Imagine that we work at a charity together, and I advocate a policy that will actively hurt what we claim we’re trying to do—and the research is clear on that—and I say that I’m advocating this policy because it will get me in good with the boss. Actually making our world better and helping the people we claim to want to help is less important to me than getting in good with the boss. You’d decide I’m a narcissistic jerk. That would be a correct inference.
People who want to criminalize abortion, who have never advocated the policies that actually reduce abortion, aren’t actually concerned about abortion. We could reduce abortion if we offered easy access to cheap and effective birth control, offered accurate sex education, had universal health care, publicly supported childcare, reasonable parental leave. When I point out to people who advocate criminalizing abortion (and birth control) that there are other methods more effective at reducing abortion, they say that they are more opposed to those policies than they are to abortion.
I want to stop here for a moment. They pass by that quickly, but it’s actually really important. They’re fine with women dying from unsafe abortions. They’d rather have that outcome than women having access to effective to birth control.
So, let’s do the math. Reducing abortion is not their highest priority. They aren’t actually trying to reduce abortion. They are only opposed to safe abortions. More concerning, they are more opposed to women having access to safe birth control (and the various social safety nets) than they are to abortion.
In my experience, what they say is that they are more concerned with doing what God wants than with actually reducing teen pregnancy (Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming talks about this, see especially 135-6). They think God wants them to lie (that is, say things that are factually untrue but true to their policy agenda), and that God doesn’t care if that lying means people get pregnant, spread STD, or otherwise suffer in ways they wouldn’t have if they had been given good information and good healthcare.
As a Christian, I’ll engage in an aside, and say that, when I argue with people like this, they can never reconcile what they’re doing with Jesus saying “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” They can’t imagine a God who wants everyone held to the same standards; they seem to imagine God as someone just like them, with all their petty hatreds, grievances, and in- out-group affiliations but with superpowers. They think God wants them to reward their in-group and punish their out-group; that is, treat the out-group in ways we would never want to be treated.
And, just to be clear: they want to criminalize abortion, not reduce it. This is about people wanting to believe that what they’re doing is so right that it will get them good with God, even if it means tragedy for all sorts of people. They don’t care about those other people. They think God doesn’t. They think God only care about them. Their personal relationship with Jesus is an eighth-grade Mean Girl relationship that involves bonding with God on how much they hate someone else.
I think they’re wrong about God giving them moral license. I think God cares about the people they want punished and the tragedies they know they’re causing. I think they’re narcissistic fucks just looking out for themselves, so concerned about their own salvation that they are sociopathic about the people their policies hurt. I think they’re worse than the people more concerned about their own purity than they were about helping a bleeding stranger.
Once again, a mass shooting, and, once again, a committed unwillingness or inability to deliberate sensibly about our policy options regarding gun violence. The most common narrative–and most damaging–is that we are at impasse because the issue is a zero-sum battle between two essentially hostile groups (“pro- v. anti-gun” or “pro- v. anti-gun control). The NRA, for instance, says that this (actually complicated) issue is a binary of people who are pro- or anti-gun. They claim that “pro-gun” is the same group as “gun owners.” They tell their base that gun owners are facing a binary: either support the NRA, or Obama personally kicks down your doors and takes all your guns.
All major media endorses that false binary and the resulting false narrative.
To the extent that media frame issues about gun ownership as pro- or anti-gun (or gun control), they endorse the NRA narrative.
This binary is false, and doesn’t describe our situation at all. The more we think our world is made up of two groups–people who want all the guns in all the hands and all the places, and a group that wants no guns of any kind for anyone or anywhere–the more we are going to stay caught in a trap we’ve set for ourselves. And that benefits the NRA, and guarantees lots more mass shooters.
In fact, the NRA does not represent gun owners–it has much more extreme stances on all sorts of policy questions about access to guns than most gun owners–but gun owners do tend to believe NRA demagoguery about the opposition wanting to take all their guns. Thus, to the extent that media describe our policy discourse about gun ownership as pro- or anti– (and especially pro- or anti-“guns”), it helps the NRA in its demagoguery.
There is a tendency to assume that, when it comes to gun violence, we have a polarized public. One side is reasonable, principled, and caring, and the other is irrational, intransigent, and extremist. Oddly enough, everyone agrees that’s the situation (it isn’t), but, if we agree that’s the situation then we just fight about who is sensible.
In pro-NRA rhetoric, gun owners are reasonable, and anyone who wants any kind of restrictions on gun ownership is in the group of irrational and fearful extremist. NRA rhetoric characterizes “gun control advocates” as “anti-gun,” who want to criminalize all gun ownership and repeal the Second Amendment. Any change in gun policies other than more guns is a step on a slippery slope to the world of Obama kicking in your door to take your guns. Many critics of the NRA accept the false premise of two groups, and simply flip the characterizations. They paint gun owners as irrational extremists who need guns because they are fearful and fragile, whereas gun control advocates are rational and realistic. As long as we begin with the false assumption that “the” gun debate is a battle between two groups, we’ll waste all our time arguing which one is the irrational one instead of reducing gun violence.
That media, all media, frame our complicated disagreements about policies as a binary of identities means that they are endorsing the NRA argument that this is an existential battle between people who own guns and people who want them banned.
If we focus on policies instead of thinking about this issue about identity, then two things immediately become clear. First, in terms of policy affiliation, there is not a zero-sum war between a group that wants no restrictions on gun ownership and another that wants no gun ownership at all. In fact, the majority of gun owners are advocates of gun control.
As numerous polls show, gun owners overwhelming support some restrictions on gun ownership. A 2017 poll by the Pew Research Center (“Views on gun policy”) shows that approximately 80% of the gun owners polled support background checks, preventing the mentally ill, people on watch lists, and people on no-fly lists from buying guns. Only 33% of gun owners endorsed permit-less concealed carry. Michael Siegel and Claire Boine’s The Meaning of Guns to Gun Owners in the US(2020) shows similar levels of support for restricting gun ownership for the mentally ill, as well as for people at risk for suicide, or with certain kinds of criminal records; A majority support “red flag” laws, and background checks. As Boines and Siegel say, “The majority of gun owners supported every policy for which they primary aim was to keep firearms out of the hands of people at high risk for violence.”
In other words, most “gun owners” are “gun control advocates.” It isn’t a binary.
The second point follows from the first. The NRA’s policy agenda of responding to gun violence by getting more people to buy more guns does not represent the views of gun owners. Gun owners and the NRA are not a homogeneous group, despite what it (and too many of its critics) say. The binary of irrational gun owners who want all the guns for all the people in all the places versus sensible people who want some restrictions is also a false binary.
If most gun owners are gun control advocates, why don’t we have the policies about which there is so much disagreement? And the answer is demagoguery. While the majority of gun owners reject the NRA’s policy agenda, they believe its representation of the Other.
According to Boines and Siegel, “the majority of gun owners have accepted the NRA’s rhetoric that the ultimate aim of firearm violence prevention advocates is to take away their guns and eliminate the Second Amendment.” If gun owners believe that there are only “two sides” on “the” issue of gun violence, then they are unlikely to advocate the policies they actually want, since those policies would seem to be letting anti-gun extremists win a skirmish. And, to the extent that advocates of restrictions on gun ownership accept the false binary of identity, the fears of gun owners are confirmed.
We don’t step out of this trap by trying to understand the Other side better, or attributing better motives to Them, or any other approach that assumes the problem is hostility and misunderstanding between two groups of people. We stay out of the trap by understanding that reducing gun violence means enacting policies and funding programs about which we can agree.
[There’s a longer, and more sourced, version of this argument in Rhetoric and Guns.]
Imagine that, despite your spouse’s resistance, you took a big risk, and moved cross-country to take a relatively specialized job with a high salary, pressuring your spouse to give up a good job they can’t get back. You spent everything on buying a house at a price you later realized was inflated, and then you discover it’s a toxic af workplace, and staying there will probably kill you.
You might try to talk to someone at work, but in a toxic workplace, that might cost you your job. It’s the kind of place that fires people who are looking for other jobs, so if you look for another job you might get fired. If you quit or get fired you might be able to find another job, but definitely not one that pays as much, so you’ll have to sell the house. You can, at best, sell the house for what you paid, so it will cost you money to sell the house, money you don’t have.
You can keep adding details–my point is simply to imagine (or remember) being in a bad situation that has a lot of possible solutions, and all of the possible solutions have high costs. What we tend to do in that situation is: nothing.
If we’re facing a problem, and we don’t like any of our available options for solving it, then we find ways to deflect thinking about it pragmatically. We don’t want to think about it at all. It’s as though we’re swatting away even considering that it’s a big problem about which we have to make some uncomfortable decisions. And that’s our situation with gun violence.
We know how mass murders happen. Troubled men (not necessarily ones who were bullied, by the way) get access to fast-firing and powerful weapons, and get access to a community that valorizes mass murderers. They believe that engaging in mass murder will gain them fame and admiration. Sometimes a person with violent tendencies is threatened with losing everything and decides to harm the people or person whom they irrationally blame (the situation in many workplace or domestic violence shootings). Sometimes the guns are illegally obtained or modified, but not always. Sometimes they’re weapons that used to be illegal (e.g., assault weapons), but not always.
Given that the situations are very different, there is no one solution that will solve all of them. Deliberative cowards say, “Welp, nothing we can do then.” But they don’t say that about other social problems, and that’s how all political problems work—there are always multiple contributing factors. Fatal car accidents have a lot of causes, and we haven’t chosen, as a culture, to say, “Welp, nothing we can do then”.
We identify the various causes (unsafe drivers, roads, and cars), and pass laws that regulate the drivers, roads, and cars. And we provide the resources necessary to enforce those regulations. There are still fatal car accidents, but far fewer than if we didn’t try to do anything.
Similarly, sometimes people say that the real issue is that the murderers are mentally ill, or that they were bullied. Were the people saying this genuinely concerned about mass murders, then they’d promptly advocate significant changes to our mental health policies, or how we handle bullying in schools. But they don’t. They don’t because both of those options would cost a considerable amount of money. Advocating the necessary expenditure would alienate the “starve the government” bloc of the GOP, as well as the people opposed to delinking health care from having a job (since people who are seriously mentally ill tend not to be able to keep a job). It would mean advocating a massive social safety net, which is about as popular with GOP voters as an abortionplex.
Sometimes people say that we have mass murders because our culture has turned from God, and they cite something they don’t like (tolerance of homosexuality, respecting the First Amendment) as an example of our cultural sinfulness. So, they wash their hands of the deaths of children when it comes to shooting. But they don’t say, “Oh, welp, abortion is just a consequence of our declining morals.” They haven’t spent the last fifty years just sending thoughts and prayers about abortion. They passed laws, violated democratic norms to get a favorable SCOTUS, and voted. They acted strategically to get abortion criminalized. If they really cared about mass murders they could act strategically to end them.
There are some fairly straightforward policies that we could deliberate. We could discuss spending the money necessary to enforce existing laws, restricting access to or banning weapons that are useful for mass murders, criminalizing the irresponsible storage of weapons, reducing bullying, requiring background checks, spending the money that would ensure people with serious mental health issues can get help. Any GOP politician who even talked about considering any of those policies would be making a career-ending move.
GOP politicians aren’t willing to be rational or principled when it comes to gun violence because they don’t really care enough about mass murders of children to take the electoral and media hit that would be the consequence of their being principled.
They’re more afraid of deliberation than they are of children being shot.
It wasn’t particularly hard to predict that mask-wearing would become a point of contention—considering that our culture of demagoguery weaponizes choices as small as the color of a tie, and that Trump was insistent on associating mask-wearing with weakness. What was somewhat surprising was that the issue wasn’t completely factionalized—that is, mask-wearing became a controversy in communities we don’t necessarily associate with Trump or the Republican Party, such as the wellness community.
In the abstract for this talk, I said that mask wearing was politicized, but that’s wrong—it was depoliticized, in the sense that it was removed from the realm of policy deliberation, and became a performance of in-group identity. There were a lot of factors that contributed to that outcome, but one especially popular explanation is that too many people rejected the advice of experts, instead relying on media pundits, youtube celebrities, or their own strong convictions. I think that explanation is inaccurate and unhelpful; in fact, I’m going to argue that it’s grounded in a way of thinking about knowledge, discourse, and authority that is the source of the problem.
On the contrary, I think the problem was too many people—not necessarily from just one place on the political spectrum—approached the issue from the perspective of what I’ve awkwardly termed “authoritarian libertarianism.” I’m not wed to the term, but also not wild about some of the other available terms.
This paper has two parts—for most of it, I’ll explain what I mean by authoritarian libertarianism, and then I’ll explain why I don’t think it’s usefully characterized as either anti-intellectualism or a kind of populism.
Authoritarian libertarianism uses a rhetoric of freedom and liberty to advocate and enforce policies of control, forcing everyone to abide by what in-group authorities determine is correct behavior and belief. I don’t think the rhetoric is necessarily insincere. My favorite example of authoritarian libertarianism is how the Massachusetts Bay Colony defended its practice of punishing, expelling, and sometimes hanging dissenters as consistent with the “freedom of conscience” guaranteed in its charter. John Cotton’s 300-page The Bloudy Tenent, Washed and Made White in the Bloud of the Lambe (1647), for instance, argued that forcing a person to do what Cotton believed right was not a violation of their conscience, but was allowing them to follow their conscience.
The assumption that he and others made is that there is not really any disagreement about what is right or wrong—a person might be momentarily mistaken (“in error” he says) but will recognize their belief as wrong as soon as they are told so by an authority. If they “persist” in error, they are persisting in doing something even they know to be wrong. (1 Timothy 5:20 is usually the proof-text cited: “As for those who persist in sin, rebuke them in the presence of all, so that the rest may stand in fear.”) As long as someone persists in error, they can be forcibly silenced. Freedom of conscience, for Massachusetts Bay authorities like Cotton, was the freedom to submit to their authority.
This isn’t a disagreement about freedom, but about knowledge—authoritarian libertarianism presumes that determining what’s right is straightforward. And here we get entangled in popular understandings of authority and expertise. As Johanna Hartelius has shown, the expert/expertise connection is complicated and varied, and shouldn’t be seen as question of identity, but of relation. Expertise is not an object or epistemic quality experts autonomously posess, but, as she says, “a social and symbolic process, a relational logic at once real and imagined, theoretical and pragmatic” (164). If you accept her argument, and I think it’s a good one, then being an expert and being right are not synonymous—people, including experts, might be mistaken. If, however, you listen to a lot of popular discourse, the assumption for many—not everyone—is that an expert is right, and the right person is the expert. The term “expert” isn’t always used; sometime “authority” or “prophet” might be the preferred term.
Many people explain the controversy over masks in a simple binary of right and wrong—people refused to listen to what authorities said, and instead relied on amateurs. This explanation is often associated with the narrative of fall—there was a time when people listened to authorities and we no longer do. I think this is wrong on both counts. People who refused to wear masks did listen to authorities—they assessed authority differently. To give just one example: some people believe that God is a micromanager, and so that every thing that happens is because he is willing it in that moment. For them, covid is a religious—not medical—issue. So, for them, the relevant expertise is not epidemiology but prophecy.
I’m not saying looking at covid that way is just as valid as seeing it as a public health issue (it isn’t), but I am saying that telling them to listen to experts isn’t an effective rhetorical or deliberative strategy. They believe they are.
And, really, expert discourse doesn’t have an unblemished history when it comes to decision making. Eugenics was the mainstream discourse of experts who had all the right degrees, and it legitimated forced sterilization, segregation, racist immigration policies, criminalizing inter-racial marriage (Jackson). When I point that out to people who tell me that the problem is that people no longer defer to authorities, they say that the people advocating racialist science weren’t real authorities because they were wrong (i.e., no true Scotsman).
The notion that we should simply do what experts say—Cotton’s argument—denies that experts disagree, and that any major policy decision requires people with wildly different areas of expertise (in the case of masks, constitutional law specialists, epidemiologists, historians, communication scholars, public health scholars). It also denies that coming to the optimal policy doesn’t mean doing The Right Thing, but deliberating about options. And there were and are rarely two.
The fantasy that many people have is that reliable expertise is an identity issue—the “autonomous” model of authority (Hartelius). People believe that we can assess reliability instantly, or with some quick checks of credentials. The Stanford Project on “Evaluating Information” shows that students, even with good instructions to do otherwise, try to assess the credibility of an argument without going “beyond the site itself” (Wineburg et al. 5). Students believe they can assess the reliability of an argument on the basis of whether it looks true, is easy to understand, has statistics (McGrew et al. 4-5).
Checklists—much like the ones we give students in classes—may make the situation worse, because they encourage students to try to assess an argument autonomously. I don’t mean that in the way that Hartelius uses the term, but in the sense used by advocates of New Criticism; that is, treating a text as an autonomous mobile floating in space. McGrew et al. show that, not only is this how many students assess credibility, because it’s what checklists advocate, but so do many professors: “College students and even professors approached websites using checklist-like behaviors: they scanned up and down pages, they commented on site design and fancy logos, they noted “.org” domain names, and they examined references at the bottom of a web article. They often spent a great deal of time reading the article, evaluating the information presented, checking its internal logic, or comparing what they read to what they already knew. But the “close reading” of a digital source, the slow, careful, methodical review of text online—when one doesn’t even know if the source can be trusted (or is what it says it is)—proves to be a colossal waste of time.” (8) Achen and Bartels’ research similarly shows that beliefs are partisan, and that we tend to assess information through partisan lenses—regardless of how well-educated we are, or how much we think we are logical—in conditions when asked to treat an argument autonomously. The subjects for their studies included faculty—this is not something only They do. Ryan Skinnell, using a more nuanced reading of “logos” than is in many textbooks (it is not the same as what we call “logic”), points out that an argument can seem perfectly “logical” simply because we agree with the major and minor premises: “If you accept the stated premise (children are being held as sex slaves in the basement of a pizza parlor), as well as an unstated premise (it is reasonable for an individual to take up arms to confront what they believe is injustice), then the logic of the argument is perfectly reasonable—even eminently moral.” (561) Assessing arguments as though they were autonomous mobiles in space, and as though expertise is autonomously determined, keeps us free to believe what we already believe.
I’m not using the term “authoritarian” in the sense that Bob Altemyer or the Frankfurt School use it—as an ideology—nor to refer to a kind of regime (as political scientists sometimes use the term). I mean authoritarian as a model of public discourse. Experts—real experts—speak the truth; and normal people (those whose perception isn’t blinded by bias) recognize what they’re saying as true. Thus, credible authorities are always in-group, and always confirming and conforming to in-group beliefs. People who rejected the expertise of epidemiologists believed that scholars with degrees from impressive places who were repeating the major scholarly consenses were only really experts if they were in-group.
This way of thinking about truth, authority, and public discourse isn’t circular as much as a Mobius strip. We should do what authorities say because they speak the Truth; we know they’re speaking the Truth because they’re authorities, and we know they’re authorities because what they’re saying is True. True statements about the world are true on their face, and while the explanation for why they’re true might be complicated (as in some conspiracy theories) there is still the instant resonance that signals Truth. Thus, deliberation is not only unnecessary, but actively dangerous because it’s likely to confuse issues. The more voices there are in the argument, the more likely people will fall for false prophets.
Cotton exemplifies this authoritarian model of public discourse, but this view is not necessarily religious. Secular figures like Richard Dawkins or Donald Trump appeal to it; it’s popular in management literature obsessed with “decisiveness” and charismatic leadership; of course it’s part of cults, and cult-like organizations. Just as it isn’t necessarily religious, it isn’t necessarily political. At least as described in Bad Blood, Theranos was a highly authoritarian organization that described itself as a place of creativity and innovation—that is, freedom. To the extent that it’s a model of political authority and discourse, it isn’t restricted to one place on the political spectrum, nor is it evenly distributed.
But, there do tend to be political implications. Authoritarian libertarianism says that, because we can cite true authorities to support our position, we don’t have to engage in argumentation; we don’t have to deliberate with people who disagree. At its best, it says that we have moral license to disenfranchise some groups; at its worst, it says we have a moral obligation to silence them. So, as with the Massachusetts Bay Colony, communities in which authoritarian libertarianism is dominant often end up with frequent expulsions and witch hunts.
I’ve used the term “expert,” but that isn’t always the term that is used. In fact, many authoritarian libertarians believe that experts—that is, scholars whose expertise comes from deep learning and who present themselves as advocating a scholarly consensus—are blinded or confused by too much learning. For that reason, this way of thinking about discourse and decision-making is sometimes called anti-intellectualism. I’m dubious about that term, though, because many of the people who advocate authoritarian libertarianism present themselves as intellectual, and are proud of their learning. David Duke still brags about his PhD., and as Kiara Walker points out in her dissertation, Richard Spencer bragged during testimony in his recent civil trial that he’d read “quite a bit of Jacques Barzun” and “so much philosophy” (22).
This model is also sometimes called populism because the distinction between those who should be followed and those who should be rejected is so often associated with imagining that the world is broken into a hostile binary of authentic (i.e., directly connected to truth) and corrupt (both dishonest and misled). Cass Mudde defines populism as “an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people” (Mudde 2004, 543, qtd. in Handbook 29). In populism, the people v. elite is not necessarily a distinction of class or education. What distinguishes the two groups, according to Mudde, is morality. Someone might be tremendously wealthy or well-educated, and still be “of the people” because they are simply authentic people who got rich or went to school: “The essence of the people is their purity, in the sense that they are ‘authentic,’ while the elite are corrupt, because they are not authentic. Purity and authenticity are not defined in (essentially) ethnic or racial terms, but in moral terms. It is about ‘doing the right thing,’ which means doing what is right for all the people.” (Handbook 31) “All the people” is not an empirical claim, but a circular and essentialist one—“the people” being in-group (since they are the only people that really count).
Paul Johnson’s recent and wonderful book I the People makes an elegant case for what he calls “conservative populism,” an ideology that is similarly muckled in terms of domination, submission, and freedom. So, populism might be a better term than authoritarian libertarianism, but I’m not sure. Johnson’s book ties the authoritarianism he’s describing to conservative ideology, and what I’m awkwardly calling authoritarian libertarianism is all over the political spectrum, and often used in non-political situations.
In addition, some of the people who use this approach are openly elite, such as John Cotton or Richard Dawkins, who have fairly nasty things to say about the masses. Cults and authoritarian religions sometimes have a rhetoric of an elect, and various kinds of paternalistic organization or political structures assume an authoritarian system that frees others through control (I’m thinking of Erich Fromm’s argument in Escape from Freedom). I think we should be careful about overextending the concept of populism because it is such a useful one—if every movement is populism, then the term loses its explanatory force.
Although I think it matters what we call it, as I said, I’m not wed to the term. What seems important to me is that we recognize that there is an approach to authority and discourse that is damaging to deliberation, and to which we are all prone. (I cringe to think about how often I probably posted or shared something about what idiots people were for rejecting expertise.) Any term that invites us to see this as something They do is just repeating the same mistake.
I’m also not saying that all experts are equally reliable, and that everyone “has a right” to their own authorities. I mean we do have a right to our own authorities—what would it mean not to have a “right” to an authority?—I’m not talking about rights. I’m making a very pragmatic argument about rhetoric.
It doesn’t work to tell people that they’re wrong to ignore authorities when they think they’re paying attention to true authorities. If we describe the problem with any public policy as a binary of people who did or didn’t submitting to authority, we have a damaging model of authority. What I want to emphasize is that the whole issue of mask wearing got caught in machinery of a system that expels disagreement and deliberation in favor of a binary of us and them. And so we spent and spend a lot of time arguing about whose authorities were or are really authoritative, by which we mean who is in-group and who is out-group—to whom should we submit. And I think that was a mistake. I think that’s the wrong argument.
Achen, Christopher H. and Larry M. Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. Print.
Cotton, John, and Roger Williams. The Bloudy Tenent, Washed and Made White in the Bloud of the Lambe … Wherein the Great Questions of This Present Time Are Handled, Viz. How Farre Liberty of Conscience Ought to Be Given to Those That Truly Feare God? And How Farre Restrained to Turbulen by John Cotton … London: Printed by Matthew Symmons for Hannah Allen …, 1647. Web. Accessed May 16, 2022..
Hartelius, Johnann. Rhetoric of Expertise. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022, Print.
Jackson, John P. Science for Segregation : Race, Law, and the Case Against Brown V. Board of Education. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Print.
Johnson, Paul Elliott. I the People : The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States. 1st ed. University of Alabama Press, 2022. Print.
Mcgrew, Sarah et al. “The Challenge That’s Bigger Than Fake News: Civic Reasoning in a Social Media Environment.” American educator 41.3 (2017): 4–. Print.
Mudde, Cass. “Population: An Ideational Approach.” The Oxford Handbook of Populism / Edited by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo and Pierre Ostiguy. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2017. Print. 27-47.
Richard Spencer testimony. Sines, et al. v. Kessler, et al., 3:17CV72, 11/5/2021 https://files.integrityfirstforamerica.org/14228/1639753607-2021-nov-5-moon-sines-v-kessler-317cv72-cvl-jt-day10-final.pdf
Skinnell, Ryan. “Teaching Writing in the (New) Era of Fake News.” College composition and communication 72.4 (2021): 546–569. Print.
Wineburg, Sam, et al. Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Online Civic Literacy: Executive Summary. Stanford History Education Group, 2016.
from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToLdVCb1ezI
[Another paper from the Rhetoric Society of America conference. For the conference, the paper is titled : “The ‘War on Christians’ and Preventive War.”]
This panel came about because of our shared interest in the paradox that advocates of reactionary ideologies often use a rhetoric of return in service of radically new policies and practices. Sometimes they’re claiming to return to older practices that either never existed or that are not the same as what is now being advocated, and sometimes they’re claiming that their new policies are a continuation of current practice when they aren’t. It’s not a paradox that reactionary pundits and politicians would use appeals to the past in order to argue for a reactionary agenda—in fact, pundits and politicians all over the political spectrum use a mythical past to argue for policies, and, if anything, it makes more sense for reactionaries to do it than progressives—the tension comes from appealing to a false past as though it were all the proof one needs to justify unprecedented policies.
The false past is somewhat puzzling in various ways. It’s sometimes about apparently trivial points, such as the myth that everyone used to say “Merry Christmas!” It’s frequently appealing to a strange sense of timelessness, in which words like “Christian” or “white” have always had exactly the same meaning that they do now. It’s sometimes self-serving to the point of silliness– the plaint that “kids these days” are worlds worse than any previous generation. The evidence for these claims is often nothing more than hazy nostalgia for the simple world of one’s youth, so that the fact that as children we were unaware of crime and adultery is taken as proof that they didn’t happen in those days.
At first, when I started running across this odd strategy, I thought the rhetoric of return was essentially a kind of rhetorical diversionary tactic, born of necessity. People are naturally resistant to new policies, especially people likely to be attracted to reactionary ideologies, and engaging in reasonable policy argumentation is hard, especially if you don’t have a very good policy. People rarely demand that a policy be defended through argumentation if it’s the status quo, or a return to past successful policy, and that kind of makes sense. What that audience tendency means is that a rhetor who wants to evade the responsibilities and accountability of policy argumentation can try to frame their new policy as a return to a previously successful one or a continuation of the status quo. This is nostalgia as a diversion from deliberation and argumentative accountability.
But I now think that’s only part of it.
I think it’s a rhetorical strategy oriented toward radicalizing an audience in order to persuade them to engage in a preventive and absolute war, thereby granting in-group rhetors complete moral and rhetorical license. I’m arguing that there is a political strategy with four parts. Reactionary rhetors strategically falsify the past and/or present such that some practice (e.g., celebrating Christmas as we do now) is narrated as something all Americans have always done, and therefore as constituting America. Another strategy is to insist that “liberals” are at war with “America,” as evidenced by their determination to exterminate those mythically foundational practices (such as celebrating Christmas). Because liberals are trying to exterminate America, the GOP should respond with preventive and absolute war—normal political disagreement is renarrated as a zero-sum war in which one or the other group must be exterminated. The goal of those three strategies is to gain the moral and rhetorical license afforded by persuading a base that they are existentially threatened.
I. Strategic Nostalgia
Take, for instance, abortion. The GOP is not proposing returning to the world pre- Roe v. Wade; they are advocating a radically new set of policies, much more extreme than were in place in 1972. In 1972, thirteen states allowed abortion “if the pregnant woman’s life or physical or mental health were endangered, if the fetus would be born with a severe physical or mental defect, or if the pregnancy had resulted from rape or incest” (Guttmacher). Abortion was outright legal in four states. And while it was a hardship, it was at least possible for women to travel to those states and get a legal abortion.
GOP state legislatures are not only criminalizing abortion in all circumstances, even if forcing a woman to continue with a nonviable pregnancy is likely to kill her, but criminalizing miscarriage, criminalizing (or setting bounties for) getting medical treatment (or certain forms of birth control) anywhere, even where it’s legal. And it’s clear that a GOP Congress will pass a Federal law prohibiting abortion under all circumstances, as well as many forms of birth control, in all states. They are not proposing a return.
Or, take another example. In 2003, the Bush Administration proposed a radically new approach in international relations—at least for the post-war US—preventive war. But, as exemplified in Colin Powell’s highly influential speech to the UN (Oddo), this new approach was presented as another instance of preemptive war (the basis of Cold War policy).
II. Preventive War
To explain that point, I need to talk about kinds of war. When rhetors are advocating war, they generally claim it’s one of four kinds: self-defense, preemptive, preventive, and conquest. Self-defense, when another nation has already declared war and is invading, is a war of necessity. The other three are all wars of choice, albeit with different degrees of choice. A preemptive war is when one nation is about to be attacked and so strikes first—it’s preemptive self-defense against imminent aggression. A preventive war “is a strategy designed to forestall an adverse shift in the balance of power and driven by better-now-than-later logic” (Levy 1). Preventive war is about preserving hegemony, in both senses of that word.
Nations or groups engage in preventive war when they believe that their current geopolitical, economic, or ideological hegemony is threatened by an up-and-coming power. And I would note that white evangelicals started pushing a rhetoric of war when their political hegemony in the South was threatened by desegregation and internal migration (Jones); the GOP increasingly appealed to various wars as data came out showing that its base was not far from national minority status (FiveThirtyEight).
While wars of conquest are common, and the US has engaged in a lot, it’s rare to find major political figures willing to admit that they were or are advocating a war of conquest. The only example I’ve found is Alexander the Great at the river Beas, and our only source for that speech was written two hundred years later, so who knows what he said. Even Hitler claimed (and perhaps believed) that his war of conquest was self-defense. Wars of conquest—ones in which the goal is to exterminate or completely disempower another group simply because they have things we want or they’re in our way—are rhetorically a bit of a challenge. So, pundits and politicians advocating wars of conquest avoid the challenge. They claim it’s not a war of choice, but one forced on us by a villainous enemy, and thus either self-defense or preemptive.
Wars of conquest are generally what the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz called “absolute” war,; that is, one in which we are trying to “destroy the adversary, to eliminate his existence as a State” (qtd in Howard 17). Absolute war is not necessarily genocide; but it is oriented toward making the opponent defenseless (77), so that they must do our will. Most wars, according to Clausewitz, can end far short of absolute war because there are other goals, such as gaining territory, access to a resource, and so on, what he calls political ends.
What I am arguing is that the US reactionary right is using strategic nostalgia to mobilize its base to support and engage in an absolute war against “liberals” (that is, any opposition party or dissenters), by claiming “liberals” have already declared such a war on America. Thus, it’s preventive war, but defended by a rhetoric of self-defense.
As Rush Limbaugh said, “And what we are in the middle of now, folks, is a Cold Civil War. It has begun” (“There is no”) and “I think we are facing a World War II-like circumstance in the sense that, as then, it is today: Western Civilization is at stake” (“The World War II”; see also “There is No Whistleblower”). And it is the Democrats who started the war (“What Happened”), actually, a lot of wars, including a race war. Again, quoting Limbaugh, “I believe the Democrat Party, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, whoever, I think they are attempting, and have been for a while, to literally foment a race war. I think that has been the objective” (“Trump’s Running”).
If “conservatives” are at war with “liberals,” then what kind of war? If politics is war, what kind is it? The GOP is not talking about Clausewitz’s normal war, that is of limited time and proximate successes, but complete subjugation.
The agenda of completely (and permanently) subjugating their internal and external opponents is fairly open, as Katherine Stewart has shown in regard to conservative white evangelicals (The Power Worshippers). Dinesh D’Souza, in his ironically-titled The Big Lie, is clear that the goal of Republican action is making and keeping Democrats a minority power, unable to get any policies passed (see especially 236-243).
It is, in other words, a rejection of the premise of democracy.
III. Moral and rhetorical license
The conservative Matthew Continetti concludes his narrative of “the hundred year war for American conservatism” saying:
What began in the twentieth century as an elite-driven defense of the classical liberal principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States ended up, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, as a furious reaction against elites of all stripes. Many on the right embraced a cult of personality and illiberal tropes. The danger was that the alienation from and antagonism toward American culture and society expressed by many on the right could turn into a general opposition to the constitutional order. (411)
(Paul Johnson makes a similar argument in his extraordinary book.) The explicit goal of disenfranchising any political opposition, the valorizing of the attempted insurrection, new processes for confirming SCOTUS nominees, voter suppression—these are a general opposition to the constitutional order. It is clear that many GOP-dominated state legislatures intend to overturn—violently if necessary—any election Democrats win. Georgia’s recent legislation, for instance, “gives Georgia’s Republican-controlled General Assembly effective control over the State Board of Elections and empowers the state board to take over local county boards — functionally allowing Republicans to handpick the people in charge of disqualifying ballots in Democratic-leaning places like Atlanta” (Beauchamp).
GOP pundits and politicians can be open in their attacks on other Americans, American culture, and American society by using strategic nostalgia to renarrate what is American, and thereby gain moral and political license. That is, radicalize their base.
By “radicalize,” I mean the process described by scholars of radicalization like Willem Koomen, Arie Kruglanski, or Marc Sageman, that enable people to believe they are justified in escalating their behavior to degrees of extremism and coercion that they would condemn in an outgroup, and that they would at some point in the past have seen as too much.
Koomen et al. say that “perceived threat is possibly the most significant precondition for polarization [and] radicalization” (161). That a group is threatened means that cultural or even legal norms in favor of fairness and against coercion no longer apply to the ingroup. There are three elements that can serve “both to arouse a (misplaced) sense of ingroup superiority and to legitimize violence”: “The first is the insistence that the[ir] faith represents the sole absolute truth, the second is the tenet that its believers have been ‘chosen’ by a supreme being and the third is the conviction that divinely inspired religious law outranks secular law” (Koomen et al. 160). Since they (or we) are a group entitled by a supreme being to dominate, then any system or set of norms that denies us domination is not legitimate, and can overthrown by violence, intimidation, or behaviors that we would condemn as immoral if done by any other group. We have moral license.
One particularly important threat is humiliation, including humiliation by proxy. That’s how the anti-CRT and anti-woke rhetoric functions. If you pay any attention to reactionary pundits and media, you know that they spend a tremendous amount of time talking about how the “woke mob” wants white people to feel shame; they frame discussions about racism (especially systemic racism) as deliberate attempts to humiliate white Christians. This strategy is, I’m arguing, a deliberate attempt to foment moral outrage—what Marc Sageman (a scholar of religious terrorism) says is the first step in radicalizing. He lists three other steps: persuading the base that there is already a war on their religion, ensuring a resonance between events in one’s personal life and that larger apocalyptic narrative, and boost that sense of threat through interpersonal and online networks.
The rhetoric of war, at some point, stops being rhetoric.
And that’s what we’re seeing. 70% of American adults identify as Christian (Pew); it’s virtually impossible for an atheist to get elected to major office; Christian holidays are national holidays. There’s no war on Christians in the US. And the Puritans—the people Christians like to claim as the first founders of the US—prohibited the celebration of Christmas. But the pro-GOP media not only claims there is a war on Christians, but that its base can see signs of this war in their personal life, as when a clerk says “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” And pro-GOP media continually boosts that sense of threat through networks that prohibit serious discussion of policy, different points of view, or lateral reading.
What all this does is make “conservatives” feel that war-like aggression against “liberals” is justified because it is self-defense.
According to this narrative, the GOP has been unwillingly forced into an absolute war of self-defense. This posture of being forced into an existential war with a demonic foe gives the reactionary right complete moral license. To the extent that they can get their base to believe that they are facing extermination of themselves or “liberals,” there are no legal or moral constraints on them.
And that’s what the myths do. The myths take the very particular and often new categories, practices, beliefs, policies, and project them back through time to origin narratives, so that pundits and politicians can make their base feel existentially threatened every time someone says, “Happy Holidays.”
Beauchamp, Zach. “Yes, the Georgia election law is that bad.” Vox Apr 6, 2021, 1:30pm EDT (Accessed May 17, 2022). https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22368044/georgia-sb202-voter-suppression-democracy-big-lie
von Clausewitz, Carl et al. On War. Eds. And Trans. Michael Eliot Howard and Peter Paret. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Print.
Continetti, Matthew. The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism. New York: Basic Books. 2022. Print.
D’Souza, Dinesh. The Big Lie : Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, a division of Salem Media Group, 2017. Print.
FiveThirtyEight. “Advantage, GOP.” https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/advantage-gop/ Accessed May 24, 2022.
Howard, Michael. Clausewitz : a Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print.
Johnson, Paul Elliott. I the People : The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States. 1st ed. University of Alabama Press, 2022. Print.
Jones, Robert P. (Robert Patrick). White Too Long : the Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2020. Print.
Koomen, Wim., J. van der Pligt, and J. van der (Joop) Pligt. The Psychology of Radicalization and Terrorism. London ;: Routledge, 2016. Print.
Kruglanski, Arie W., Jocelyn J. Bélanger, and Rohan Gunaratna. The Three Pillars of Radicalization : Needs, Narratives, and Networks. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019. Print.
“Lessons from Before Roe: Will Past be Prologue?” The Guttmacher Policy Review, 6:1, March 1, 2003. (Accessed May 16, 2022). https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2003/03/lessons-roe-will-past-be-prologue
Levy, Jack S. “Preventive War and Democratic Politics.” International studies quarterly 52.1 (2008): 1–24. Web.
Limbaugh, Rush. “Biden Will Renew Obama’s War on Suburban Property Values.” October 26, 2020. (Accessed May 16, 2022). https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2020/10/26/biden-will-renew-obamas-war-on-suburban-property-values/
“Rush to the Democrats: Stop the War on Police.” May 4, 2021. (Accessed May 16, 2022)https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2021/05/04/rush-to-the-democrats-stop-the-war-on-police/
“Rush Sounds the Alarm on the Democrat War on Policing.” April 26, 2021. (Accessed May 16, 2022) https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2021/04/26/rush-sounds-the-alarm-on-the-democrat-war-on-policing/
“The World War II Challenge We Face.” June 6, 2019. (Accessed May 16, 2022). https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2019/06/06/our-world-war-ii-challenge/
“There is No Whistleblower, Just a Leaker! We’re in the Midst of a Cold Civil War.” September 27, 2019. (Accessed May 17, 2022). https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2019/09/27/were-in-the-midst-of-a-cold-civil-war/
“Trump’s Running to Save Us from a Race War Fomented by Democrats.” August 31, 2020. (Accessed May 17, 2022). https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2020/08/31/trumps-running-to-save-us-from-the-race-war-that-democrats-are-fomenting/
“War on Women! Dems Sponsoring Sex-Trafficking at the Border.” May 26, 2021. (Accessed May 17, 2022) https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2021/05/26/war-on-women-dems-sponsoring-sex-trafficking-at-the-border/
“What Happened Since I Was Last Here: The Left Sparks a Civil War.” (Accessed May 17, 2022). https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2018/06/25/what-happened-since-i-was-last-here-left-sparks-civil-war/
Oddo, John. Intertextuality and the 24-Hour News Cycle : a Day in the Rhetorical Life of Colin Powell’s U.N. Address. East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 2014. Print.
Pew Research Center. “Religious Landscape Study.” https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/ Accessed May 24, 2022.
Stewart, Katherine. The Power Worshippers : Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. Print.
As I’ve said elsewhere, demagoguery breaks a complicated issue with an array of policy options and explanations into two: one is narrowly defined, and everything else is the other. So, for the pro-GOP demagogic sphere, if you don’t support the current GOP, then you’re “liberal” which is, incoherently enough, the same as communist. (When I’m grumpy, I try to get the people who think democratic socialist, progressive, communist, and liberal are the same to explain Weimar Germany. They never do.) There are other demagogic enclaves out there, in which people insist you either completely endorse their agenda or you’re [whatever the extreme Other is], and they irritate me just as much, but they aren’t relevant to this post. So, I’ll stick with listing articles from non-“liberal” sources on the issue of Biden’s responsibility.
I have to admit that I didn’t find a smart, sourced argument that it’s all Biden’s fault. The best argument I found for blaming Biden was neither smart nor sourced, but it was better than a lot of others that were just argle bargle. And, really, that would be a hard argument to make. It’s useful to point out that gas prices have risen worldwide, and Biden is not actually President of the world. So, there’s no reasonable narrative that says it’s him alone. How would he make prices rise in Europe? There must be something else…it’ll come to me. Starts with a U, maybe, or supply issues?
Anyway, I’ve put these together so that, if you find yourself arguing with someone who says it’s all Biden, you can provide sources they’ll have a harder time deflecting.
So, let’s start with the notoriously liberal Journal of Petroleum Technology. It’s a complicated argument, and it’s really about natural gas. I will quote this (it’s important for something later): “A year ago, President Joe Biden and others were focused on priorities such as ending drilling on federally owned land. Now, the federal government is planning a lease sale for onshore drilling rights.”
There are several in Wall Street Journal. “Energy markets were already tight as the global economy rebounded from the pandemic, and gasoline prices have climbed recently as traders, shippers and financiers have shunned supplies of oil from Russia, which is the world’s second-largest exporter of crude oil after Saudi Arabia, according to the International Energy Agency.” There’s also this article of theirs (well worth a read) : Pull quotes:
“Oil prices, already turbocharged by a rebounding economy after a pandemic-induced slowdown, were pushed even higher when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pulled some three million barrels of Russian oil a day from global supplies.” “Gasoline prices have hit records as petroleum refiners that had cut back output as the economy slowed still haven’t ramped back up to pre-pandemic levels. The market has lost about one million barrels of daily petroleum-refining capacity since early 2020, when the U.S. was producing about 19 million barrels of refined petroleum a day. Events in Ukraine caused oil prices to skyrocket, pouring gasoline on what was already a smoldering fire. Brent crude topped $130 a barrel in early March, and gasoline prices recently hit a record $4.331 a gallon, putting them up more than 15% from where they stood a month earlier, according to AAA. Prices have fallen slightly from that record, hitting $4.215 a gallon on Friday, despite the continuing loss of Russian oil.”
And what has Biden done? According to the notoriously liberal WSJ:
“President Biden has said his administration would release millions of barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which has a capacity of 727 million barrels. However, experts say that is unlikely to move the needle very much on the price of gasoline. Some state and federal officials are also weighing state and federal gas-tax decreases to ease consumers’ pain at the pump. Business groups are pushing back on such moves, saying they could jeopardize infrastructure improvements. The Biden administration also has held talks, or said it plans to do so, with major oil producing countries about potentially boosting production. Talks with Venezuela, the oil industry of which the U.S. sanctioned in 2019, met opposition from Republicans, as well as some Democrats. Some Democrats, meanwhile, are pushing to suspend the federal gasoline tax, which amounts to 18 cents a gallon, for the rest of 2022.”
The free-market Economist doesn’t mention Biden. There’s one article from September that predicts problems, even without the war. More recent articles focus on Russia, such as this one.
The only one that tried to argue it is Biden is Heritage , which, seriously, has gone downhill. Not because I disagree with them (I disagree with all the sources I list) but because they stopped providing sources, and are dipping deep into just lying. This page, for instance, doesn’t cite any source for its claim. Its argument is that Biden is responsible for the high prices because he won’t “use all the energy sources we have”—in other words, there are high prices that even they say aren’t his fault. He’s to blame because he isn’t doing what would lower the prices he didn’t cause.
What should he do? Something that won’t immediately lower prices, and is unwise on other grounds.
This is argument by counter-factual, not necessarily a bad argument. But in this case, it is a bad argument, but bad faith. It engages in straw man, motivism, binary thinking, and non sequitur. The argument is: “Even now, with Americans struggling, they want to make it more expensive and difficult to explore for and produce oil, construct and operate pipelines, and access financing and investment. And that means they have to manipulate customer demand by discouraging gasoline use in the long run.”
For one thing, as mentioned above, Biden has eased up on drilling on public lands. What Biden has done is clearly explained in the WSJ article linked above and here. More important, allowing the exploration and production of oil on public lands, forcing people to accept pipelines, and…I don’t even know what the financing argument is—the article doesn’t say…will not result in an increase in oil for several years. So, this isn’t a solution for gas prices now. The whole drill now, drill everywhere argument is the equivalent of saying that we should spend every penny we have if someone in the family loses a job, which is risky at best. In any case, the point is that even the most anti-Biden argument implicitly admits it isn’t Biden, and he can’t solve it immediately. And that’s the best they’ve got. [1]
[1] They also like a heavily-edited Fox interview. Since they cut off what Granholm thinks is hilarious, I’m going to go with she made a reasonable argument.
This is the latest version of the preface to the book I’m working on.
One semester, I was teaching Abrams v. US and Schenck v. US—two famous cases about criminalizing dissent in wartime—and I had a couple of students absolutely insistent that people should not be allowed to criticize a war “once boots hit the ground.” I pointed out that refusing to deliberate about a war we were in would mean we were guaranteed to have wars last longer than they needed, and therefore have troops die unnecessarily. They said it didn’t matter—what mattered that you could not criticize a war once people were risking their lives for it. To do so would be to dishonor them and their sacrifice.
My uncle was killed in the 1943 North Africa campaign. He successfully bombed a Nazi supply train, but his plane was downed in the resulting explosion–perhaps because he hadn’t been informed the train had munitions, perhaps because he was unable to pull the plane up fast enough since he’d been injured in the Battle of the Kasserine Pass. He was a hero to me.
Since the speculation was that a contributing factor to his death was an injury he’d gotten during the Kasserine Pass battle, at some point, I looked into it. Anyone familiar with the action knows what I found: “America’s first major battle against the Germans in World War Two would end in shame, disgrace and defeat—and Major-General Lloyd R. Fredendall would bear a great deal of the responsibility for that defeat” (Whiting 114). Histories of the battle have little or nothing good to say about Fredendall. He was “an appallingly inept commander” (Carr 28), whose leadership was “a tangled skein of misunderstanding, duplication of effort, overlapping responsibility, and consequential muddle” (Dear, Oxford Companion 644). His communications were often “incomprehensible,” and he became angry if asked to clarify (Blumenson 85). He “was utterly out of touch with his command […] feuded constantly with his subordinate commanders, and generally broke every known principle of leadership in the employment of his corps” (D’Este 24). He was “ill-informed and far from the scene” (Rutherford 121). Whiting says, “Critical of his superiors, Fredendall was outspoken about the defects of his subordinates, ponderous in action, overbearing in attitude and with a tendency to jump to conclusions—probably more often than not, the wrong ones.” (113) Major General Ernest N. Harmon, tasked by Eisenhower with assessing what went wrong in the battle, reported that Fredendall was “a physical and moral coward” (qtd. Atkinson 400). The book I read particularly noted his poor handling of the Army Air Corps, putting them in considerable and unnecessary danger (including getting fired on by American troops, Blumenson 81-2).
I was enraged.
At the author.
Not because I knew enough about the event to think that what the author was saying was untrue, but because I felt it shouldn’t be said.
I was immediately puzzled by my own rage. It would make sense for me to be outraged that Fredendall might have been an over-promoted coward whose incompetence may have contributed to my uncle’s death. It would make sense for me to be outraged if I believed that the author was being inaccurate or unfair to Fredendall. But, to be honest, neither of those was my first (or even third) reaction. I was outraged because someone was suggesting that my uncle’s death was the consequence of someone’s incompetence. And I felt strongly that that was not something that should be said. It took me a while to understand why I was more angry at someone arguing (even correctly) that his death might have been the consequence of military incompetence than I was at the incompetent who might have caused his death. I was having the same reaction as the students. My almost visceral response was that criticizing how the action was conducted dishonored my uncle because it seemed to say that his death was unnecessary, and therefore meaningless.
What I learned from my rage about the criticism of the Kasserine Pass action is that it is tremendously difficult to consider seriously that someone we love and admire might have died unnecessarily, as a consequence of bad decisions, bad leadership, or even for bad reasons. Yet, as I said to the student, if we can’t admit the bad decisions, bad leadership, or bad reasons, more people will die unnecessarily.
Eventually, of course, I worked around to realizing that some people are incompetent, some decisions are unforced errors, some wars are the consequence of political figures bungling or blustering or trying to stabilize a wobbly base or just having painted themselves into a corner, an irresponsible media, an easily-mobilized or distracted public, a culture of demagoguery, or various other not especially noble factors. Even in a just war (and I do think American intervention in WWII was just) there are unjust actions, bad decisions, incompetence, and failures of leadership, and, if we are to make the conduct of war more just and competent, we have to acknowledge the errors. But that my uncle’s death might have been the consequence of incompetence still hurts.
What I learned from my own reaction is that deliberation about a war is constrained by considerations of honor. I want my uncle honored. And it was hard for me to understand that honoring him is compatible with being willing to be critical about the conditions under which he died. We want our ancestors honored. That we want them honored shouldn’t make us unwilling to think carefully and honestly about how, why, or what for they died. The more we refuse to consider past deliberations critically the more we poison our ability to deliberate about the present, and the more likely it is that others will die.
My uncle was a hero. Fredendall bungled the Battle of the Kasserine Pass, in ways that might have contributed to my uncle’s death. Both of those things can be true at the same time. We have to live in a world in which we honor the military dead without thinking we are prohibited from being critical of the cause for which they fought, the people who led them, or the political discourse that caused them to go to war. Learning from mistakes gives those mistakes meaning.
This isn’t a book about military strategy, or military history; it’s about rhetoric. More specifically, this book is about the vexed relationship of political disagreement, deliberation, demagoguery, and war. And I don’t think we can figure out the right relationship without being willing to admit we’ve sometimes gotten it wrong.
We’re primed to reason badly when it comes to questions about war because the prospect of fighting activates so many cognitive biases, especially binary thinking. Under those circumstances, deliberation can easily be framed as opting for cowardly flight instead of courageous fight, as unnecessary at best and treasonous at worst. It’s precisely because disagreements about war are so triggering, so to speak, that we need to be deliberately deliberative. To say that we should deliberate reasonably before going to war is banal in the abstract, but oddly fraught in the moment, and this book uses several cases to explore why it is that we often evade deliberation even (or especially?) when the stakes are so high.
Many people believe it is counter-productive to deliberate about war before it starts, since they think deliberation might cause us to delay in an urgent situation, will weaken our will, enable cowardice to sneak in the door. But, like my students, many people believe we shouldn’t deliberate about war once it’s started because we shouldn’t have sent people to risk their lives if we’re uncertain that the risk is necessary—we owe them our full commitment, since that’s what they’re giving. My own experience shows the deep aversion to deliberating about a war even long after it’s over, since a critical assessment suggests that lives were wasted. In other words, we are averse to deliberating about war, ever.
But, if war and deliberation are incompatible, then war and democracy are incompatible, because democracy thrives on deliberation. This isn’t to say that every decision about a conflict should be thoroughly deliberated—that would be impossible and unwise—but that deliberation doesn’t weaken the will for war if there is a strong case to be made for that war. If advocates of war can’t make their case through reasonable policy argumentation, then they probably have a bad case, and it’s likely an unnecessary war. War triggers cognitive biases, and so deliberation is necessary to counter the effects of those biases—contrary to popular belief, we can’t simply will ourselves not to rely on biases; deliberating with people who disagree can, however, do some work in reducing the power of the biases. But, not all rhetors want us to reduce the power of cognitive biases. Because we are averse to deliberating about or during war, rhetors engaged in normal political disagreements who are unable or unwilling to advocate a policy rationally are tempted to claim that this isn’t normal politics; it’s war. If they can persuade their base that this situation is war, then they won’t be expected to deliberate. The cognitive biases triggered by war will motivate the audience to believe beyond and without reason, and some political leaders and media pundits want exactly that.
Rhetoric and war have a counterintuitively complicated relationship; after all, we don’t go to war because of what the situation is, but because of what we believe the situation to be—that is, the rhetoric about our situation. Being at war (or even believing ourselves to be at war), as I’ll emphasize in this book, often causes us to think differently about things; it persuades us. It also constrains our rhetoric in ways, such as how much we can be critical of the war or its conduct once boots are on the ground. Invoking war or its prospect can change how we argue, and rhetoric can be treated as a kind of war. In this book, I’ll argue that the way we argue for a war (that is, the rhetoric) implies the conditions under which we can end it, how it will be conducted, what kind of war it will be, what kind of sacrifices (lives, resources, rights) will be expected on the home front, who and what our enemy is. The rhetoric we use might alienate, neutralize, or mobilize potential allies, gain sympathy and assistance from third parties, generate sympathy and assistance for our antagonist(s), or persuade third parties to remain neutral. It might unify a nation, thereby increasing support and morale, or frame the question in partisan terms, thereby ensuring divided support; it can enable us to deliberate our options, including long-term plans. It might make the military action to be diversionary, an attempt to deflect attention from a regime’s scandals or failures, thereby rousing cynicism rather than enthusiasm.
And war affects rhetoric. As mentioned above, when we’re seriously considering war, it’s easier to persuade people to imagine our complicated situation in binaries—pro-/anti-war, patriotic/traitorous, brave/cowardly, action/talk, confident/defeatist. And we can, I will argue, get into a cycle. Believing we are in danger of being attacked (or are already being attacked) increases in-group loyalty and extremism (see, for instance, Hoag et al.), and so we are less open to hearing nuanced explanations of our situation, holding in- and out-groups to the same standards, realizing that the world does not consist of an in-group and an out-group, or even paying attention to non in-group sources of information. If we imagine there are only two positions (pro- or anti-war) then we are likely to hear any criticism of our war plan—or even calls for deliberation–as “anti-war.” Thus, in the process of talking ourselves into a war, we can talk ourselves out of deliberating about that war, and out of deliberation at all. And then we have more war, less deliberately.
I mentioned in another post my discomfort with a professor who was engaged in classic in-group/out-group deflection about Catholic actions. A Catholic, he was trying to show that Catholicism isn’t that bad, isn’t actually responsible for all sorts of actions in which Catholics engaged, and is better than Protestantism. When Catholic secular leaders behaved badly, then they didn’t really count; only official doctrine mattered. When doctrine wasn’t great, and it was Catholic officials who were behaving badly, then only the statements of the Pope counted. When the Pope was the problem, then individuals were the ones who really represented Catholicism. We all do that.
We are drawn to believe that in-group membership both guarantees and signifies our goodness because, no matter how bad we are, we are better than That Out-group. We do so because we like to believe that we’re good people, and we also like the certainty that comes with believing that our in-group membership guarantees that we’re good. Unfortunately, that desire for certainty about our goodness often means we end up giving ourselves and our in-group moral license.
When we are committed to believing that we are good because we are in-group, then we engage in all sorts of “no true Scotsman” and dissociation in order to deflect in-group behavior we don’t want to acknowledge. And this often applies to our own history. But, if we lie about our own history, we can’t learn from it.
Americans lie a lot about slavery, and especially American Protestants. We don’t like to hear that people like us found themselves fully committed to terrible things, like slavery, segregation, genocide, and so on. We tell ourselves that they fully and completely committed to the wrong in-group. But they fully and completely committed to our in-group.
And, in fact, some Catholics still believe the lie (I recently ran across a person commenting that Jews try to steal consecrated hosts).
When we find the nuances, uncertainties, ambiguities, and complexities of policy argumentation paralyzing, we resort to believing that all we have to do is belong to the good group. We believe that, were everyone in this good group, we would never have injustice, cruelty, bad policies, crime, genocide.
That is so very, very comforting. It’s also a lie.
There is no group that is and has always been right. And so, when confronted with times that members of our good group (our in-group) have done extraordinarily terrible things, we find reasons they weren’t really in-group.
But, if we really want to make good decisions, we need to acknowledge that our group has done terrible things, and then we would have to acknowledge that making good decisions isn’t a question of being in the right group. We can’t be guaranteed that we’re making just decisions just because we’re endorsing the policy of our in-group. We actually have to deliberate those policies, and that means treating the arguments of other groups as we want them to treat our arguments.
So, for Christians, it means that being Christian—even being fully committed to a personal relationship with Christ–doesn’t guarantee we’re endorsing the right policies and doing the right things. But treating others as we want to be treated—that is, refusing to give ourselves and our in-group members moral license–just might get us pretty far in terms of following Christ.
From https://www.newsbug.info/news/nation/commentary-attacks-on-critical-race-theory-reopen-old-wounds/article_7f053c53-270a-566e-99e3-622595161329.html
Imagine that someone was going around talking trash about you, claiming that you’d said all sorts of repellent things, and that you were part of a despicable group with villainous goals. Imagine that they persuaded people you were awful by claiming you’d said things you’d never said, rarely quoting you directly (and if they did, it was completely misrepresenting what you’d said, out of context or worse), and generally making a set of accusations people could know were wrong if they just talked to you, and listened to what you had to say. But they persuaded people, who were now going around repeating all those things without ever talking to you directly. And they were persuading people who weren’t bothering to listen to you.
You’d be furious at being treated that way. Everyone would.
Here’s the important point. If you’re a Christian, and you’d be furious if you were treated that way, then you’d feel obligated not to do that to others. Jesus said, very clearly, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Wanting people to listen to you directly before condemning you means Christians should listen to others directly before condemning them. To do otherwise is to reject what Jesus very clearly said.
Thus, if people who claimed to be Christian treated the “CRT” controversy the way they want to be treated, they wouldn’t repeat the anti-CRT rhetoric without first reading CRT, the material people are quoting that is supposedly CRT, arguments that the anti-CRT rhetoric is wrong and misleading. They wouldn’t rely on second- or third-hand versions of the what K-12 teachers are doing, what anti-racist pedagogy is, or even what CRT is.
When I point this out to people who say they’re Christian, I tend to get one of four reactions. I’ll talk about two.
Sometimes people say that they don’t need to read CRT, or its defenses—they know it’s bad because they read descriptions of it that make it clear that it’s terrible. They know it’s bad because trusted sources (i.e., “in-group”) tell them it is. Is that how they’d want to be treated—do they think it’s fine if people believed terrible things about them just because “trusted” sources say they’re terrible? Of course not.
Do Christians think it’s fine if critics of Christianity mis-quote Christians, misrepresent Christianity, nut-pick, cherry-pick, lump all Christians into one group as represented by the most marginal versions, engage in argument by association? If we think it’s wrong for others to do that to us, then it’s wrong for us to do that to others.
Do we think it’s fine if people repeat the arguments in articles, books, videos, speeches, and so on that engage in all those dodgy and fallacious attacks on Christianity? In other words, are we fine with what Richard Dawkins and his loyal repeaters do? They’re relying on “trusted” (i.e. “in-group”) sources. If that’s wrong when it’s done to us, then it’s wrong when we do it to others.
This post is only partly about Hitler; it’s really about Putin, and it’s mostly about us.[1]
I write about train wrecks in public deliberation, so it was just a question of time till I got around to the question of appeasing Hitler. That UK politicians chose to appease Hitler (and the US decided to do nothing) is not just a famously bad decision, but a consequential one. Jeffrey Record says it nicely:
No historical event has exerted more influence on post-World War II U.S. presidential use-of-force decisions than the Anglo-French appeasement of Nazi Germany that led to the outbreak of World War II. The great lesson drawn from appeasement—namely, that capitulating to the demands of territorially aggressive dictatorships simply makes inevitable a later, larger war on less favorable terms—has informed most major U.S. uses of force since the surrender of Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945. From the Truman’s Administration’s 1950 decision to fight in Korea to the George W. Bush’s administration’s 2003 decision to invade Iraq, presidents repeatedly have relied on the Munich analogy to determine what to do in a perceived security crisis. They have also employed that analogy as a tool for mobilizing public opinion for military action. (1)
When I started researching the issue, I approached it with the popular story about what happened. That is, Hitler was obviously a genocidal aggressor who couldn’t possibly be prevented from trying to be hegemon of all Europe—he had laid all that out in Mein Kampf, after all. Leaders who chose to appease him were wishful thinkers who deluded themselves; other countries should have responded aggressively much earlier, at the remilitarization of the Rhineland, ideally, or, at least, when he was threatening war with Czechoslovakia over what he called “the Sudetenland.”
Turns out it’s way more complicated than that. Way more complicated. To be clear, I still think various countries made terrible decisions regarding Hitler and Germany, but the leaders were constrained by voters. It was voters who got it wrong. I’ll get to that at the end.
Hitler took over from the Weimar democracy, which had its problems. It also had its critics. It liberalized laws about sexuality and gender identity, reduced the presence of religious proselytizing in public schools, opened up opportunities for women, included a lot of a demonized group in its power (Jews), relied on democratic processes that included Marxists and democratic socialists, had a reduced military, encouraged avant garde art.
Here’s what is generally left out of popular narratives about WWII. Conservatives in all the countries that went to war against Nazis hated everything the Weimar Republic had done, including its tolerance of Jews, and so many didn’t think the Nazis were all that wrong–better than the USSR, and better than Weimar. Popular between-the-wars UK literature is filled with anti-semitic and anti-Slav rhetoric. Even during the war, a US anti-Nazi pamphlet that condemned Nazi racial ideology was severely criticized because it was attacking the “science” used to defend US segregation. As late as 1967 (in the lower court rulings on Loving v. Virginia) theories of race integral to Nazism were cited as authorities.
Hitler had a lot of apologists among conservatives, including the owner of the very popular Daily Mail in the UK. And, as George Orwell describes in the book that conservatives who quote him never read (haha, they never read anything he wrote–they just quote him), many UK media were knee-jerk anti-communist in their coverage of events—so knee-jerk anti-communist that they failed to distinguish between various kinds of leftist movements. So, a lot of UK media liked what Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler were doing.
Hitler’s first move after being granted dictatorship powers in 1933 (which he did with no particular outrage on the part of major media in other countries, including the US) was to criminalize membership in unions, the democratic socialist party, the communist party, or any other party that advocated democratic deliberation. His second act was to kill all the socialists in the Nazis, which, weirdly enough, was used by his defenders as proof that he was more moderate than they. And from that point on it’s hard to get things in chronological order. The important point, thought, is that by 1939, when there were still major media and figures defending him, he had criminalized not just dissent but any criticism of him, begun engaging in mass killing, criminalized various identities, begun a process of fleecing emigrants, openly reduced Jews to constant humiliation and abuse, put into law the racialization of Germany. He had also remilitarized the Rhineland, incorporated the Saar, violently appropriated Austria, and then appropriated the “German” part of Czechoslovakia. He then took over the rest of Czechoslovakia, and he still had defenders.
Then, when he invaded Poland, some (not all) said, oh, wait, he’s a bad guy. So, why didn’t they do anything earlier? Because his rhetoric was pretty clever.
He had two kinds of rhetoric. For his internal audience, it was exactly what the rhetoric scholar Kenneth Burke described in 1939. Unification through a common enemy, scapegoating/projection, rebirth, bastardization of religious forms of thought, toxic masculinity (not Burke’s term, of course—he talks about the feminization of the masses). All of this was about the rebirth of Germany into a “strong” nation set on domination of weak groups. But he also always made a point of the injustice of the Versailles Treaty, especially the guilt clause.
His external rhetoric had a lot of overlap with that. For instance, a lot of UK media—specifically “conservative”—endorsed and openly admired Hitler’s ‘strong man’ crushing of liberal democratic practices and leftist policies, since they hated those policies and practices. They were also anti-Semitic, anti-Slav, and believed in the Aryan bullshit behind Nazi policies, as were many people in the US. In both the UK and US, many major political figures were sympathetic to thinking of Jews as “a problem” who should be denied immigration.
To go back to the UK, these “conservative” media were thereby writing approvingly of very new practices, ones that traditional conservative voices (such as Edmund Burke) would have found horrifying. “Conservatives” were now writing approvingly of what had until recently been seen as the enemy of the UK. In other words, people often claim to be “conservative” when all they’re conserving in their loyalty to their party, and it has nothing to do with conserving principles.
Here’s the part I didn’t know about appeasement. Many people, all over the political spectrum, were willing to say that the Versailles Treaty was unjust. Hitler’s foreign policy was defended through the rhetoric of the Versailles Treaty, which emphasized self-determination. He didn’t believe in self-determination, of course, but he could use that rhetoric. And he did.
And, as scholars have argued, his use of that rhetoric made it hard for advocates of the treaty to say he was wrong in what he was doing. They certainly couldn’t go to war over it, since the Great War, as it was called, was almost unanimously understood everywhere other than Germany as a colossal mistake. To go to war over the remilitarization of the Rhineland would have seemed to most UK voters a bizarre compulsion to repeat the errors of 1914, when a minor political issue could have been resolved without war.
Hitler adopted the rhetoric that his enemies had recently used—the rhetoric of self-determination—to scoop up territories. He claimed that “the people” of a region wanted Germany to invade because they were being oppressed by [Jews/liberals/Slavs], and so his appropriation was actually liberation. When it came to Poland, he couldn’t plausibly argue that, so he shifted his rhetoric to self-defense—Poland, France, and the UK were intent on attacking Germany (he claimed they had), and so all Germany was doing was justifiable self-defense.
And that’s what Putin did. He adopted the rhetoric his enemies had used, which made it hard for them to call him out.
The rhetoric for a preventive war against Iraq—an unprecedented kind of war for the US—was that it was preventive self-defense. In fact, it was motivated by the desire to make Iraq a reliable ally in US foreign policy.
The rhetoric was that Iraq was supporting a global war against the US in the form of Al Qaida (Bush later admitted they knew it wasn’t), the site of anti-American terrorism, and various other lies. The Bush Administration, and its fanatically supportive media, told a lot of lies, that they knew were lies, because they wanted to put in place a government that would be an supportive of US policy or because they loyally and irrationally supported whatever a GOP President did. I happen to think Bush meant well. I think he believed a very simplistic version of the extremely controversial (and circular) “democratic peace” model, one he didn’t think most Americans would find compelling enough for war, and he so he lied to get what he thought was a good outcome.
The problem is that rhetoric has its own consequences, regardless of intention. By arguing that the US was justified in invading Iraq and putting in a new leader because 1) that state was fostering terrorism, 2) part of an anti-US conspiracy, and 3) presented an existential threat to the US, Bush legitimated a certain set of arguments (what rhetoricians call “topoi”). Just as the Versailles Treaty was grounded in topoi of self-determination, the Iraq invasion was grounded in topoi about terrorism and existential threat. There was a long history of that kind of rhetoric in the Cold War, especially about crushing any kind of political movements in the areas that the US considered its sphere of influence, such as Nicaragua, that might threaten US control. Throughout the Cold War, the US persistently crushed local popular movements of self-determination on the grounds of “sphere of influence”–we would not let any government exist in those areas if it wasn’t loyal to the US.
Putin used US Cold War rhetoric to justify his scooping up of areas, such as Chechnya. It would have been rhetorically and politically impossible for the US and NATO to go to war over that region, given how factionalized US politics is. Look at how the GOP—which had far less power in those days—was critical of US intervention in Serbia. Had Clinton advocated going to war, or even threatening war, over Chechnya, the GOP would have gone to town, and very few Dems would have supported it.
When it came to Ukraine, Putin adopted a rhetoric that cleverly blended Hitler’s rhetoric about Poland, US Cold War rhetoric, and Bush’s rhetoric about Iraq. It was a gamble, but not an unreasonable one (a different post) given the rhetorical conditions of US politics. You could take Hitler’s speech about invading Poland and just do a few “find and replace” to get his speech, and blend it with a speech of Bush’s advocating invading Iraq.[1]
My point is that adopting a rhetoric to get what you want—Cold War rhetoric to justify propping up corrupt and vicious regimes in Central and South American, lying about terrorism to get a war desired for other reasons—has consequences. Rhetoric has consequences in terms of legitimating certain kinds of arguments.
And here is the point about appeasing Hitler. I’m writing a book with a chapter about the rhetoric of appeasement. My argument is that it was a bad choice in terms of what was in the long-term interest of the UK (and the world). However, and this is what most people don’t know, or won’t acknowledge, politicians made the choices they did because appeasing Hitler was the obvious choice to make for any political figure (or party) who wanted to get (or remain) elected. If they advocated responding aggressively to Hitler they would have been excoriated by the most powerful media. Had Clinton advocated responding aggressively to Putin’s treatment of Chechnya, it would have gone nowhere. Had a GOP President advocated responding aggressively to Putin’s expansionism, the Dems would have thrown fits.
I’m not saying that we should have responded aggressively when Putin took over Austria, I mean Chechnya, but that we should have deliberated what Putin was doing. And we couldn’t. Because we are in a culture that demonized deliberation. We are in a culture in which engaging in politics means standing in a stadium chanting, having no political opinion more complicated than what can be put on a bumper sticker, loyally repeating, retweeting, or sharing whatever is the latest in-group talking point, and hating the other side is proof of objectivity.
And here I’ll go back to appeasing Hitler. I don’t really blame the politicians for appeasing Hitler, but that’s largely for the same reason I don’t blame my dog Delbert for eating cat shit. Delbert will do whatever he can to get to cat shit, and politicians will do whatever they can to get elected.
Politicians appeased Hitler because the voters wanted Hitler appeased. We need to stop asking why politicians did what they did in regard to Hitler and instead ask why voters voted the way that they did. FDR and Chamberlain don’t bear the blame for why the US and UK responded as we did to Hitler; voters do. The lesson of appeasement, and the lesson of Putin, is not that leaders make bad decisions, but that voters make bad decisions, and then blame leaders.
After the tremendously popular Sicilian Expedition ended in disaster, the very people who had voted for it claimed that they had been misled, and politicians were at fault.
They voted for it.
George Lakoff pointed out that “liberals” and “conservatives” both adopt the metaphor of family for government in that the government is a parent to the citizens who are children. What if, instead of imagining voters as tools in the hands of political leaders, we acknowledge what Socrates says: even tyrants are tools in the hands of citizens.
So, how do we counter Putin’s kind of rhetoric?
We accept the responsibility of voters, citizens, commenters, sharers, likers. We are all rhetors, and we try to behave responsibly, whether it’s about how awful cyclists are or whether Putin is right.
We stop remaining within our informational enclave. And we feel no shame about pointing out how unfair and irresponsible people are being.
We read the best arguments against our positions; we hold others to the same rhetorical standards as ourselves; we stop engaging in rhetorical Machiavellianism; we argue, well and fairly and vehemently. And we shame others who argue badly. We might do so vehemently, kindly, gently, or harshly, but we do so because we want others to do that to us.
[1] Normally, I link to citations, but that would have delayed this post by a week, since there are a lot of links. If folks want links and cites, let me know. [2] For the people who have trouble with logic, and reason associatively, I’m not saying Bush was Hitler. I’m saying we shouldn’t judge rhetoric by whether we like its outcome or its advocates—it has its own consequences. Bad rhetoric in favor of a cause we like is, I’m saying, still bad rhetoric in that it legitimates what others might do with it.
