Retired Professor, Writing Center Director, Scholar of train wrecks in public deliberation
A podcast with a Rhetoric PhD who is also a standup comic, consultant, Emmy-nominated comedy writer, and author.
https://rhetoricwarriors.com/podcast/rwp-117-flogging-the-demagogues-w-dr-trish-roberts-miller/
In Deliberate Conflict I ridiculed a particular kind of assignment as not teaching argumentation. Since I’m retired, I can make the stronger argument: this kind of assignment teaches students to think they know what good argumentation is, when it it isn’t teaching argumentation at all. It’s like telling students you’re teaching them how to play chess, when you give good grades to students who tip over the board. It does so because it puts teachers into a false dilemma when it comes to grading terrible arguments.
Here’s the assignment prompt:
Write a well-organized five page argument for a policy about which you care, and use four credible sources to support your claims. Use [MLA, APA, Ancient Sumerian] method of citation, and [this font that I happen to like], have a summary or funnel introduction, put your thesis at the end of your introduction, and use correct English.
Having directed a Writing Center for six years, I can say that this is the fallback writing assignment for people all over the university. Sometimes the last three criteria aren’t mentioned, but are simply assumed as included in the “well-organized” criterion.
You get this paper from your student Josef. The introduction is:
Since the dawn of time there has been a problem with Jews. Now, more than ever, Germans are faced with the question of what to do with Jews. Making Germany great again requires expelling Jews because Jewish leftists agreed to the Versailles Treaty, leftist revolts made the major political figures believe they had to surrender, and Marx was a Jew.
The paper has three body paragraphs showing that each of those minor premises (his data) are true. They are, so he has no problem citing credible sources to support those claims. There are no grammar errors, and his citation is faultless.
What grade does this paper get?
On a rubric model, assuming the prompt implies the rubric, he could easily get a good grade. He cares about this issue, he has four credible sources, he uses the correct method of citation, the right font, his thesis is right there, he could easily have the kind of “organization” that student writing is supposed to have (which is specific to student writing, but that’s a different post), and he meets whatever idiosyncratic grammar rules the teacher has.
Josef might have worked a long time on this paper—should he get a good grade on the labor contract model?
If a teacher abides by the criteria implied by that assignment, they seem to be faced with giving him a bad grade because of his argument being awful (and it is)—which is a criterion not mentioned in the prompt–, or giving him a good grade because he met the criteria.
If we give him a bad grade because his argument is awful, we’ve introduced a new criterion, and one that only applies to him. Since Josef’s (false) narrative about him and his group is that they are persecuted by “leftists,” we seem to have given him evidence to support that claim of persecution. He would definitely get invited to go on Tucker Carlson’s show.
If we give him a good grade, we’re saying this is a good argument, and it isn’t.
So, what do we do with Josef’s paper?
This will take me several posts, but the short answer is: the problem is the prompt. It doesn’t ask that students engage in argumentation. We don’t do anything about Josef’s paper because we don’t give that prompt.
It’s fine if we choose to have an fyc program that doesn’t have the goal of teaching argumentation. FYC is overloaded with things it’s supposed to do, and it’s great if programs choose to do one or two things well rather than a lot of things badly. And those one or two things aren’t necessarily argumentation. What’s not fine is claiming that we’re teaching argumentation when we aren’t.
It’s also not fine to set teachers up for the false dilemma of how to deal with Josef’s argument, but that’s what we’re doing. There are many ways that we can write prompts that don’t put us (or teachers of fyc) in that false dilemma, and even many ways that do so while actually teaching argumentation.
Last week was the week of TribFest, which is great. It’s just heaven for policy wonks. Normally, of course, it’s in person, and, since the Texas Tribune tries to be non-partisan, it means that there are often panels with people on “both sides” (Lawdamighty I hate that metaphor). But, this whole last week I was thinking about a panel from a few weeks ago.
I should begin by saying that I think that conservativism is a legitimate political philosophy (although it’s one with which I disagree). And, as a legitimate political philosophy, it can be defended through rational argumentation.
The GOP, on the other hand, is not conservative, nor does it engage in rational argumentation to defend its policies, because it can’t. And a speaker from a couple of years ago seems to me to exemplify how GOP rhetoric works. It’s all about irrational fear-mongering, with some shameless exploitation of children as a kind of rhetorical shield thrown in.
Just to be clear: I think being fearful can be rational. And I think it’s possible to make a rational argument for being fearful. The GOP use of transphobia is not a rational fear, and, in fact, the rhetoric works to keep people from thinking rationally about the issue. Instead, the whole rhetorical strategy consists of teaching people (especially vulnerable people) to memorize and repeat certain talking points verbatim, even when those points are contradictory, incoherent, and often outright lies.
A teenager on the panel (call her Chester), who was representing an anti-trans organization, talked about how she went home to her daddy (I’m not kidding, that’s what she said), saying that she was frightened at the idea of boys in her bathroom. Her spiel (since all she could do when asked a question or pushed was to repeat that spiel or part of it verbatim in the discussion, I feel it’s fair to call it a spiel, rather than an argument) emphasized how terrible it was that she should feel frightened going to the bathroom. She also talked about how Obama was forcing this down her throat. (Another metaphor I think people have not thought through) because he enacted an Executive Order after a particular event (I don’t remember the event).
What I do remember is that someone pointed out that she had her chain of events wrong, and that she was putting Obama’s Executive Order after something that was actually before it, which she admitted. Yet she continued to repeat the spiel with that false narrative–the one she admitted was false.
But the whole argument was hateful. Her argument–this policy is bad because it frightens students–has the major premise that teens (all teens, even ones not like her) should not be afraid to use the restroom in their high school.
Except she didn’t believe that major premise.
Someone asked her, “So, you think that teenagers should be able to go to the bathroom without being afraid that they’ll get assaulted?” and she said, “Yes, absolutely.” I think I kind of momentarily blacked out from how hard her in-group entitlement hit me, but I think someone pointed out that trans students are far more likely to get beaten up in bathrooms that she is likely to get….what? Assaulted by a male who thinks his best strategy for assaulting women is to pretend to be trans in an American high school?
She didn’t care about whether students might be assaulted in a bathroom. She didn’t care whether students are afraid in a bathroom. She only cared about whether she was frightened. What she was appealing to was not a premise about students feeling safe in bathrooms, but a premise about what the ideal society is: a world in which policies protect people like her from being made uncomfortable. It’s all about politics as providing safe spaces for easily-triggered in-group members. It’s toxic populism.
Also, it isn’t within several football fields of a rational argument. Rape is a major problem among American teens, and I take it very seriously, but it isn’t possible to make a rational argument that the most common kind of rape—the kind about which Chester should be worried—was the kind about which she complained to “Daddy.” (Her word, seriously.) A girl in an American high school isn’t suddenly presented with the threat of rape if a trans girl can use the girl’s bathroom.
Her argument was not grounded in a rational assessment of relative threats to her physical safety.
I really wish that we still taught people about syllogisms. As Aristotle said, in public disagreements (as opposed to how philosophers in his day argued), we rely on enthymemes (A is B because A is C). In common conversation, I might say to you, “Hubert is a jerk because he kicked my shins for no reason.” I would not have to engage in a long and complicated argument to show that my major premise—kicking someone in the shins for no reason is bad (C is B)—is true.
But, let’s imagine that I made that argument, and then I told you a story about how much I admire Ruth because she goes around and kicks shins for no reason. In that case, I don’t actually believe my own major premise is a principle. So much of our political discourse works this way–people make arguments with major premises they don’t believe.
Appealing to the premise that kicking shins is just something useful for me in the moment. For instance, if I say, “You are a terrible room-mate because you leave dishes in the sink,” I am making an argument with the major premise that “people who leave dishes in the sink are terrible room-mates.” If you point out that I also leave dishes in the sink, and I don’t acknowledge that means, by my argument, I’m a bad room-mate, then I’m throwing claims to deflect from my behavior the way a monkey throws poo.
Chester was, obviously, throwing poo. Her whole argument was deflecting from how trans students are treated to how she felt. She didn’t actually care about whether people feel threatened or might get assaulted in bathrooms. She only cared about whether she felt scared.
She hadn’t thought it through at all, as was made clear by the fact that she couldn’t do anything other than repeat the script she’d been given. And that’s another appalling aspect of this whole argument. There are, and always have been, Machiavellians who so believe in their case that they throw children like her out to make insensible arguments. I think she was shocked at getting challenged in what she said, and she was probably traumatized. The organization that put her out there knew the argument they were telling her to make would be treated with outrage and scorn. They exploited her. They put her out there making an incoherent and irrational argument that was actively offensive and hurtful to trans students, and let her take the heat.
That’s unconscionable. And it shows that they don’t actually care about her, or the feelings of high school students. So, let’s do the math. She made an argument that made it clear she didn’t care about anyone other than her in service of a group that didn’t care about her. There’s a theme here.
And in service of what argument? There is no rational argument that can be made that trans students are more of a threat to other students than cishet students; when transphobics try to make an argument that gender is perfectly correlated to biology, they get into a set of claims that only MC Escher could map.
Clearly, GOP fear mongering about bathrooms is just another instance of what is often called the Southern Strategy. But, the author of that strategy wasn’t just talking about the South. What he said is that people prone to voting GOP are more likely to respond out of fear of the Other, and he was right. People drawn to closure, people who get anxious in situations of ambiguity or hybridity manifest that anxiety as anger.
Years ago, Mary Douglas showed that we want to live in a world that is a taxonomy of hard categories. We want things to be purely their thing—fish don’t have shells; we don’t eat the same things our enemies eat; birds fly. Fish that have shells, birds that don’t fly—those are dangerous. Arie Kruglanski showed that many people are drawn to closure (aka, certainty). For some people, that sense that the world can be easily and with certainty categorized is tremendously comfortable. They need to believe that their cognitive categories are ontological ones—their neat mental categories are how the world is—because that means they know the world.
Presenting someone who believes that there is a clean binary of gender/sexuality with the fact of trans people is like giving a Sun Ra album to someone who is obsessed with a music collection that has rigid categories of genre.
They get mad. Irrationally mad. Because their categories are gerfucked. Because they’re being presented with a world that is not a rigid taxonomy of discrete categories, one in which we can be certain that our internal imagination and the world outside of that imagination are definitely the same.
If you noticed, I shifted from they to we. We are all drawn to a world in which we make quick judgments, on the basis of categorizing people, places, groups, experiences. We have to be in that world; otherwise we would go mad. We all have taxonomies, and we all get flustered when we come across something that blurs the categories of our taxonomy. It’s fine that we have categories and taxonomies. What matters is what happens when we come across data, an experience, or a person that presents us with a transgression of our taxonomy. That transgression is threatening only insofar as it proves to us that our taxonomy does not guarantee certainty.
The more frightened we are by uncertainty and ambiguity, the more we are frightened by transgressions of our taxonomy. That we are afraid does not mean we are in danger. That someone threatens our taxonomy does not mean that they threaten our safety.
That Chester experienced trans girls as violating her taxonomy is understandable, that this transgression made her uncomfortable is also understandable, but that she went from her feeling uncomfortable to characterizing them as a threat is externalizing and exaggerating her discomfort. What made them seem dangerous for Chester is that they complicated her sense of how identity works, that they transgressed the lines of her taxonomy. The leap from “This person is a serious threat to my way of thinking about people” to “these people are a threat” is the real danger.
The position she was given to memorize and repeat is not rational. Nor is it Christian. She wants to be able to go home and tell Daddy that she is frightened of people, and they should therefore be banned from her space. If students find her presence in a high school restroom frightening, should they be able to get her banned from that space? Is she willing to be treated the way that wants to treat others?
Nope.
The fact that no pro-GOP person appalled at CRT will read this post shows they know their beliefs are too fragile to be subjected to disproof.
The anti-CRT rhetoric makes six arguments:
1. People in K-12 are teaching CRT
2. Because they are talking about racism as an institutional and structural problem,
3. And CRT talked about racism that way, and some CRT authors were Marxist (or said things that could be characterized as Marxist)
4. Therefore, anyone who talks about racism as institutional or structural is Marxist,
5. And they are violating the principles of Christianity,
6. And promoting an ideology MLK would have rejected.
The first thing I want to say is a lot of people repeating these anti-CRT talking points are doing so because they are genuinely concerned about reducing racism, and especially racial conflict, and they sincerely want a world in which racism is just not an issue.
I argue with these people a lot. And I’ll say that they aren’t all bad people, and they aren’t necessarily stupid people. They are often people tremendously successful in careers that require considerable training. But they refuse to read anything that disagrees with them, and that makes them gullible. They believe that the truth is pretty obvious to reasonable people, that you should get your information from trustworthy sources, and that a good argument is one that has data and rings true.
What those beliefs mean, in effect, is that, if you want to be an “objective” person you should only get your information from sources that confirm what you already believe. That’s pretty much the opposite of objective.
In other words, they reason like Stalinists. As I’ve mentioned before, I was in Berkeley for a long time, so I’m very familiar with what it’s like to argue with people who only get their information from in-group sources, and who reject all other information and sources as “biased.”
If you’re reasoning like a Stalinist, you’re reasoning badly. But the problem is that people trapped in the world in which a claim is true because it seems true don’t care whether they’re reasoning like Stalinists. They tell themselves, “Stalinists were wrong, but I’m not!” Anyone can believe that what they believe is true if they only honor sources that tell them that what they believe is true.
Every one of those six talking points is false and fallacious, but no person worked into outrage about them will admit that. I think they know that the arguments aren’t rational, and that’s why they won’t read any CRT, or anything trying to point out that the anti-CRT rhetoric doesn’t make sense.
Lots of people arguing with them point that out refusal to be informed by reading actual sources, and it has no impact. I’ve only had one person try to defend themselves by citing CRT, but he obviously hadn’t read the link he’d offered. It was a law school textbook from 1995. So, it didn’t actually support his claim that CRT was being taught in K-12 now.
The argument that CRT is being taught in K-12, and that it’s Marxist and anti-Christian works this way. (And, unlike people up in arms about CRT, I’ve read the things I’m criticizing.) First, what is being taught in K-12 is that the US still racist, racism is a problem of institutions and structures and not individuals hostility, and the US has a history of racist action. CRT was a theory advocated by legal theorists, some of whom were Marxist, that said that racism was not a question of intent, but legal systems and institutions.
Therefore, and here’s one of many fallacious leaps, anyone who says that racism is not a question of individual intent, but institutional racism and systemic oppression got their ideas from CRT. Since Marxism also says there is systemic oppression, and then all people who say that there is institutional racism are Marxist. If someone teaches that, for instance, the GI Bill was applied in racist ways, or that the system of slavery was racist, or that segregation was systemic racism, then that person is teaching that there is institutional racism and therefore they’re a Marxist and teaching CRT.
That’s a way of arguing that makes absolutely no sense–it’s a combination of the genetic fallacy and the fallacy of guilt by association. And people can see that it’s fallacious when that kind of reasoning is applied to them. For instance, Marx said that capitalism relies on workers being desperate for employment, and therefore it requires that there be people who can’t survive without working. That was the GOP argument for workfare, and it’s what many GOP politicians have said is wrong with the stimulus package–that it’s making things harder for businesses. In other words, they are saying that a free market requires that there are people who can’t survive without working. Since GOP political leaders are saying something Marx said, they must be Marxist, and since CRT theorists are Marxists, Republicans are CRT!!!!!
I could go on. The first Puritan settlers in New England tried to hold all their property in common. Since that’s something Marx advocated, they were Marxist! Therefore, Thanksgiving is Marxist. Therefore, schools that put up Thanksgiving decorations are advocating Marxism.
That argument makes as much sense as the anti-CRT demagoguery.
Of course it’s a flawed argument, because it’s a flawed way to argue. If it’s a flawed way to argue about Republicans or Thanksgiving, then it’s a flawed way to argue about K-12 teachers.
So, let’s just start with the claim (which I’m happy to have disproven) that no one making the above six claims can support them with rational-critical argumentation.
In other words, the people making those arguments are consuming and repeating demagoguery.
As far as the first claim, that depends on making CRT every way of talking about racism that says it’s systematic and institutional. Since even abolitionists talked about racism that way in the 1830s, and Marx didn’t start theorizing Marxism till the late 1840s, Das Kapital wasn’t published till the 1867, and the first English translation was in 1887, then the claim that anyone who talks about racism as built into American institution is inspired by Marxism fails on its face. That takes care of 2-4.
Since critics of CRT will not themselves live by the standard they’ve set for their opposition (argument by association), they also fail at making a rational argument (again, even they think that the logic behind 2-4 is fallacious, but only when it applies to them, and not when they apply it to others).
The claim that there is institutional discrimination, and that not every individual has the same chances at success does not invalidate the principles of Christianity. It does invalidate the “just world model” or its incarnation as “prosperity gospel,” but those are very recent ways of reading Scripture, and not all Christians endorse them. So, talking about institutional discrimination might invalidate people who think Christianity and prosperity gospel are identical, but they don’t speak for all Christians. (And, really, they need to know their own history—the notion that people deserve what they get was used to justify slavery, after all.)
That these people claim that MLK would be on their side is the final thing that frosts my cupcake.
If they think that MLK never talked about institutional racism, then they’re just showing that they reason and read badly. But, really what they’re showing is that, just as they’ve read no CRT (but only things about it), they’ve read little or no MLK. In fact, MLK talked a lot about how racism was not about angry redneck individuals, but white “moderates” who wouldn’t face the institutional problems (that’s the point of most of “Letter from Birmingham Jail”). For instance, from his speech “The Other America” (which every critic of CRT should read in its entirety):
But we must see that the struggle today is much more difficult. It’s more difficult today because we are struggling now for genuine equality, and it’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee a livable income and a good, solid job. It’s much easier to guarantee the right to vote than it is to guarantee the right to live in sanitary, decent housing conditions. It is much easier to integrate a public park than it is to make genuine quality integrated education a reality. And so today, we are struggling for something which says we demand genuine equality. It’s not merely a struggle against extremist behavior toward Negros. And I’m convinced that many of the very people who supported us in the struggle in the South are not willing to go all the way now. [….] I say that however unpleasant it is, we must honestly see and admit that racism is still deeply rooted all over America. It’s still deeply rooted in the North, and it’s still deeply rooted in the South. [….] In 1875, the nation passed a civil rights bill and refused to enforce it. In 1964, the nation passed a weaker civil rights bill, and even to this day, that bill has not been totally enforced in all of its dimensions. The nation heralded a new day of concern for the poor, for the poverty-stricken, for the disadvantaged, and brought into being a poverty bill. But at the same time, it put such little money into the program that it was hardly and still remains hardly a good skirmish against poverty. White politicians in suburbs talk eloquently against open housing, and in the same breath, contend that they are not racist. And all of this, and all of these things, tell us that America has been back lashing on the whole question of basic constitutional and God-given rights for Negros and other disadvantaged groups for more than 300 years. [….] But at the same time, it is as necessary for me to be as vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause persons to feel that they must engage in riotous activities, as it is for me to condemn riots. I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society, which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. And in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. So in a real sense, our nation’s summer’s riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.
What I learned arguing with Stalinists is that some people believe that personal certainty is objectivity, data is proof, and sources that agree with them are unbiased. The Stalinist were wrong on all counts. But, if reasoning like some group means you are part of that group (people who talk about institutional racism are like CRT and CRT are Marxist), then critics of CRT are Stalinists.
If, like me, you have spent your life arguing with assholes, then you find yourself in the same kind of argument. It doesn’t matter if they’re Stalinists, Maoists (my least favorite interlocutors), crude Freudians, raw food for dog cultists, or, now, anti-maskers. Assholes aren’t restricted to any one place on the political spectrum, or even necessarily restricted to the “political” spectrum at all. By “asshole,” I don’t mean people who are unpleasant or aggressive, but people who can’t defend their position rationally, and feel no obligation to do so. Although they can’t defend their position rationally, they are certain that they are right because 1) they can find data to support them, and 2) they feel certain that they’re right.
In general, you find someone like this on every issue, but there are some issues on which everyone is like this. What I’ve found by drifting around and trying to read the best anti-mask/anti-vaccine posts is that none of them can defend their position rationally, so those are in that latter category.
When pushed to support their case rationally (e.g, hold all data to the same standards, have an internally consistent argument, be able to name the data that would cause them to change their mind, represent opposition arguments fairly, avoid fallacies) they get mad. They get mad if asked to support their case rationally, and they try to shift the burden of proof–their position is true because it can’t be proven wrong. Once again, that isn’t a rational argument.
Making a rational argument isn’t about your tone, whether you have evidence, or whether it feels true to you–anyone can cherrypick the data to make any case. I learned this watching someone present a lot of data that Stephen King and Richard Nixon conspired together to kill John Lennon–lots of data, all of it cherrypicked, none of it rationally related to the overall claim. That guy had done too much speed, and ended up in jail for stalking Stephen King. Having data that to you proves a point doesn’t mean you have a rational argument. You might have done too much speed.
For this post, I’ll talk about the strongest argument I’ve seen against masks (since it cited a study). And the first point I’ll make is that no anti-mask or anti-vax person has read this far. They do not read anything that might complicate, let alone disconfirm, their point of view. So, they fail the absolutely lowest level of having a rational position–being able to engage the smartest opposition. They don’t even engage dumb oppositions. They run away from opposition information the way I run away from snakes. It isn’t rational, but it’s what I do. If you refuse to read opposition arguments (and not what your in-group tells you are the opposition arguments) then you don’t have a rational position–it doesn’t matter what the issue is.
Anti-maskers often claim that 1) masks are ineffective, and 2) they reduce oxygen intake and exhalation of carbon monoxide. The “and” is important. On its face (prima facie) this is an irrational argument. Both of those claims cannot be true at the same time. If masks significantly inhibit inhalation and exhalation, then they would definitely inhibit the spread of and threat of infection from covid.
I recently pointed this out, and someone responded by citing this study.
This is typical. They found a study that says that masks do inhibit inhalation and exhalation. That study doesn’t solve the basic contradiction–if masks are extremely effective at restricting inhalation/exhalation, they are extremely effective at preventing the spread of COVID.
But, let’s set aside that contradiction (one present in the cited study). I’m not an epidemiologist, but I am an expert in argumentation, and one of the most salient aspects of an irrational position is cherry-picking data. (As I said, this is true of irrational positions on all issues.)
The most prominent characteristic of an irrational position–whether it’s about masks, tax breaks, raw food for dogs, my desire for a camper, whether your boss is a jerk– is that it’s about finding data to support our position, and not taking one step above, and thinking about our position in terms of whether it relies on premises and data you’d think valid if they led to opposite conclusions.
Irrational people on the internet find a study that supports what they believe, on the basis of the abstract. (They reject all studies that don’t support them, also based on the abstract.) I read the study. The person who cited it obviously didn’t. (This is typical.) But, if one study proves you right, then one study proves you wrong.
And this study didn’t even prove them right. Most of the study looked at research regarding N95 mask use among medical workers. As the study says, “Thirty papers referred to surgical masks (68%), 30 publications related to N95 masks (68%), and only 10 studies pertained to fabric masks (23%).” The study says that surgical and N95 masks are effective for preventing the spread of COVID (see especially pages 20-21), so the person cited a study as an authority that contradicts the anti-mask talking point. That’s also typical of someone who can’t support their case rationally (because they don’t read the studies they cite).
Most important, the negative consequences were associated with N95 masks, not fabric ones. So, how many people out in public are wearing N95 masks? I asked the person who posted this study what she thought of the following paragraph. She never responded. Also typical of someone defending a position irrationally.
“In addition, we found a mathematically grouped common appearance of statistically significant confirmed effects of masks in the primary studies (p < 0.05 and n ≥ 50%) as shown in Figure 2. In nine of the 11 scientific papers (82%), we found a combined onset of N95 respiratory protection and carbon dioxide rise when wearing a mask. We found a similar result for the decrease in oxygen saturation and respiratory impairment with synchronous evidence in six of the nine relevant studies (67%). N95 masks were associated with headaches in six of the 10 studies (60%). For oxygen deprivation under N95 respiratory protectors, we found a common occurrence in eight of 11 primary studies (72%). Skin temperature rise under masks was associated with fatigue in 50% (three out of six primary studies). The dual occurrence of the physical parameter temperature rise and respiratory impairment was found in seven of the eight studies (88%). A combined occurrence of the physical parameters temperature rise and humidity/moisture under the mask was found in 100% within six of six studies, with significant readings of these parameters (Figure 2).”
To be clear, the study expresses skepticism about mask-wearing generally, but their meta-research doesn’t support that skepticism. When they get to the part of the argument in which they want to say that wearing masks is harmful, the authors abandon their meta-research (because meta-research wouldn’t support their position) and start citing various individual studies that suggest that fabric masks might not be very effective. So, on the whole, the study shows that fabric masks might not be effective but aren’t harmful, and N95 are effective but might be harmful. Not an argument against wearing masks.
And the “harms” the study identifies for the N95 masks are far preferable to the harms of getting COVID. When it gets to the harms of fabric masks, the study starts arguing syllogistically, and seems to be assuming that people are not washing their masks. (Yeah, if you wear a fabric mask and don’t wash it on a daily basis, you’re likely to get acne. If this is news to you, we need to talk about your underwear.)
I could make other points about the study, such as that they didn’t include the variable of social distancing, none of the authors appears to be an epidemiologist, and it isn’t clear that anyone is a statistician, but the most important point is that the study as a whole doesn’t support the claim that masks are useless, let alone that masks are useless and harmful. What it does show is something that experts have been saying for a while: wearing a fabric mask (especially if, as the authors assume, one keeps wearing a fabric mask without washing it) is not a guarantee in and of itself (helllooooo, social distancing!) and might have problems. That is something that research has been saying for at least a year. Wearing a mask and engaging in social distancing is probably a good strategy:
“Evidence for efficacy of face masks against the first SARS virus, SARS-CoV-1, implies that they may be effective against the current outbreak of SARS-Cov-2 virus. This is important as mathematical modeling suggests that even small reductions of in transmission rates can make a large difference over time, potentially slowing the pace of viral pandemics and limiting their spread. Perhaps the strongest argument for the use of masks is that countries with early adoption of masks have tended to see flatter pandemic curves, even without strict nationwide lockdowns.[…] Improvised masks are less effective than medical masks, but may provide better protection than nothing at all.”
I picked this study because it’s over a year old, and pretty typical of what studies of fabric masks had and have been saying for a while. It also includes the issue of social distancing–a variable the anti-mask study didn’t include. This study says that a person wearing a non N95 mask can still expel droplets 20 cm. (That’s about eight inches.) So, social distancing is an important factor. This study doesn’t support a claim that masks are guaranteed to prevent infection, just as seat belts won’t magically prevent a person from injuries in a car wreck (and a person might be injured by the seat belt, albeit less injured than if they weren’t wearing one), but it does give good reason to think that wearing a mask, coupled with social distancing, will reduce COVID infection rates.
The anti-masker position is irrational because its advocates can’t put forward arguments that meet the lowest standards of a rational argument. They fail at the most basic level of: 1) having an internally consistent argument; 2) engaging the best opposition arguments; 3) holding themselves and their oppositions to the same standards of proof; 4) avoiding major fallacies.
Here’s how an anti-masker or anti-vaxxer could prove me wrong: identify the data that would cause you to admit you’re wrong; put forward an internally consistent argument that holds all data to the same standards; engage the best opposition arguments.
It’s common for people to complain about obstructionism and political paralysis in the abstract, and to blame politicians (or political parties) for those problems, but we rarely see how we, as voters, are rewarding obstructionism and thereby guaranteeing political paralysis. Obstructionism in a democracy only happens when it’s rewarded by voters, so, if we want it to stop, we have to stop rewarding it.
Of course, obstructionism only looks like obstructionism when the out-group engages in it. We don’t see our political party or leader engaged in obstructionism, but principled resistance. There are times when refusing to compromise is principled and good, but it’s rare that refusing to deliberate is principled. Yet it can present itself that way, particularly on issues that voters have made impossible for politicians to deliberate. Too often, political leaders declaring themselves so irrationally committed to an irrational policy that they refuse to engage in rational deliberation is seen as principled and decisive. It’s neither.
How we (not they) reward obstructionism is neatly exemplified in the December 2, 1980 session of the House of Commons, when Nicholas Ridley, Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the UK, gave a statement regarding what the British called the Falkland Islands.
Background. The situation regarding the Falklands/Malvina was murky—both Britain and Argentina claimed sovereignty, and the issue had never been litigated in a world court. After the UN passed Resolution 2065 in 1965, recognizing that sovereignty was disputed, and calling on the two countries to find a solution, the UK couldn’t be certain that any such litigation would result a favorable decision. The UN Resolution framed the issue in terms of colonialism, specifically mentioning Resolution 1514, which was a “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples” (XV). Regardless of assertions on both sides about their indisputable right to claim sovereignty, the claims were disputable, since they were being disputed (this point will become sadly important).
It was also murky as to what policy Britain should pursue. This is also sadly important. Loosely, there were two kinds of action political leaders could advocate: formally acknowledge Argentine sovereignty of the region, or commit to “Fortress Falklands” (that is, openly commit to holding onto the islands, by military force if necessary).
Within each of those large categories were numerous other options. For instance, Britain might opt for a leaseback with Argentina while granting all islanders “patrial” rights (that is, the right to move to Britain as a British citizen), or a leaseback without those rights (which would mean about 200 of the 1800 or so islanders would not have British citizenship). The leaseback might be as short as twenty years or as long as eighty; islanders might be recompensed for their property, or not.
The “Fortress Falklands” option similarly had variations. The basic notion was that Britain would cease negotiating about sovereignty, an action that would require that the islands be fortified at least enough to deter Argentina from sending troops to occupy the area—such as regular navy patrols (so expensive that the Thatcher government had fought hard for the only ship in the area to be scuttled and for the UK to have no naval presence at all) or a standing military force on the islands. The airport would have to be expanded such it would be useable in case of an attempted occupation. The island economy would also have to be strengthened so that the islanders could be independent of Argentina in case it tried some kind of economic embargo.
The problem was that almost every possible long-term policy that involved British insisting on sovereignty was expensive, ranging from millions to billions of pounds, at a point when the Thatcher government was advocating a neoliberalist economic policy of cutting government expenditures back to the bone. Advocating spending, for instance, 7 million pounds on an airport for the 1800 islanders, when coal miners were told to stuff it, was not an argument likely to go over well with the large swaths of the public. And that estimate was a minimal expenditure.
Meanwhile, arguing for acknowledging Argentine sovereignty would mean either changing the recent law regarding “patrial” rights (which seemed unthinkable at the time, but ended up getting changed) and that had implications that were controversial among anti-immigration voters in the UK.
In short, there was no obviously perfect policy option, but a variety of choices with varied costs and risks. Therefore, in a perfect world, or even just a deliberative one, the House reaction to Ridley’s statement would have been to insist on deliberating the relative strengths, weaknesses, costs, and risks of the various options. It is, after all, supposed to be a deliberative assembly. That isn’t what happened.
There was one thing about the situation that was perfectly clear: an ambitious politician could not advocate any of the policy options without enraging some group. Insisting upon rational deliberation about the long-term costs and likely outcomes of any option did nothing other than offer a cue to an ambitious politician to rant and rage and strike poses like a bad actor in an amateur production of Shakespeare. The temptation was there because it looked as though the one non-controversial position (that would look good to many people and outrage no one) was to insist upon the principle of self-determination for the islanders without advocating any of the policies necessary to make that self-determination meaningful. And politicians of every party took that cue when it was offered. Lawrence Freedman snarkily summarizes the political rhetoric on the issue: “There was an obligation to accept that the islanders’ wishes were paramount when it came to negotiations with the Argentines but not when it came to expenditures” (Official I:151). And that is what happened when Ridley made his statement.
One of many strange things about political discourse is that, the more uncertain the situation, the more likely it is that politicians and pundits will insist there is no question at all. The answer, they insist, is obvious. For instance, several speakers insisted that it was obvious that Britain’s sovereignty claim was indisputable (as I said, it was disputed, so it was disputable). Ridley began his statement says, “We have no doubt about our sovereignty over the islands.” Yet Peter Shore criticized Ridley’s actions as though he was weak on the question of sovereignty, saying that even discussing leasing was “a major weakening of our long-held position on sovereignty.” Bernard Braine similarly characterized Ridley’s position as “yielding on sovereignty” and thereby undermining “a perfectly valid title in international law.” Of course, the title might have seemed to Braine to be “perfectly” valid, but that’s hyperbole. A title that has never been tried in international law is not perfect.
Ridley also said in his statement that “Any eventual settlement would have to be endorsed by the islanders and this House.” That’s an unambiguous statement, yet various speakers replied as though Ridley had waffled on the question of the ability of the islanders to veto any foreign policy they didn’t like, regardless of what the majority of British citizens felt. I emphasize that disproportionate amount of power because it would have been reasonable to say that some compromise is necessary. In 1977, the “Ridley Report” advocated harsh measures regarding workers in various industries, with comments like, “It must eventually be taken for granted that in order to meet the obligation plants must be closed and people must be sacked” (4) and “Effective action might mean that men would be laid off, or uneconomic plants would be closed down, or whole businesses sold off or liquidated” (4). Ridley’s report assumed that strikes were inevitable, and included estimates on how long the country could withstand strikes. So, when it came to workers in the UK, Ridley himself had no trouble telling far more than 1800 people that their wishes and desires could be completely ignored—neither he nor the Conservative Party was committed to the principle of self-determination, or unwilling to force people into compromises they didn’t want.
But, having said that he would give the islanders veto power, Ridley was treated as though he’d said the opposite, and various speakers from different parties asked leading questions (statements and speeches are prohibited in these circumstances, and only questions are allowed) demanding that Ridley take a hyperbolic stance on the issue. Peter Shore (Labour) said, “Will [Ridley] reaffirm that there is no question of proceeding with any proposal contrary to the wishes of the Falklands Islanders? [….] Will he, therefore, make it clear that we shall uphold the rights of the islanders to continue to make a genuinely free choice about their future, that we shall not abandon them, and that, in spite of all the logistical difficulties, we shall continue to support and sustain them?” (emphasis added) In other words, Shore was demanding that Ridley say that he will be an irresponsible political leader—a responsible leader sets limits on policies, largely on the basis of logistical difficulties. Political leaders (and voters) should pay careful attention to logistical difficulties, especially if those difficulties might require spending millions or billions of pounds.
Shore, a member at that time of the Labour Party, would hardly claim that it’s responsible to spend at least 17 million pounds on the Falklands and endanger relations with Argentina, at a time when “current and pending contracts with Argentina [were] worth over £240 million, as well as investment worth £60 million” (Freedman 49) and the UK economy was in such trouble. William Shelton (Conservative), David Lambie (Scottish Labour), James Johnson (Labour), Viscount Cranborne (Conservative) made similar demands for statements of intransigence. One of the most irresponsible statements was Douglas Jay’s “Why cannot the Foreign Office leave the matter alone?” As explained above, and as every member of Parliament knew, Britain had choices, it wasn’t obvious which one was best, and none was perfect, but something had to be done.
As various scholars have argued, and was admitted at the time, Argentina would eventually trigger war by occupying the islands because of misunderstanding the very mixed signals sent by Parliament, Thatcher’s government, and the Foreign Office. The way political leaders talked about the issue led to war when diplomacy might have solved the problem.
It’s quite likely that the speakers taking a bellicose stance had no desire for war over the islands, and I’m sure they didn’t realize that they were setting such a war in motion. But they were, not just by their posturing about a rigid stance on the issue of sovereignty, but by the combination of a rigid stance and no policy that would make a refusal to negotiate about sovereignty a plausible course of action. They had nothing to gain, politically, by arguing for any policy at all and much to lose. But, they had a lot to gain politically by arguing against any policy. In other words, they were engaged in obstructing not only any policies oriented toward a long-term solution to the situation, but any deliberation of the policies.
Newspaper reports the next day describe Ridley as having been “mauled” by the House, but I don’t feel sorry for him. He had several moments at which he could have been more honest and more accurate about the situation. He never mentioned the practical costs of improving the situation for the islanders, or of the costs of Fortress Falklands. At one point, a member (Frank Hooley) says, “Is not the Government’s argument that the interests of 1,800 Falkland islanders take precedence over the interests of 55 million people in the United Kingdom?” It’s an accurate characterization of the Thatcher approach to the situation, and of that advocated by Labour members like Shore. At that point, Ridley could have reminded the House of the costs of the course of action necessarily connected to what they were advocating, but instead said, “There need be no conflict between the two, especially if a peaceful resolution of the dispute can be achieved.” However the conflict was resolved would be expensive, and that means money would have to come from something that some other UK constituency wanted. Of course the interests conflict because interests conflict.
The members’ obstructionism was rewarded in the media. The Parliamentary Correspondent for The Times, for instance, repeated the arguments, endorsing them along the way, and said,
Seldom can a minister have had such a drubbing from all sides of the House, and Mr Ridley was left in no doubt that whatever Machiavellian intrigues he and the Foreign Office may be up to, they will come to nothing if they involve harming a hair on the heads of the islanders. (December 3, 1980, p 8)
Too bad The Times wasn’t so worried about the islanders’ hair that it advocated a reasonable discussion of policy options.
But, again, I don’t blame The Times, or the Members. Newspapers print what gets them readers, and politicians say what gets them votes. It was, ultimately, the voters who rewarded this kind of obstructionism. It is, also, voters who eventually pay for it. In the case of British voters, it was 288 dead, and 777 wounded, and at least 2 billion pounds. The UK gave the islanders patrial rights, and, in 2011/12, was spending 46 million pounds on the islands yearly.
But the miners could stuff it.
On April 18, 1965, The New York Times published a long editorial written by Hans Morgenthau, in which he argued that, while he appreciated a recent statement of LBJ about Vietnam, on the whole, he thought that “the President reiterated the intellectual assumptions and policy proposals which brought us to an impasse and which make it impossible to extricate ourselves.” The assumptions were false, he argued, and the policies grounded in those assumptions were therefore unreasonable and unlikely to succeed. Morgenthau’s criticism of US policy in regard to Vietnam is interesting not because it was unusual (it wasn’t), but because the response to his criticism exemplifies how people avoid the responsibilities of democratic deliberation through motivism and fallacious arguments from association. That kind of response undermines useful policy deliberation, and ultimately contributes to authoritarianism. It doesn’t matter who it is used by or for.
Morgenthau was anti-communist, self-identified conservative, and one of the founders of what is generally called the “realist” school in international relations (e.g., Kissinger’s realpolitik). Thus, Morgenthau granted that China should be contained, but he argued that military intervention to prop up the Diem regime was not the way to do it. He argued that it was a fantasy to think that it could be contained in the same way that the USSR had been in Europe–that is, through “erecting a military wall at the periphery of her empire.” He insisted that the Vietnam situation was a civil war, not “an integral part of unlimited Chinese aggression.”
In many ways, Morgenthau’s criticism of US policy was more or less the same as others elsewhere on the political spectrum (like Henry Steele Commager, MLK, Reinhold Niebuhr). He said that Ho Chi Minh “came to power not courtesy of another Communist nation’s victorious army but at the head of a victorious army of his own.” (so this was not like Soviet aggression in Europe). Ho Chi Minh had considerable popular support, whereas Diem did not, and therefore this was not a military, but a political, problem. Morgenthau argued that, “People fight and die in civil wars because they have a faith which appears to them worth fighting and dying for, and they can be opposed with a chance of success only by people who have at least as strong a faith.” Supporters of Diem did not have at least a strong a faith because Diem’s policies resulted in his being unpopular (“on one side, Diem’s family, surrounded by a Pretorian guard; on the other, the Vietnamese people”). Morgenthau pointed out that trying to treat such situations in a military way–counter-insurgency–had not worked. The French tried it in Algeria and Indochina (i.e., Vietnam), and it didn’t work, and it wasn’t working for the US in Vietnam. Like other critics of US policy in Vietnam (e.g., MLK), he emphasized that Diem (and the US, by supporting Diem) had violated the Geneva agreement, especially in terms of refusing to have an election—a refusal that was an open admission that communism was not imposed on an unwilling populace, but a popular policy agenda (he notes, largely because of land reform). We were violating the fundamental characteristic of democracy—abiding by the results of elections—in some mistaken notion that it would protect democracy.
Morgenthau’s anti-communist, conservative, and realist opposition to Vietnam shows how false is our tendency to talk about policy affiliations in terms of identity (left v. right, “conservatives” v. “liberals”). To take a policy affiliation and assume it has a necessary relationship to an identity is anti-deliberative, anti-democratic, and proto-demagogic, and what happened to Morgenthau shows just how damaging that deflecting of argumentation is.
Being opposed to US policy in Vietnam didn’t necessarily mean that one was sympathetic to communism—it could, as it did with Morgenthau, be the consequence of such a commitment to anti-communism that one only wants to support polices that will actually succeed. Ironically, that would eventually be the position that Robert McNamara, the (liberal and Democratic) architect of US policy in Vietnam, would adopt. In his 1995 book In Retrospect, McNamara would say that he came to realize that everything people like MLK, Morgenthau, and Neibuhr had been saying was true. He didn’t mention them by name, or acknowledge that he could have listened to them. But he could have.
We now often equate opposing the Vietnam War with “liberals” and supporting the war with “conservatives” and we assume that “liberals” were Democrats and “conservatives” GOP. We do so, not because we’re operating from any coherent mapping of policy affiliation, but because reducing policy affiliation to a false binary or continuum of identity throws policy argumentation to the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. And that’s the point, especially if the policy agenda of a party is contradictory. Under those circumstances, instead of trying to defend policies, the most short-term effective rhetorical strategy is to go on the offensive, and deflect attention from one’s policies to the motives of the critics.
That’s exactly what the liberal and Democratic LBJ and his supporters did in regard to his Vietnam policies, as exemplified in their treatment of Morgenthau. Morgenthau put forward a sensible plan that was, it should be emphasized, grounded in anti-communism:
(1) recognition of the political and cultural predominance of China on the mainland of Asia as a fact of life; (2) liquidation of the peripheral military containment of China; (3) strengthening of the uncommitted nations of Asia by nonmilitary means; (4) assessment of Communist governments in Asia in terms not of Communist doctrine but of their relation to the interests and power of the United States.
In other words, the US should be prepared to ally itself with communist regimes, as long as they were hostile to China. This plan was similar to the policy the US justified as “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”–how we rationalized supporting unpopular authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records rather than allow elections that might lead to socialist or communist (even if democratic) regimes–but with a more realistic assessment of the varieties of communism and the possible benefits of those alliances. As Morgenthau says, “In fact, the United States encounters today less hostility from Tito, who is a Communist, than from de Gaulle, who is not.”
Realism, as a political theory, claims to value putting the best interests of the nation above “moral” considerations, and strives to separate moral assessments of the “goodness” of allies from their potential utility to the US. We were, after all, closely allied with Israel, Sweden, and various other highly socialistic countries; why not add North Vietnam to that list, as long as it would be an ally?
That’s an argument worth considering. Morgenthau thought we should. Clearly, McNamara should have. He didn’t. We didn’t. Defenders of LBJ’s policies neither debated nor refuted Morgenthau’s argument. Instead, they shifted the stasis to Morgenthau’s motives and identity, pathologizing him, misrepresenting his arguments, and depoliticizing debate about Vietnam.
The Chicago Tribune published a short guest editorial (from National Review) June 12, 1965, and it’s worth quoting in full:
Prof. Hans Morgenthau’s hyperactive role as a protestor against our policy in Viet Nam is embarrassing many of his friends, and may even be embarrassing to himself, who is not used to the kind of self-exposure he is submitting to or to the company he finds himself keeping. (He was, it is reliably reported, distressed to see a photograph of himself standing next to Linus Paulding, and we cannot believe he looks forward to sharing the Madison Square Garden platform with the infantile leftist, Joan Baez.)
Morgenthau is a fine scholar and a first-rate dialectician. His Asiatic policies are heavily conditioned by his adamant Europe-firstism—much as the politics of Dean Acheson were. Then too, in 1960-61, Morgenthau went to Harvard as a visiting professor, expecting appointment to a new chair of government, McGeorge Bundy, then dean, nixed it—and may thereby have lit a fuse that is now exploding in anti-Johnson (and anti-Bundy) rallies around the country.
The Tribune editorial doesn’t misrepresent Morgenthau’s argument—it doesn’t even acknowledge he has one—nor does it characterize him as a dangerous person. Instead, it infantilizes and trivializes him by associating him with Linus Paulding and Joan Baez, embarrassment, infantilism, and leftism. It never argues that he’s infantile, trivial, and so on—the argument is made through association (such as characterizing his criticism of US policy regarding Vietnam as a “hyperactive role”).
There is a gesture of fairness–acknowledging that Morgenthau is a Professor and intelligent, but with a smear and dismissal. Morgenthau was Jewish, and one of many anti-semitic strategies for othering Jews was to refer to them as “Asiatic” (and therefore not really white)—Morgenthau’s ethnic background is irrelevant to whether he’s making a good argument. But, given the anti-semitism of the time, it would discredit him for some audience members. Similarly, whether he was a “Europe First,” or even whether that’s a bad thing to be, is irrelevant to whether his claims are logical, reasonable, and so on. The narrative about what happened at Harvard—whether true or not—also has nothing to do with the quality of Morgenthau’s argument.
But, dismissing an opposition argument on the grounds that the person has bad motives for making it (and it isn’t therefore a real argument) is persuasive to people who believe dissent constitutes out-group membership. We have a tendency to attribute good motives to the in-group and bad motives to the out-group for exactly the same behavior. Thus, the editorial says Morgenthau’s stance on Vietnam is purely the consequence of an academic rivalry. Why not assume the same of McGeorge Bundy’s stance? Why not assume that Bundy, if he did “nix” Morgenthau’s appointment, did so out of personal spite, and personal spite means he is taking the opposite position on the war from Morgenthau?
The slippage between Cold War rhetoric and policies meant that, as in the case of Vietnam, the US was in the paradoxical position of claiming to promote democracy, freedom, and independence while helping major powers (like France) hold on to colonies, supporting anti-democratic (even openly fascist) governments, suppressing elections, and silencing free speech even in the US:
The cold war was an all-encompassing rhetorical reality that developed out of Soviet-American disputes but eventually transcended them to reach to American perceptions of Asia and to American actions against domestic dissidents. This ideological rhetoric became so embedded in American consciousness that it eventually limited the political choice leaders could make, created grossly distorted views of adversaries, and finally led to the witch-hunts of McCarthyism. (Hinds and Windt xix)
Given the way the Cold War rhetoric paired terms worked, to criticize an “ally” or any US policy could be framed as endorsing the USSR. This despite the fact that we were often not promoting democracy, that not all forms of communism were imposed by a Soviet-led minority on an unwilling populace, and that silence of dissent was one of the main criticisms of the USSR. Thus, in service of battling an enemy one of whose crimes was silencing dissent, we silenced dissent.
When I was working on the demagoguery book, I wanted to include pieces all over the political spectrum, including something by an author I really liked (Muir) and something from the radical left. Length made me cut the discussion of Muir’s “Hetch Hetchy Valley.” (At the time, I thought it would be part of my next book project. It’s now moved to the one after this at the earliest.) And I also spent some time thinking I’d write about the Weathermen, but writing about their rhetoric is really hard for a bunch of interesting reasons. Since I didn’t get to write about it in the book, I’ll blather about it here. I still think rhetoric from groups like the Weathermen should be talked about more in our scholarship and teaching for several reasons. But it’s tough.
First, their writings, especially Prairie Fire (1974), are mind-numbing in a kind of interesting way (so this is a reason for and against writing about them). That may be a deliberate rhetorical choice. It might be what used to be called mystagoguery, in which the rhetoric is basically unintelligible, but it seems smart, and the fact that the audience can’t follow the argument is taken to mean that the author is sooo smart, a prophet with direct connection to the Truth that the audience doesn’t have (but might get by putting all their faith in the prophet). A lot of New Age self-help rhetoric works this way, as do most conspiracy theories.
The term mystagoguery quickly fell out of favor among scholars because the accusation of mystagoguery was so often just anti-intellectualism or an unconsidered hostility to specialist discourse. The problem was that people called something mystagoguery (especially literary theory) simply because they didn’t understand it. But something not making sense to a particular person doesn’t mean it’s unintelligible in general. Early Habermas made no sense to me for a long time because I didn’t understand the references, context, counter-arguments, and terms. Once I took the time to try to understand them, it made sense. I can’t follow an argument about super-string theory to save my life, but it isn’t mystagoguery—I’m just not in the audience. So, to argue that something is mystagoguery requires first engaging in the most charitable reading possible—trying to make sure one understands the references and so on–, and then explaining why, even in that context and so on the text doesn’t make sense.
Arguing that Prairie Fire is mystagoguery would require going deep into the specific kind of Maoist Marxist discourse of the Weathermen, and then either showing that it didn’t make sense, or that their use of it didn’t make sense. That’s a long slog I didn’t feel like making.
To claim something is mystagoguery is to attribute a fairly specific relationship between the rhetor and audience. The audience isn’t persuaded of the arguments made in the text, because the audience can’t even say exactly what those arguments are (let alone explain what many of the terms or phrases mean), but they can get a general gist (capitalism = bad; weathermen = good), and they believe that the rhetor does understand everything they are saying. So, the audience believes there is a very clear set of arguments and the rhetor is a genius who understands them.
In another kind of discourse, however, neither the rhetor nor audience believes that there is a set of comprehensible claims logically related to one another. The claims might be clear to the reader in isolation, but their relationship to one another is nonsense. Much Weatherman rhetoric, for instance, lists various ways that different groups are oppressed by American capitalism, and makes claims about what a revolution would do, and why now is the moment that various oppressed groups will see their shared oppression, rise up together, and overthrow capitalism in favor of a communist society. There isn’t any argumentation showing the connections among the claims, and those connections are vexed.
The notion that the white working class would, any minute now, realize that their interests were the same as BIPOC (all of whom have the same interests), environmentalists, prisoners, gays, Palestinians, women, and every other group mentioned in the pamphlet seems to me implausible. Although it was doctrine in some (not all) Marxist circles that the first step in revolution was a massive coalition of people who had realized their shared oppression, that wasn’t how any revolution had happened. But Prairie Fire, like a lot of demagoguery, argues through assertion, not argumentation. There are specifics and data, but the specific cases described function to exemplify the point being made, not as minor premises logically connected to a valid major premise.
In other words, there’s a different kind of rhetoric going on here, discourse that is fundamentally epideictic but with all the discursive surface markers of argumentation. It looks like argumentation, but it isn’t. That’s interesting.
Another aspect of Weathermen rhetoric that’s interesting for scholars and teachers of rhetoric is the question of effectiveness. At the time of Prairie Fire (1974), there were authors engaged in Marxist critiques of American education, carceral system, economy that, whether we agree with them or not, were engaged in argumentation, and they did change minds. People did read, for instance, Angela Davis on the prison system and change their mind about it. It’s hard to imagine that anyone would read Prairie Fire and have their mind changed about abolition, China, Palestine, the Rosenbergs, or the other sometimes apparently random topics discussed. But, the authors might not have been trying to persuade their audience about those issues.
Prairie Fire is a manifesto, and one of the major rhetorical functions of a manifesto is persuading an audience somewhat committed to the cause to become fully committed. Augustine famously said that a sermon might inform pagans about Christianity, persuade Christians to believe correct doctrine, and convince committed Christians to walk the walk (not his exact words). A manifesto tries to convince believers to become beleevers, largely by trying to persuade them that the group is fully committed to success, and will be effective because it’s in a tradition of successful social movements.
It doesn’t make that latter argument through a careful comparison of strategies, but by providing a geneaology in which Weather Underground is placed at the end of a narrative that includes Harriet Tubman, unions, Toussaint L’O[u]verture, and others whose precise relationship to the Weathermen is never clearly explained. But I think the implication that one is supposed to draw is associative, and not logical. And that’s interesting.
There’s one other point I want to make about effectiveness. It’s hard to find a good secondary on the Weathermen—some of the histories make them heroes and others villains, with very little in between. All the authors seem to have an axe to grind. The people who were involved in it are not necessarily motivated to be entirely honest about their reasons for joining the group. Still and all, there’s some indication that, at least for some people, it was the sex and drugs. So, did the verbal rhetoric even need to be plausible, let alone persuasive?
The main reason I really wanted to write about the rhetoric of Prairie Fire is that its rhetorical approach—accumulation, association, assertion, dismissal of any opposition or criticism through motivism—might be connected to the epistemological premises of a certain kind of Marxism that was popular in that era: a kind of enlightened and omniscient naïve realism.
Naïve realism says that the world is as it appears, and that, if we get back to direct perception (which is relatively easy for sensible people to do) then we will all see the same thing: the truth. Disagreement is necessarily a sign that someone is biased and their views should be dismissed.
There is also a kind of naïve realism that says that only some people (those who have been enlightened) can have that unmediated perception of the truth, and that their perception is universally valid—they are omniscient. This way of thinking about thinking is deeply anti-democratic, and yet common in democracies. It isn’t particular to democracies, nor is it specific to any one political affiliation.
There are four important assumptions involved in the enlightened and omniscient naïve realism model of identity and perception: 1) that there is a truth in any situation—a true way of thinking about religion, the truly best policy, a true narrative about a historical event; 2) a single individual can perceive this truth (that is, they can have a perspective-free, omniscient viewpoint, from which they can see everything that is true about poverty, the Trinity, WWI); 3) certain experiences (a particular kind of education, a conversion experience, success in business, military prowess) and/or group identity (wealthy, poor, GOP, Dem, white, young, old, so on) have either given them or signify their enlightened and omniscient naïve realism; 4) because their point of view is omniscient, everyone who disagrees with them is biased (by cupidity or stupidity), limited to one perspective (seeing only part of the situation), or lying (they know what the truth is, but it’s inconvenient, risky, or unpleasant, so they deliberately or choose the obviously wrong policy).
The political implications are pretty clear: there is one right policy solution to every problem. There is no such thing as intelligent and informed good faith disagreement. That one right solution is obvious to the right people, so disagreement is itself a reason to ban someone from the discussion, and to keep political power limited to the people who demonstrate enlightened omniscience. In other words, it’s anti-democratic. There may be forms and norms that appear democratic–the communist bloc nations had constitutions and Bills of Rights, and Massachusetts Bay Colony claimed to support “freedom of conscience.” But, in all those cases, people had the right to be right–that is, the right to agree and not the right to disagree.[1]
Ultimately, enlightened omniscient naive realism ends up in a tyranny of some form, perhaps a one-party state (such as Dinesh D’Souza advocates), a theocracy, herrrenvolk democracy, oligarchy, and so on.
In the case of the Weathermen, it ended up with their being racist, and that’s another interesting aspect of them. Because they were enlightened by virtue of their ideology, they saw themselves as better judges of the conditions of Black Americans than Black Americans, with the obvious consequence that they became notorious for whitesplaining. Their epistemology undermined their sincere attempts to be anti-racist.
Participating in politics is, as Hannah Arendt elegantly argued, a transcendental leap into uncertainty. We can reduce the uncertainty of any particular leap by using processes that reduce our reliance on cognitive biases, such as trying to find the smartest opposition arguments we can, trying to think about what evidence would cause us to change our mind, and making a distinction between agreeing with an argument and thinking it’s reasonable. Believing that there is only one right policy, and that we happen to know it is like making that leap without a rope, parachute, rescue plan, or map.
[1] When I make this argument, sometimes people think I’m arguing against vehemence, and I’m not. I think it’s great for people to be passionately committed to their argument. Being passionately committed to our argument, and arguing vehemently that someone else’s argument is wrong because their evidence is flawed, they’re missing important information, their sources are bad, and so on—that’s what democracy needs to be. Arguing that one’s preferred policy is the best is how people are likely to argue. But arguing that one’s preferred policy is the only possibility, and that every single other policy is obviously wrong, and obviously every single person who disagrees is a benighted, biased, corrupt, bigoted fool—that’s profoundly anti-democratic. Dismissing arguments because everyone not in the in-group has bad motives is the problem. It’s also false. None of us is actually the person who crawled out of Plato’s cave and sees the truth in every situation.
This was going to be one post, but it turned into several. And it’s a set of posts, not about how appeasing Hitler was right (it wasn’t), but about how people like us actively supported Hitler, or actively supported appeasing him.
It’s common for people to express outraged bewilderment at British politicians and figures who appeased Hitler—we claim not to understand how they could have been duped by him, how they could not have seen him for who he really was. We like to explain appeasement either by saying that Hitler was a rhetorical magician, whose persuasive skills were overwhelming, or by saying that the people who didn’t take him seriously enough were fools engaged in wishful thinking. Neither is the case. In fact, many of us would have supported appeasing Hitler. If we try to tell a story of an irresistible rhetor or hopelessly gullible political leaders, then we are the gullible ones.
In other words, this isn’t about Hitler, and it isn’t about Chamberlain. It’s about us.
Hitler, like many manipulative people, didn’t persuade others, as much as he gave them the tools that enabled them to persuade themselves of something they already wanted to believe. Those strategies (and those people) allowed Hitler to normalize Nazi behavior and deflect his personal responsibility for what couldn’t be normalized.
On May 11, 1933, the British Ambassador to Germany, Horace Rumbold, met with Hitler. Hitler had only been in the government since that January, and dictator since that March, but Rumbold already had him correctly sized up. Rumbold described the meeting in a dispatch back to the Foreign Office (Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919-1939, Second Series, Volume V #139) and his description of it shows how Hitler’s rhetoric worked (and, in this case, didn’t work) and with whom.
The meeting was fairly typical of meetings with Hitler—he did most of the talking, got unhinged on the subject of Jews, deflected (especially through whaddaboutism), and lied or exaggerated when he couldn’t deflect. After the Reichstag Fire, the Nazi government arrested anyone considered communist, a category that included labor union activists. Nazi persecution of Jews was well known, as well as violence against communists.
Because he had read Mein Kampf and been listening to speeches by Hitler and other major Nazis, Rumbold knew exactly what Hitler planned. In a memo written not long before this meeting (Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919-1939, Second Series, Volume V #36), Rumbold had summarized Hitler’s philosophy (long quotes from Rumbold are the full paragraphs in italics):
He starts with the assertion that man is a fighting animal: therefore the nation is, he concludes, a fighting unit, being a community of fighters. Any living organism which ceases to fight for its existence is, he asserts, doomed to extinction. A country or a race which ceases to fight is equally doomed. The fighting capacity of a race depends on its purity. Hence the necessity for ridding it of foreign impurities. The Jewish race, owing to its universality, is of necessity pacificist and internationalist. Pacificism is the deadliest sin, for pacificism means the surrender of the race in the fight for existence [….] The race must fight: a race that rests must rust and perish. The German race, had it been united in time, would now be master of the globe today. The new Reich must gather within its folds all the scattered German elements in Europe [….] The ultimate aim of education is to produce a German who can be converted with the minimum of training into a soldier [….] Again and again he proclaims that fanatical conviction and uncompromising resolution are indispensable qualities in a leader [….] Germany needs peace until she has recovered such strength that no country can challenge her without serious and irksome preparations.
He was right, as we know. It’s important to point out that his correct interpretation of Hitler and the Nazis was grounded in evidence available to anyone fluent in German—the public and published statements of Hitler and the Nazis. It’s also important to point out that, while Hitler had very recently (around 1932) begun talking in terms of self-determination rather than conquest, shifted to dog whistles about his racist policies, and took to lying about violations of the Versailles Treaty, he never retracted, apologized for, or even qualified his previous very clear statements about German hegemony, the desire for a pure and militarized Germany, the need for violence, the equation of Jews and communism, and so on.
People do change their minds, of course, and so the notion that Hitler wasn’t the hothead he had been in the twenties isn’t obviously wrong. But he only stopped making all those arguments two or three years before becoming Chancellor, and he never retracted them. When people change their minds, they openly retract what they previous said. He changed his rhetoric, and not his mind. He didn’t change his rhetoric because he wanted to hold on to the base he’d created with his militaristic and racist rhetoric; he’d risk losing them if he retracted those sorts of statements. When a political figure suddenly changes their rhetoric, then we have to figure out which sets of statements s/he meant, and one relatively straightforward one is: they believe the one they’ve never retracted, even if they’re stopped saying it or are saying the opposite.
But, back to Rumbold’s despatch about the May 11 meeting.
Rumbold says that Hitler complained about the “Polish Corridor:”
He only wished that the Corridor had been created far more to the east. (This is the same remark as that which he recently made to the Polish Minister). The result of the creation of the Corridor had been to provoke grave dissatisfaction in Germany and apprehension in Poland, for the Poles realized that it was an artificial creation. Thus a state of unrest was kept alive.
So, what is Hitler doing?
First, he wasn’t a mastermind of rhetoric. Someone genuinely skilled in rhetoric wouldn’t harangue people in small meetings, but he was notorious for that—not only for, as he does in this meeting, doing almost all the talking, but actually slipping into giving a speech. He was highly skilled at one kind of rhetoric—he was good at making a speech that moved a crowd. Even William Shirer, the Berlin correspondent for American media, says that he sometimes found himself temporarily moved by Hitler’s speeches, and he knew exactly who Hitler was and what he wanted. Paradoxically (given what we know about Hitler), what came across so effectively in the big public speeches was that Hitler was completely, passionately, authentically, and even irrationally committed to the cause of Germany (the in-group). We don’t expect rational discussions of policy options in large public speeches (although maybe we should); we are particularly prone to the rush of the charismatic leadership relationship. And that’s what Hitler offered.
In one-on-one situations, charismatic leadership works less well—that Hitler was irrationally committed to the cause of Germans wasn’t especially interesting to the British Ambassador. What does work, but only for people who are looking to be persuaded, are the strategies that Hitler uses: projection, whaddaboutism, lying, exaggeration.
Take, for instance, Hitler’s comments about the “Polish Corridor.” The idea that there are “natural” boundaries, which the Polish Corridor violated, is part of Hitler’s racist notions about some “races” being entitled to territory. Of course the boundaries are artificial—that is, made by humans—because that’s what boundaries always are. Poles weren’t worried about the boundaries being artificial; they were worried about German aggression. Hitler’s passive—a state of unrest was kept alive—makes it seem as though Poles were partially responsible for the state of unrest. Were the Poles completely confident about the borders, there would still be a state of unrest because of Hitler’s rhetoric about German entitlement. Poles weren’t apprehensive about the boundaries; they were apprehensive about Nazi aggression. Hitler projects his unrest he creates onto the Poles.
This strategy would work with an interlocutor who believed that states have “natural” boundaries, or that the boundaries set by the negotiations at the end of the Great War were artificial or unfair to Germany. This way of presenting the situation would also work with someone who didn’t really believe that Poles were people who should be considered, or at least not considered as having the same natural rights to self-determination and a nation-state as, say, Germans.
What many people now forget is that the Austro-Hungarian Empire had collapsed with the Great War, and one consequence was the rebirth (or creation, depending on your narrative of history) of various nation-states that hadn’t existed for several lifetimes. Poland and Czechoslovakia were two of those nation-states. Given the vexed and sometimes violent history of 19th century conflicts over nationalism, language, and oppression, some boundaries had been deliberately designed to keep Germans a minority. Were he talking to the kind of racist who believed that Germans were better people than Slavs, Hitler’s implicit argument about the boundaries would seem reasonable. As it happens, he wasn’t at that moment, but he often was. So, one reason that major political figures argued for appeasing Hitler was that they agreed with him that Germans should be politically dominant in central Europe because Slavs were, you know, so Slavic. They would, therefore, overlook that a state of unrest was kept alive because of German leaders like Hitler, and instead be willing to see the situation—self-determination for Slavs designed to keep a minority German population from dominating—as artificial, with some vague sort of “both sides are at fault” way of framing the situation.
These people wouldn’t necessarily think Germany should take over all the areas previously controlled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but they would be sympathetic to Germany calling a situation artificial if it kept German speakers from political domination. They might object to Germany dominating Europe, but not what they (wrongly) imagined to be racial Germans dominating the political situations in most Central and Eastern European countries.
We now forget (or don’t know) how widespread what we now know are bullshit narratives about “race” were in that era. Race, which even the most respected and cited scholarship on race couldn’t define consistently, was incoherently associated with language, and sometimes phenotype (but only when that was politically useful). Books like Passing of the Great Race (1916) or The Rising Tide of Color (1921) were tremendously popular in the US and Britain, and they were pearl-clutching jeremiads about the danger to civilization from Central and Eastern Europeans—that is, from Slavs and, worst of all, Slavish Jews. That was the whole point of the extremely restrictive 1924 Immigration Act—it was designed to reduce the number of people coming from Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe.
Hitler’s griping about the “artificiality” of the Polish Corridor was grounded in the belief that people who self-identified as German (what he would have called “Aryans”) should not be politically dominated by Slavs. And that argument would work with anyone who agreed with the unhappily common premise that politics should not be people from different groups arguing from their different perspectives, but people who have the right point of view being dominant.
So, for our fantasy that we would never have supported Hitler, the important question is: do we believe that ideal political deliberation has people with radically different points of view, people we really dislike and look down on, arguing with one another, or do we think it consists of our in-group being “naturally” (ontologically) entitled to political domination?
If the latter, then we would have loved Hitler, as long as we agreed with him as to what in-group was entitled to political domination.
Just in case I’ve been unclear: if we condemn Hitler, but believe that only our group has a legitimate political stance, and that our group is entitled to domination, then we don’t really condemn Hitler. We would have been open to persuasion to his narrative about the victimization of Germans, since we believe that a group can be victimized simply on the grounds that it isn’t as dominant as it feels entitled to be.
One of the reasons that people supported Hitler–including people shocked that he did what he’d said he would do were he in power–was that they agreed with his premise that there is an in-group that should have all the political power. If we agree with that premise, but disagree as to which group it is, we’re close enough to Hitler that we’re just splitting some very fine hairs.
Every once in a while I find myself arguing with people about an apparently pedantic, but actually very important, point about demagoguery. People I respect and think are very smart insist that demagoguery is a condition unique to democracy.
I think that this argument comes from several sources. One is Mortimer Adler, who argued that the Athenian empire collapsed because of “too much democracy.” (It didn’t.) Another is sloppy inference from morphemes. Demagoguery and democracy share the “dem” after all.
Although pedantic, this argument is also really troubling, in that it implies that the solution to demagoguery is to abandon democracy, and/or that only the masses are susceptible to demagoguery, a solution that also implies some degree of authoritarianism.
It’s not only pedantic, but wrong.
Were Adler right, then the elites in Athens would have been right in their decisions, and the problems would have come from bad decisions on the part of the “demes” (the small landowners). Alcibiades was elite; he was a jerk out for himself. There’s no reason to think he was only supported by the small landowners. And that term—the demes, small landowners–is the linguistic source of demagoguery and democracy. Demagogues were leaders of the small landowners—the demes. Democracy is a system that includes them.
Alcibiades was an example of what was toxic in Athenian democracy, but his success had nothing to do with too much inclusion. It was about too much factionalism on the part of oligarchs and demes.
What happened is that what had been a neutral term for the leader of a political party (the demes) became a term for an unscrupulous rhetor, largely as a consequence of anti-democratic elitists like Plato and Plutarch.
Thucydides used the term in a neutral way, meaning the leader of the party of the demes. So, his use of the term is like someone saying “the leading Libertarian” or “the leader of the Republicans.” His hero Pericles was a leader of the demes, a demagogue. One of his villains, Cleon, was a leader of the demes, a demagogue. Alcibiades was a disaster, and not a leader of the demes, and another disastrous leader, Nikias, was not a demagogue.
What made Cleon, Alcibiades, and Nikias disastrous leaders wasn’t that they were demagogues (only Cleon was) but that they didn’t have Pericles’ combination of good judgment and rhetorical skill. Thucydides wasn’t making a point about democracy, but about rhetoric and judgment.
Aristotle (whose understanding of demagoguery is pretty interesting) says that a demagogue—that is, a populist politician—can gain power when the rich so oppress the poor that the poor are desperate. Then, the rich get worried about the agitation of the poor and so support a tyrant. And democracy ends.
Plato and Plutarch both took up the issue of demagoguery, and both were profoundly elitist, thinking that the demes should have no part in politics. Plutarch’s narrative about politics was that there are two groups: the rich (basically reasonable) and the poor (completely driven by emotions). Poor people are basically irrational, and easily roused to authoritarianism. A good government gives more power to the rich, but also gives the poor a way to express their concerns that the rich can consider. (This is a misunderstanding of what happened in Athens, by the way.)
The Founders were strongly influenced by Plutarch. And, therefore, their ideal was not the Athenian democracy, but the Roman republic. They believed the republic solved the problem of rich v. poor. And they knew that the Roman republic had its demagogues. So even the Founders understood that demagoguery was not just a problem of democracies—it arose in republics.
Thomas Hobbes translated Thucydides because he was worried about the presence and damage of demagogues, and he lived in a monarchy. His horror of demagoguery was the consequence of his seeing the devastation created by the Thirty Years War and the English Civil Wars, neither of which happened in a democracy or republic.
It would be difficult to claim that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is not demagoguery, and it was created under an authoritarian monarchy. Hitler’s rhetoric began in the conditions of democracy, and remained the same under fascism. Did he stop being a demagogue March 24, 1933 when he became dictator? Stalin’s rhetoric (not a democracy) is exactly like Father Charles Coughlin (democracy). But only Coughlin’s is demagoguery? If people have the same rhetorical strategies, shouldn’t we characterize their rhetoric with the same term?
Insisting that demagoguery is a condition of democracy means that we say that the Founders and Hobbes were wrong to worry about it, that Hitler stopped being a demagogue March 24, 1933, that neither Castro nor Stalin ever engaged in it, that there was never demagoguery about Jews, Slavs, Africans, and…well, this list is way too long, except in democracies.
Really? Is that a claim anyone wants to defend? That the rhetoric that blamed Jews for the plague was not demagoguery? Even if it was exactly like the demagoguery during the Weimar democracy that blamed them for Germans losing the Great War? So, exactly the same rhetoric is not the same just because of the governmental system under which it happened?
Pedantic much?
Demagoguery is not a form of rhetoric that only arises in democracies.