

First, stop putting all issues into left v. right. That’s like trying to categorize all people as at this moment using their left hand v. at this moment speaking French. Some people are doing both, most people are neither, and it varies from moment to moment.

Second, get out of your informational enclave, and, when you put that with the first recommendation, that means don’t just flip between Maddow and Hannity, or Mother Jones and the Drudge Report. Toggling between highly partisan media doesn’t make you more informed; it just makes you more angry. Every reasonable political position has someone smart making a smart argument for it—find those smart arguments.

Instead of thinking left v. right, think about the array in regard to the relevant axes. For instance, for some issues this is my set of go-to sites.

I’d have a slightly different list for something about immigration, or religion, or the environment.

Third, simply asking yourself if you have reasons for your position doesn’t make you reasonable. Thinking you are not motivated by feelings doesn’t make you rational. It’s more useful if we think about a rational stance as one that meets two standards:

    1. you can imagine the circumstances under which you would change your mind—could your mind be changed by new data? what would that data be?
    2. you have listened to smart versions of opposition arguments. can you summarize your opposition’s argument in a way they would say was fair and accurate? have you looked at the data they’ve provided?

And a rational argument is one that argues in a way that you apply consistently– so, if your argument about one Constitutional amendment is grounded in the intentions of the people who wrote it, is that how you read all of them? If not, your argument isn’t rational.

Would you consider your way of arguing rational if made by your opposition—if you think your argument must be accepted because you can describe a personal experience to support it, would you abandon it if your interlocutor told you a personal experience of theirs to refute it? In other words, are you consistently treating personal experience as sufficient support?I’ve been going on a long time, so I’ll just mention a few resources that can be helpful. I really like the ten rules of two philosophers—Fran van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst (1984).

    1. Parties must not prevent each other from advancing standpoints or casting doubt on standpoints.
    2. A party that advances a standpoint is obliged to defend it if the other party asks him to do so.
    3. A party’s attack on a standpoint must relate to the standpoint that has indeed been advanced by the other party.
    4. A party may defend his standpoint only by advancing argumentation relating to that standpoint.
    5. A party may not falsely present something as a premise that has been left unexpressed by the other party or deny a premise that he himself has left implicit.
    6. A party may not falsely present a premise as an accepted starting point nor deny a premise representing an accepted starting point.
    7. 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. In his argumentation, a party may only use arguments that are logically valid or capable of being validated by making explicit one or more unexpressed premises.
    9. 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 his doubt about the standpoint.
    10. A party must not use formulations that are insufficiently clear or confusingly ambiguous and he must interpret the other party’s formulations as carefully and accurately as possible.
      By the way, this isn’t saying that you have to treat everyone discussion this way—it’s just the set of rules for a rational argument. If you’re talking to someone who consistently violates the rules, you aren’t in a rational argument, regardless of what you do. This is a relationship that takes two. In addition, there are really worthwhile conversations that aren’t like this—a time you can’t persuade each other, but you can learn from each other.

The book Superforecasting has a great list of how to counteract the various cognitive biases we have. Philip Tetlock has listed those rules as the “Ten Commandments for Aspiring Superforecasters.” One of the most important premises of his work is that there is not a binary between being certain and being clueless. Pure certainty is a personal feeling, not a cognitive state—be willing to acknowledge that we live in a world in which we range from being able to be pretty certain to not at all certain, and we need to think about where on that continuum a decision is ranges. Tetlock says, there is a big difference between the amount of justifiable confidence we can have about who will win the 2019 World Series than who will win the 2050 one.

The last point I’ll mention is something that Diodotus says. Diodotus began his speech, not by talking about Mytilene, but by talking about talking. Diodotus said, “The good citizen ought to triumph not by frightening his opponents but by beating them fairly in argument.”

[slides by Alexander Fischer]

Citations

Applegate, Kathryn et al. (2016) How I Changed My Mind About Evolution: Evangelicals Reflect on Faith and Science. IVP Academic.

Bailenson, Jeremy N., et al. (2008). “Facial similarity between voters and candidates causes influence.” Public Opinion Quarterly 72.5, 935-961.

Burger, J. M., Messian, N., Patel, S., Prado, A. del, & Anderson, C. (2004). “What a Coincidence! The Effects of Incidental Similarity on Compliance.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30(1), 35–43.

Eemeren, F.H. van, & Grootendorst, R. (1992). Argumentation, communication, and fallacies: A pragma-dialectical perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Hodson, G., & Olson, J. M. (2005). “Testing the generality of the name letter effect: Name initials and everyday attitudes.” Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 31(8), 1099-1111

Kahneman, Daniel. (2013). Thinking Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Poehlman, T. et al. (2013). “The name-letter-effect in groups: sharing initials with group members increases the quality of group work” PLoS one, Vol. 8 , Issue 11

Tetlock, Philip. https://fs.blog/2015/12/ten-commandments-for-superforecasters/

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian Wars. (1998). Trans. Steven Lattimore. Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

Walton, G. M., Cohen, G. L., Cwir, D., & Spencer, S. J. (2012). “Mere belonging: The power of social connections.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(3), 513-532.

Folk rhetorical theory and the “argumentum ad Hitlerum”

[This is a talk–a revised version of one I posted earlier–so it doesn’t have links.]

Wayne Booth once complained that, when he mentioned he was an English teacher, people on trains wanted to talk about commas. If he had told them he taught rhetoric, they would have said something about Hitler. In papers in argumentation classes, Hitler references are as common, and as welcome, as dawn of time introductions. Like dawn of time introductions, Hitler references aren’t unwelcome because they’re always wrong, but simply because they’re so easy, so thoughtless, and so rarely relevant. In politics, it’s even worse; hence the argumentum ad hitlerum fallacy, or Godwin’s law. Despite the miasma of Hitler references in politics, and Hitler’s reputation as the most powerful rhetor, teachers and scholars of rhetoric tend to avoid him.

We do so for various reasons, but at least one is that the popular (and even, to some extent, scholarly) understanding of Hitler’s power is far more simplistic than the case merits that it seems hopelessly complicated to try to get in and untangle it. I want to argue that is why Hitler should figure more in our teaching and scholarship. The popular (let’s call it folk) explanation of Hitler’s success is simplistic and inaccurate, but it’s powerful in that it fits with the folk explanation of persuasion, which fits with the folk explanation of what distinguishes ethical from unethical persuasion, which fits with folk notions about what constitutes good versus bad citizenship.

Talking about Hitler is a way of talking about the problems with all those mutually confirming, and similarly damaging, folk explanations.

And here a note about terminology: when I proposed this paper, I was strongly influenced by Ariel Kruglanski’s discussion of lay epistemology—that is, the common sense way that non-experts think thinking works. But, the more I worked on the issue, the more I realized that it isn’t a question of experts v. non-experts—Kenneth Burke, various scholars of demagoguery, some historians, and other experts assume the explanations I’m talking about. I came to think the better analogy is Christopher Achens and Larry Bartels’ discussion of what they call the “folk theory of democracy” which, as they point out, serves as the basis for a lot of scholarly work on political science and theory.

Here are the four folk explanations:

    • The folk explanation of what happened in Germany is that Hitler is the exemplar of a magician rhetor because he “swung a great people in his wake” (Burke 164), hypnotized the masses (and his generals, the generals claimed post-war). The disasters of Nazism are thereby explained monocausally: Hitler was a pure rhetorical agent, whose oratorical skill transformed the German people into his unthinking tools.
    • This explanation appeals to the folk explanation of persuasion, in which a rhetor determines an intention, identifies a target audience, and then creates a text that contains the desired message (often presented visually as an arrow) and shoots it at the target. If it hits, the target audience now believes what the rhetor wanted them to believe, and it was effective rhetoric. (Obviously, this reduces all public discourse to compliance gaining.)
    • Ethical rhetoric is one in which the rhetor, and the message the rhetor is sending, are ethical. And that is determined by ethical people asking themselves if the message is ethical (sometimes by whether the rhetor is ethical); Hitler’s rhetoric was unethical because it was intended to do unethical things. This is the folk explanation of the ethical/unethical distinction.
    • There are unethical rhetors out there, and, therefore, good citizens are ones who think carefully about the message being shot at them.. That is, the dominant popular way of describing and imagining participants in public deliberation is as consumers of a product—they can be savvy consumers, who think carefully about whether it really is a good product, or they can be loyal consumers, who always stick to one brand, or they can be suckers, easily duped by inferior products (and so on). Good citizens think carefully about the political messages they consume. Ethical citizens recognize an unethical rhetors and unethical messages, and resist them.

These are powerful narratives in that they enable the fantasy that each of us is a good citizen, an ethical person, who recognizes unethical arguments, and would, therefore have opposed Hitler, and continues to oppose anyone like Hitler. (Hence argumentum ad Hitlerum—it isn’t about the political figure in question; it’s about a performative of being an ethical person with good judgment.)

These models are refuted by theoretical work (e.g., Biesecker’s 1989 “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation”) or empirical work on political reasoning (e.g., the work summarized in 2013 The Rationalizing Voter). They aren’t just wrong; they’re importantly wrong. They rely on a pleasurable but entirely indefensible othering of Germans.

That’s wrong, as I’ll discuss, but it’s importantly wrong because this explanation of what happened in Nazi Germany can make people feel good about themselves while they’re replicating the errors that Germans made. It says that, if you believe you are thinking critically about what a rhetor says, you are making sure it fits with what you think is ethical, and you only put your trust in someone you think is ethical, then you will never make the mistake Germans did.

This explanation of what happened in Germany is partially the consequence of post-war renarrrations of pre-war events. Large numbers of Germans post-war claimed they didn’t know about the genocides, they had nothing to do with it, and they resisted Hitler in their hearts. The Wehrmacht officers claimed they were just following orders (sometimes unwillingly), didn’t know about the genocides, and couldn’t break their oath to Hitler. Officials of churches claimed they were the real victims, and had resisted the Nazis all along.

None of that was true. Christopher Browning (Ordinary Men), Robert Gellately (Backing Hitler), Ian Kershaw (Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution), Michael Mann (Fascists) and various other scholars have shown that participation in, support for, or pragmatic acquiescence toward the genocides, imprisonment, and war-mongering of the Nazis were considerable and often strategic and instrumental. People were not swept up by Hitler’s rhetoric. Support for the Enabling Act was a strategic gamble. Support for Hitler and the Nazis increased after he took power because people liked the improved unemployment rate, the remilitarization of Germany, the rejection of various treaties, the reassertion of German’s entitlement to European hegemony, the conservative social agenda. Ian Kershaw says,

“The feeling that the government was energetically combating the great problems of unemployment, rural indebtedness, and poverty, and the first noticeable signs of improvement in these areas, gave rise to new hopes and won Hitler and his government growing stature and prestige.” (Hitler Myth 61)

They either liked or didn’t care about the antisemitism, jailing of political opponents, politicization of the judiciary. They didn’t think Hitler was unethical, and they didn’t think his policies were unethical. Many thought he was a decisive leader who was getting things done, and many thought he was chaotic and unpredictable, but getting them what they wanted.

For instance, the Wehrmacht was not constituted of innocent victims of Hitler’s rhetoric or hopelessly bound by their oaths. As Robert Citino says, “The officers shared many of Hitler’s goals, however—defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, rearmament, restoration of Germany’s Great Power status—and they had supported him as long as his success lasted” (Last Stand 205). The officer class helped Hitler come to power in 1932-33 because

“They saw Hitler as a fellow nationalist, a bit crude, but one who could win the masses to the nationalist and conservative cause. His opposition to Marxism, his plans for German rearmament, his anti-Semitism: all these things harmonized well with the essentially premodern world view of the officer corps.” (Citino, Last Stand 211)

That he would later destroy Germany, enable the USSR to gain territory, and destroy the German officer class meant that post-war they could try to present themselves as having been victims all along—but they had helped him get into power, supported him in power, knew about the genocides, and engaged in them.

Similarly, that Hitler did, as he said he would, disempower the churches and imprison those who resisted Nazi control of the churches means that some people now try to claim that the two major confessions—Catholic and Lutheran—resisted Hitler and Nazism. But they only resisted Nazi interference in Church power, and then only fairly late. There was criticism of the euthanasia program, and some criticism of the extermination of converted Jews, but it was little and it was late. The Church Wars were about issues of Church autonomy, not genocide. Like the officer class, many Catholic and Lutheran church officials would regret having supported Hitler (many would claim that the problem wasn’t Hitler, but Nazi administrators acting on their own initiative), but support him they did. Had the Catholic party (the Centre Party) not unanimously voted for the Enabling Act, it would not have passed.

Catholics and Lutherans were concerned about reinstating the privileges reduced by the Socialist Democrats (who believed in a separation of church and state) and the political agenda they believed was the core of being “Christian”—opposition to birth control, homosexuality, abortion, pornography.

Germans were persuaded during the Nazi regime—people came to accept and act on policies they would have balked at before 1930—but not because they heard a Hitler speech and were magically hypnotized. They did so, largely for instrumental reasons.

Culturally, our discussions of Hitler are dominated by what Ian Kershaw calls “the Hitler myth”—that he was a magically charismatic leader who overwhelmed Germans’ capacity to judge. That isn’t what happened: Germans judged, and they liked what they saw.

My point is that these four folk explanations–of Hitler, persuasion, ethical rhetoric, and good citizenship– are not just inaccurate, but are inaccurate in ways that reinforce factionalism, obstructionism, and politics as performance of in-group loyalty. Talking. more about Hitler is a way to talk about what’s wrong with those explanations.

Avocado toast, Orwell, homelessness, and prosperity gospel

When I was teaching first year courses in argumentation, one of my favorite texts for sparking interesting arguments about poverty, homelessness, and working conditions was George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. His description of poverty usefully vexed a tendency to approach the issues in “liberal v. conservative” ways, and helped students move beyond thinking about an economic issue in terms of feeling or not feeling “sorry” for the homeless, let alone overworked and underpaid dishwashers. The book shifted the argument from whether the homeless are or are not “bringing it on themselves” (that is, whether their identity is villain or victim) to policy arguments about strategies. On the whole, the self-identified Christians in the classes at Berkeley tended to argue for some kind of intervention, with disagreements (even among themselves) as to what it should be. I liked that. I don’t like binaries.

I moved to a much more conservative region, and discovered the book didn’t thwart the “they brought it on themselves and therefore don’t deserve help” argument, for some self-identified Christian students. The first time it happened, the student (call zir Chester) was really angry with Orwell. Chester said something like, “Well, of course he’s homeless; he’s wasting money.” My response was, “How so?” Chester answered, “He talks about smoking, so clearly he’s spending money on cigarettes.” Other students pointed out that Orwell very clearly said he (and other “tramps” as he called them) were picking up discarded cigarette butts, and smoking them, or picking out the last bits of tobacco and re-rolling them. There was no evidence he was spending money.

Chester argued that meant that Orwell and the tramps must have been spending money on rolling paper. Some students argued that we don’t know that, but one student (call zir Hubert) said, “Even if he was, that would have been a few pennies.” Chester said, “He should have saved those pennies.” I liked Chester a lot, but at this point even I was confused—“And done what with them?” Chester said, “Save them.” Hubert asked how—Orwell couldn’t open an account with a few pennies, and it wasn’t as though he could buy stock (or whether buying stock at that point was even a smart investment—this was the 30s). Chester brushed off any of those questions about how, practically, Orwell could have taken the few pennies he might (or might not) have spent on rolling paper (or perhaps even tobacco) and invested it for financial security.

That was my first exposure to prosperity gospel.

Orwell’s situation wasn’t some consequence of his personal failings or lack of work ethic; it was the consequence of a world economic situation, and the ways his government was (or was not) responding to them. Hubert didn’t see how Orwell’s refusing to smoke would change the worldwide and systemic factors that caused homelessness and poverty—Hubert wanted to know what to do with the pennies.

The Huberts of the world now post on Facebook and tweet about how bizarre it is that some political figure argues that “millennials” or “urban poor” (do I hear whistling?) or “that person using WIC” (that whistling is really loud) or “immigrants” (why are my dogs barking?) aren’t really poor because they eat avocado toast, have nice shoes, bought chips, have i-phones.

The Huberts of the world point out that there is no practical action a person could take that would mean forgoing avocado toast, chips, i-phones, or nice shoes would enable that person to gain financial security.

But for the Chesters of the world, getting economic security isn’t an pragmatic (and economic) system of taking money from one place and investing it; it’s a spiritual system (an issue of “character” or “will”). Orwell’s mistake, for Chester, wasn’t spending money on smoking—it was smoking. Smoking is an indulgence.

In this world, smoking, avocado toast, nice shoes, chips, i-phones are all indulgences. If you are the sort of person who engages in indulgences, you will never be rewarded with wealth. Had Orwell refused to smoke, he would have … I don’t know, something. This whole way of thinking seems to be so blazingly irrational, and theologically indefensible, that I’m still unclear on the relationship of claims.

This notion that being a person who resists smoking (but doesn’t always resist sexual assault) also has to do with the current fundagelical obsession with control (largely Strict Father Morality). In this world, good people, especially good men, control their desire for indulgence (they also control others, but that’s a different post). If they are in control, they are rewarded with wealth (which, oddly enough, enables them to have all the avocado toast they want, but no one claims this ideology is internally consistent). The assumption is that being a rigid person who believes in God and engages in strict self-control means you will prosper.

So, it isn’t about what you would do with the money you saved by not smoking or not eating avocado toast. It’s about being the sort of person who doesn’t indulge in smoking or avocado toast. We don’t need an argument about avocado toast; we need an argument about prosperity gospel.

Conservative Christians’ support for Trump isn’t hypocrisy

[Image from here]

Many people are dismayed and shocked at how self-described conservative Christians are justifying our government’s heartless treatment of immigrant children. Since most (perhaps all) of these “Christians” are descendants of people who made exactly the same decision they are now characterizing as “irresponsible parenting,” it’s tempting to call their stance hypocritical.

It isn’t. There is no conflict between American conservative evangelical Christians’ support for an authoritarian, anti-democratic, corrupt, bigot and their fundamental values. Those are their values. They’ve always supported bigoted authoritarianism. They always do.

Self-identified conservatives are, as Elizabeth Theiss-Morse’s research shows, if they consider themselves patriotic, “more likely to set stricter boundaries on who counts as American and therefore  to limit who should receive the benefits of group membership.” (98) What Theiss-Morse calls “strong identifiers” (that is, people who identify strongly with their in-group)  tend to rely heavily on stereotypes about groups. So, people who self-identify as conservative evangelical Christians are more likely to believe stereotypes about out-groups (immigrants, poor people, non-whites, non-conservatives) as lazy, indulgent, weak, and therefore not deserving of support.

Self-identified conservative Christians read Scripture as advocating an us v. them attitude that calls on Christians to protect “us.” And they define “us” by political, not Scriptural, agenda. And certainly not by what Christ emphasized.

Look, for instance, at a defense  of how “evangelicals” are supporting Trump . And notice, first, that the author assumes that all evangelicals are white, and politically conservative. In other words, as I said, Brown’s sense of “us” (which he falsely identifies as evangelicals) is actually his very narrow sense of who is truly “us.” The no true Scotsman fallacy.

Brown’s argument is fallacious and authoritarian to the core. It’s also a rejection of Jesus.

Brown doesn’t think self-identifying evangelical Christians count if they don’t share his very narrow political agenda. They aren’t even in his world. He only thinks in terms of his in-group’s self-identification: as “evangelicals” who have a very specific (and very new) political agenda.

Brown admits that politically conservative white evangelicals “made a gross miscalculation” to think Trump would “change the moral fabric of the nation,” and defending Trump’s treatment toward others has “compromised [their] moral authority]”.

But, he says, ignore all that because Hillary Clinton would have made things much worse because “she would be a staunch opponent of our religious liberties, a zealous advocate for abortion, and a supporter of radical LGBT activism.”

Let’s be clear: Brown is not an advocate of religious liberty on principle. He is, as he says, concerned about “our” religious liberties (meaning his). He isn’t concerned about the religious liberties of evangelical Christians who disagree with him about politics, let alone about the religious liberties of non-Christians. Trump’s judicial appointments are doing extraordinary damage to the principle of religious liberty. But, he’s doing great for people who want the liberty to treat other religions in a way they wouldn’t want to be treated. Brown likes that.

Brown is only concerned about the very narrow “us” and he wants that “us” to be treated differently from how other groups are treated.

HRC wasn’t an advocate for abortion, and he isn’t supporting a policy agenda that would reduce abortion. Radical LGBT activism is simply his term for queer people asking that they be treated as Brown wants to be treated, that they have the same rights he does. Brown doesn’t like the idea that the government would treat others as he wants to be treated.

Jesus never mentioned abortion or homosexuality, and, as many people have shown, Scripture is more oriented toward issues of our treatment of the poor than it is about abortion or homosexuality.  As has been shown over and over, bigoted readings of clobber verses about homosexuality are incoherent.  Yet Brown never mentions anything about the poor, about a Christian attitude toward immigration, about opposition to violence and war.

Brown thinks, correctly, that Trump is promoting Brown’s very limited political agenda. Brown thinks his political agenda is evangelical Christian. That’s where he’s wrong. What Brown wants the government to do is a violation of how Jesus says we should behave.

Brown might be able to cherry-pick Scripture to argue that his political agenda is Scriptural, but he can’t cherry pick what Jesus said—he wants a government that enables him to do unto others as he would not have done unto him.

Brown’s “Christianity” is religious demagoguery. He is arguing for a government grounded in an “us” (people who think the way he does) who are privileged in every aspect and a “them” (people who disagree with him) who should be punished, marginalized, and treated differently.

Unhappily, Brown is not unusual for conservative Christianity. It’s worth remembering that conservative Christianity was on the side of slavery  segregation , and are still on the side of marital rape. Conservative Christians justified Roy Moore’s pedophilia, Trump’s sexual assaults (he bragged about watching underage girls undress), Kavanaugh’s plausible accusation of assault. They don’t really care very much about rape. They also don’t care about the poor.

Advocates of slavery and segregation, conservative Christians, sometimes (rarely) responded to progressive Christian arguments that slavery and segregation violated Christ’s “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” And their argument was always some version of why that didn’t apply, why it was less important than other cherry-picked bits from Scripture. That’s why anti-slavery and anti-segregation rhetoric posed the same assertion that enraged conservative evangelicals: they said, “I am a man.” Conservative Christians rejected that claim; they rejected Jesus’ call.

Current “conservative Christians” are the same. They still can’t defend their politics in terms of what Jesus very clearly said: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Instead, they argue that we are in a battle between good and evil that means we should reject what Jesus said in order to save “us.”

American conservative Christians have always been getting their panties in a bunch about how they are being oppressed, about how they are in an existential fight against extermination, and it’s never been true, and it’s always been in service of enacting oppressive, exclusive, and bigoted policies against some other. It’s always been in service of rejecting what Jesus very clearly said.

Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you means that you, and everyone who disagrees with you, are held to the same standards. Were conservative Christians to follow Jesus’ rule (they don’t, and they never have), then they would have to say that their desire for a “conservative evangelical” to have the “religious liberty” to preach in classrooms, would mean that they’d have to be fine with a terrorist Zoroastrian doing the same.

They aren’t okay with their very narrow understanding of Christianity being treated equally with all other religious beliefs because American conservative evangelical Christianity is, and always has been, a rejection of what Jesus’ commandment that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. American conservative evangelical Christianity has always been on the wrong side of history; it has never been about caring for the marginalized, doing unto others, abjuring violence.

Progressive Christians opposed slavery; progressive Christians opposed segregation; progressive Christians advocate effective policies regarding abortion, progressive Christians advocate compassionate and non-punitive policies about the poor, immigrants, and the marginalized. American conservative evangelical Christianity is, and always has been, about rejecting Jesus’ commandment that we do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Progressive Christians are the ones who’ve taken that seriously.

So, no, conservative evangelical “Christians”’ heartlessness about children being separated from parents isn’t hypocrisy—it isn’t a violation of their core beliefs; it’s perfectly consistent with the values they have and have always had.

ASHR talk: “Lay rhetorical theory and argumentum ad hitlerum”

[Image from here.]

Although Adolf Hitler and rhetoric are deeply entangled in popular culture, and argumentum ad hitlerum a pervasive fallacy in public discourse, there is very little recent scholarship in rhetoric about Hitler. While the reasons for avoiding Hitler are both varied and valid, in this paper I want to argue that those are also the very reasons we should be teaching, writing, and talking more about Hitler, his rhetoric, and the conditions of persuasion.

Briefly, the case of Hitler appears simultaneously too obvious and too complicated for scholars and teachers of rhetoric to pay much scholarly or pedagogical attention to him or his rhetoric. Hitler appears to be the example of the powers of bad rhetoric, a man who, in Kenneth Burke’s words, “swung a great people into his wake” (164); that is, the story of Hitler appears to confirm lay rhetorical theory’s monocausal narrative of rhetoric being a powerful rhetor whose discursive skill transforms the irrational masses into unthinking tools.

This narrative of Hitler and his rhetoric seems to confirm lay rhetorical models of persuasion, a model encapsulated in the notion of a purely agentic speaker who shoots an arrow (the message) into the head of the target audience. This model assumes an asymmetric relationship between rhetor and audience (the rhetor has the power and the audience is a passive recipient, or not, of information). This model also assumes that an “engaged” audience is not purely passive in reception, but engages critical thinking as a kind of “filter” (the metaphor often invoked) of the rhetor’s message. The role of the audience is to judge the message. That is, the dominant popular way of describing and imagining participants in public deliberation is as consumers of a product—they can be savvy consumers, who think carefully about whether it really is a good product, or they can be loyal consumers, who always stick to one brand, or they can be suckers, easily duped by inferior products (and so on).

This isn’t how communication works, as both theoretical arguments (e.g., Biesecker’s 1989 “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation”) and empirical work (especially work on confirmation bias) clearly show, but that isn’t my point. Regardless of how scholars model the complicated relationship among audiences, context, texts, and intentions, in popular culture, there is still the tendency to describe audiences using a consumer/marketing model.

Popular conceptions of Hitler fit neatly with that model—he was a witch doctor, in Burke’s terms, who sold snake oil (ignore the mixed metaphors) to a gullible and desperate audience. This (false) narrative of what went wrong in Weimar Germany ensures that people will not recognize when we are making the mistakes that Hitler’s backers made—because 1) we have defined Hitler’s supporters as hopelessly other (no one sees themselves as a potential mark), and 2) we’ve misdefined the mistakes.

argumentum ad Hiterlum is the consequence of that othering—we accuse any effective rhetor who is popular with an out-group of being Hitler. In addition, there is a kind of timelessness of judgment, and we tend to see our perceptions acontextually—we assume that we would have looked at Hitler then as we look at him now—knowing what we know now. But Hitler didn’t look like Hitler—while there was always evidence that he had genocidal, expansionist, and militaristic aims—but that rhetoric could be (and were) dismissed as mere metaphor not to be taken literally. That his arguments were, to the elite, clearly nonsensical and profoundly dishonest (perhaps delusional) meant they thought he could be easily outmaneuvered. That his arguments were, to many people (elite and non-elite), common and familar (racism, German exceptionalism, social conservatism, vague anti-elitism) meant that they thought he could be trusted to understand how common people think.

He had many arguments and qualities that made some groups uncomfortable—Nazis’ (deserved) reputation for hostility to Christianity, and Hitler’s own intermittent claims of being Christian, concerned many conservative Christians, both Lutheran and Catholic. That he would later work to reduce their power, and had plans for marginalizing the established churches entirely, makes many Christians believe they would not have supported him (there is even the blazingly counter-factual claim that Hitler did not have the support of Christians, as well as the hyperbolic claim that he “persecuted” Christians). The fact is that Christians’ support of Hitler was crucial—the Catholic Party supported “The Enabling Act” (the act that made him dictator) unanimously. (Only the Communists and Social Democrats voted against it.)

Later harassment of Christian churches made some Christians regret their support (such as Niemoller), but many found ways to dissociate the Nazi attacks on church power from Hitler himself, insisting that it must be happening without his knowledge. Christians supported Hitler; they shouldn’t have, but they did. And even those who regretted supporting him did so because of Nazi weakening of Christian power structures, not out of a principled opposition to his treatment of Jews, his authoritarian government, the abrogation of human rights, the factionalizing of the judiciary, or the expansionist and inherently genocidal war. Those who stopped supporting him did so when, as Niemoller famously said, they came for him.

Understanding why so many people supported Hitler means, not seeing his supporters as dupes blind to his obviously evil character, but understanding why people across social and educational groups very much like us thought it made sense to support him, why his rabid antisemitism, militarism, rhetoric of victimization, and history of inciting and rationalizing violence against his critics was either attractive or dismissible.

And that means understanding that Hitler didn’t rise to power primarily because of his rhetoric.

Scholars of Hitler and Nazis, while acknowledging that Hitler was an impressive public speaker, emphasize other factors as more important than his personal ability to give a great speech. These include:

    • the important role of calculated and elite support for Hitler, essentially strategic politics. von Papen and Hindenberg weren’t persuaded by Hitler’s rhetoric—they thought he was a putz who could be played;
    • the role of Nazi, rather than Hitler’s, rhetoric. Memoirs, autobiographies, and various comments—even from before backing Hitler started to look like a mistake—show that many people came to Nazism via speakers other than Hitler, or not through speeches at all (such as via newspapers and magazines, or even through a desire to participate in the violence of the Freikorps). After the Nazi takeover in 1933, much of the rhetoric that would have persuaded people originated with Streicher, Goebbels, or the army of speakers and writers—most of whom were following Goebbels’ direction, and not Hitler’s.
      Even when it was Hitler’s direction, he was persuasive, as even he acknowledged, because he could count on his base only hearing (and only listening to) his version of events. After years of presenting the Soviet Union as the materialization of the Jewish-Bolshevik threat against which Germany and Germans must be implacably opposed, in 1939, Hitler announced that the USSR was a valuable ally and trusted friend. In 1941, he insisted on an about-face from Germans once again when the USSR reverted back to the nation with whom Germany was in an apocalyptic battle. Hitler attributed his success on that (and other instances in which public opinion had to be changed quickly) to complete control of media: “We have frequently found ourselves compelled to reverse the engine and to change, in the course of a couple of days, the whole trend of imparted news, sometimes with a complete volte face. Such agility would have been quite impossible, if we had not had firmly in our grasp that extraordinary instrument of power we call the press—and known how to make use of it” (Table Talk 480-1; see also 525).
    • that much of the conversion that happened during the Nazi regime was some version of strategic acquiescence. Historians emphasize that groups like the military chose to support Hitler despite misgivings because they believed, correctly, he would build up the military and fulfill the dream of German hegemony of Europe, finally achieving what had been the territorial goals of the Great War. There remains considerable debate as to exactly how much popular backing Hitler really had, since expressing criticism was so dangerous, with scholars like Gellately arguing it was considerable and others like Kershaw arguing that coercion played an important role. But all of them agree that much of the compliance was the consequence of changes to material conditions—the (apparently) improved economy, lower unemployment, a reduction of street violence, a conservative social agenda, a more reactionary judiciary less worried about the rights of the accused, recriminalizing of abortion, homosexuality, and birth control, and just the sense that Germany was again a respected and feared power. That is, much of Hitler’s support wasn’t because of his rhetoric, but his policies. His successful acquisition of territory without provoking war was the cause of his greatest popularity (in 1939, although some put the height in 1941, when the western Blitzkrieg had done so well)—in other words, propaganda of the deed.

I’m not, like some scholars in the 80s, rejecting Hitler as a factor at all, but simply pointing out that the situation isn’t accurately described by the monocausal narrative promoted by lay rhetorical theories.

People in Germany did change their minds—it’s generally agreed that large numbers of Germans came to new positions on such questions as whether they would participate personally in genocide (Ordinary Men), the ideal relationship with the USSR, the plausibility of a two-front war, and various other points. But they didn’t do so because, believing one thing they listened to a Hitler speech and suddenly believed something else entirely. Hitler’s rhetoric was effective because (and when) it fit with things his audience already believed, needed to believe, or needed to legitimate. His rhetoric was effective because (and when) it was not unique, and he alone was not creating the wake into which Germans would be drawn.

My point is that the popular fascination with Hitler gives scholars of rhetoric the opportunity to promote, not just better understandings of Hitler, but more nuanced understandings of the complicated ways and forces that cultures change beliefs.

Why y’all should read Lilliana Mason’s _Uncivil Agreements_

The book has a lot that is of interest only to scholars, and much that is of interest only to scholars in her field, but there is a lot that is useful to everyone. I think lefties can particularly benefit because she provides empirical research to show that a lot things we tend to do will not actually help (she isn’t alone in her claims about that–she pulls together a lot of research).

The empirical research, like hers, is clear that Americans agree on policy, especially policies that would imply higher taxes for the wealthy, reasonable gun control, government-funded healthcare, and various other progressive policies. But running candidates who advocate those policies won’t work because people (including a lot of lefties) vote on the basis of partisan identification.

They cheerfully (sometimes without knowing, sometimes completely aware) vote for political figures who will enact policies they don’t want, but they do it because their side winning is more important than any policy issue.

The more people identify with a political group–the more all their various group identifications align with a political party–the more they engage in motivated reasoning. People with cross-cutting identities are more likely to engage in empathy with other groups, advocate tolerance, and be willing to argue about policy.

This is a complicated point I won’t make here, but I think her book helped me understand the very specific ways that GOP trolls and clickbait fractured the left (and are already doing so today, especially in regard to AOC). Here are some of my favorite passages.

I read Goebbels’ 1945 diary entries so you don’t have to.

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The 1978 edition (ed. Hugh Trevor-Roper) of Goebbels’ Final Entries begins in late February 1945. By that time, the Battle of the Bulge was over, and it had failed. At this point, Germans have lost Budapest, Breslau is encircled, they’re calling up women, Dresden has been firebombed, bombings of major German cities are a nightly event, American troops have reached the Rhine. It goes downhill from there.

28 February. Goebbels’ reading of the situation is that Western countries are facing a “profound political crisis” with strikes “the order of the day”–so, any minute now, the Allies will collapse.[1] That same day he expresses outrage at “bolshevist atrocities” and, after a conversation with General Vlasov about the USSR in 1941, concludes, “The Soviet Union has had to weather precisely the same crises as we are now facing and that there is always a way out of these crises if one is determined not to knuckle under them.” [Thereby ignoring that USSR got through 1941 by having moved factories, still having access to resources, getting help from the US, and having a much larger potential military force. It was not just the will.]

2 March. “We can count on major operations in the east German area being possible by the end of March” and “if all goes well we can anticipate enormous success” [which is a nice example of a tautology, and summarizes Nazi strategic thinking at this point]. Also, the situation “is not reassuring” and “In the East too operations have not gone through as we expected.” But, meanwhile, he got a lot of letters telling him he made a great speech. Oh, and he condemns Roosevelt for megalomania.

3 March. Anglo-American troops are making progress. “We had never really visualized such a course of events.” [He did another speech that went over well, though.]

4 March. The population in the West is welcoming the Anglo-American troops. “This I had really not expected.” [Later he would—in many entries– blame this problem on the Nazi leadership rejecting his argument that they should openly abrogate the Geneva Convention.] He’s reading Carlyle on Frederick the Great, and that proves it will all be fine. Oh, and a lot of people thought “four weeks ago the situation was such that the majority of military experts had given us up for lost” but Hitler sure showed them! Hitler has a bullet-proof plan: “we must somehow succeed in holding firm in the West and the East.” Hitler also hopes to open talks with some one of the Allies, but, before they could start talks, “it is essential that we score some military success.” So, it’s a clear plan: hold the line everywhere, have some major military successes, and then open talks with one of the Allies. That’ll work.

7 March. [And a lot of other entries.] Goebbels is puzzled that publicizing Soviet atrocities isn’t turning world opinion in favor of the Nazis. [This is a common plaint: why can’t people see that Nazis are the real victims here?] He’s also grumpy that a lot of the “Germans” coming in from the East don’t really look German to him. At this point, he begins to blame Goering for all of the Nazis’ problems [a nice instance of projection—yes, it’s true that Goering screwed up, but Goebbels has screwed up just as much if not more].

8 March. Goebbels makes fun of Churchill for saying the war would end in two months. [VE-Day was 8 May.] “Our sole great hope at present lies in the U-boat war.” And “Rendulic has now put things in order in East Prussia.” So, really, everything is fine.

13 March. Hitler says there are new airplanes, so it’s all good (and, besides, Hitler had been right all along about what kind of aircraft Germany should have been producing) [This topos–what really matters here is who was right–runs throughout Hitler’s deliberations with his generals, and, less so, through Goebbels’ diaries. That’s interesting.][2]

14 March. “I refuse to be deterred by reports of so-called eyewitnesses.” [Germans in the west are cheerfully welcoming Anglo-American troops.]

21 March. He and Hitler have a long talk and agree “that we must hold firm at the front and if possible score a victory in order to start talking to the enemy.” Well, as long as he and Hitler have decided that the people at the front should hold firm, it’s all good. [It’s fascinating how often Goebbels and Hitler decide that the problem can be solved by telling people to be more steadfast. Sometimes they take a lot of time to yell at people to be more steadfast. ]

22 March. “The military situation both in East and West has become extraordinarily critical; during the course of the 24 hours it has changed noticeably to our disadvantage.” [Because up to that point it was pretty good?]

23 March. “I think that my work too is no longer being totally effective today.” He was getting a lot of reports of people surrendering instead of fighting to the death for Hitler. This might cause some people to think that perhaps things were getting a little bleak for Germany. But, no, his reading of Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great shows that, although Frederick “too [who else is feeling this? Goebbels or Hitler?] sometimes felt that he must doubt his lucky star, but, as generally happens in history, at the darkest hour a bright star arose and Prussia was saved when he had almost given up all hope. Why should not we also hope for a similar wonderful turn of fortune!” So, the fact that things were going badly was proof that things would be fine! As long as you continue to beleeeeeve.

30 March. “This is the beginning of the catastrophe in the West.” He and Hitler agree on the military strategy: “we must now make every effort to re-establish a fresh front.”

31 March. He’s getting letters that are a little “despairing.” Some of them even suggest Hitler might be at fault. He blames it on Goering.

1 April. People in France, he says, must really be regretting the Allies’ success because they are facing a serious food shortage. [Did he really not know that Nazis had always been starving occupied countries? He mentions, approvingly, Hitler’s decision not to try to feed POW. He has several entries where he says that the liberated peoples must be miserable now, so maybe he really didn’t? On the other hand, he knew about Nazi extermination policies, and the extraordinary atrocities, and yet he expresses outrage at Soviet atrocities, so is all just in- v out-group?]

4 April. “We must act at once if it is not to be too late.”

It was too late in November 1941.

In other words, this is how an administration steeped in charismatic leadership and blind loyalty who believes it’s all about marketing responds to failure. They never learn. They never start behaving rationally.

Never. They will take everyone down with them.

[1] Editors of Goebbels’ diaries always have to decide what to do about the fact that he is writing the next day about what happened the previous. So, on February 28, he wrote about what happened on the 27th (“yesterday” in Goebbels’ words). Some editors (e.g., Fred Taylor, who edited Goebbels’ 1939-41 entries) keep Goebbels’ dates, but Trevor-Roper doesn’t. I’ve used Trevor-Roper’s dates.

[2] This is also the entry where Goebbels makes clear that it was genocide, and he knew it, and he was happy about it: “Anyone in a position to do so should kill the Jews off like rats. In Germany, thank God, we have already done a fairly complete job. I trust that the world will take its cue from this.”

Trump and the long con

One of the paradoxes of con artists is that cons always depend on appealing to the mark’s desire for a quick and easy solution but the most profitable cons last a long time. How do you keep people engaged in the scam if you’re siphoning off their money?  

There are several ways, but one of the most common is to ensure that they’re getting a quick outcome that they like. They’ll often wine and dine their marks, thereby coming across as too successful to need the mark’s money, and also increasing the mark’s confidence (and attachment). They might be supporting that high living through bad checks, but more often with credit cards and money from previous marks, or by getting the mark to pay for the high living without knowing. One serial confidence artist who specialized in picking up divorced middle-aged women on the Internet was particularly adept at stealing a rarely-used credit card from the women while they were showering. He then simply hid the bills when they arrived.

Because he seemed to have so much money, the women assumed he wouldn’t be scamming them, and would then hand over their life’s savings for him to invest.

They do this despite there being all sorts of good signs that the guy is a con artist–his life story seems a little odd, he doesn’t seem to have a lot of friends who’ve known him very long, there’s always some reason he can’t write checks (or own a home or sign a loan). There are three reasons that the con works, and that people ignore the counter-evidence.

First, cons flatter their marks, arguing that the marks deserve so much more than they’re getting, and persuade the marks to have confidence in them. They will tell the marks that those people (the ones who are pointing to the disconfirming data) look down on them, think they’re stupid, and think they know better. The con thereby gets the mark’s ego associated with his being a good person and not a con artist—admitting that he is a con means the mark will have to admit that those people were right.[1] The con artist will spin the evidence in ways that show he’s willing to admit to some minor flaws, ones that make the mark feel that she can really see through him. She knows him.[2]

Second, the con works because we don’t like ambiguity, and we tend to privilege direct experience and our own perception. The reasons to wonder about whether a man really is that wealthy are ambiguous, and it’s second order thinking (thinking about what isn’t there, about the absence of friends, family, connections, bank statements). That ambiguous data will seem less vivid, less salient, less compelling than the direct experience we have of his buying us expensive gifts. The family thing is vague and complicated; the jewelry is something we can touch.

Third, people who dislike complexity, who believe that most things have simple solutions, and that they are good at seeing those simple solutions are easy marks because those are precisely the beliefs to which cons appeal. Admitting that the guy is a con artist means admitting that the mark’s whole view of life—that the world has simple solutions, that people are what they seem to be, that you can trust your gut about whether someone is good or bad, that things you can touch (like jewelry) matter.

And it works because the marks don’t realize that they are the ones who’ve actually paid for that jewelry.

There are all the signs of his being a con artist—all the lawsuits, all the lies, the lack of transparency about his actual wealth, the reports that show a long history of dodgy (if not actively criminal) tax practices, the evidence that shows his wealth was inherited and not earned—but those are complicated to think about. Trump tells people that he cares about them; he (and his supportive media) tell their marks that all the substantive criticism is made by libruls who look down on them, who think they know better. The media admits to a few flaws, and spins them as minor.

Trump is a con artist, and his election was part of a con game about improving his brand. But, once he won the election, he had to shift to a different con game, one that involved getting as much money for him and his corporations as possible, reducing accountability for con artists, holding off investigations into his financial and campaign dealings, and skimming.

 And Trump gives his marks jewelry. If you have Trump supporters in your informational world, then you know that they respond to any criticism of Trump with, “I don’t care about collusion; I care about my lower taxes.” (Or “I care about the economy” or “I care that someone is finally doing something about illegal immigrants.”) They have been primed to frame concerns about Trump as complicated, ambiguous, and more or less personal opinion, but the benefit of Trump (to them) as clear, unambiguous, and tangible.

 They can touch the jewelry.

And they don’t realize that he isn’t paying for it; he never paid for it, and he never will. They’re paying for it. They bought themselves that jewelry.

There are, loosely, three ways to try to get people to see the con. First, I think it’s useful not to come across as saying that people are stupid for falling for Trump’s cons (although it can be useful to point out that current defenses of Trump are that he’s too stupid to have violated the law). It can be helpful to say that you understand why he and his policies would seem so attractive, but point out that he’s greatly increased the deficit (that his kind of tax cuts always increase the deficit). It’s helpful to have on hand the data about how much “entitlement”programs cost. Point out that they will be paying for his tax cuts for a long, long time.

Another strategy is to refuse to engage and just keep piling on the evidence. People get persuaded that they’ve been taken in by a con artist incident by incident. It isn’t any particular one, but that there are so many, and they reject each one as it comes along. So, I think that sharing story after story about how corrupt Trump is, how bad his policies are,and what damage he is doing—even if (especially if) people complain about your doing so—is effective in the long run.

Third, when people object or defend Trump, ask them if they’re getting their information from sources that would tell them if Trump were a con artist. They’ll respond with, “Oh, so I should watch MSNBC” (or something along those lines) and the answer is: “Yes, you should watch that too.” Or, “No, you shouldn’t get your news from TV.” Or a variety of other answers, but the point is that you aren’t telling them to switch to “librul” sources as much as getting more varied information. 

Con artists create a bond with their marks—their stock in trade is creating confidence. They lose power when their marks lose confidence, and that happens bit by bit. And sometimes it happens when people notice the jewelry is pretty shitty, actually.

[1]This is why it’s so common for marks to start covering for the con when the con gets exposed. They fear the “I told you so” more than the consequences of getting conned.

[2] In other words, con artists try to separate people from the sources of information that would undermine the confidence the mark has in the con.