Tag: demagoguery

Margaret Mead’s definition of civilization

A quote attributed to Margaret Mead is going around, which she may or may not have said. People sharing that quote have had various commenters disagree with Mead about her implicit definition of civilization—as far as I can tell, none of them cultural anthropologists or sociologists. (I’ll come back to that.)

While the quote is very badly sourced, it’s possible that she said something along the lines of the quote, since it’s in line with other things she said. And, if she said it, it was not an invitation to debate the distinction between civilized and non-civilized cultures but her attempt to show that distinction is always grounded in the wrong goals. This is, after all, among the scholars who advocated “cultural relativism.” She was never in favor of anthropology as a justification for imperialism. And it often was, and the civilized v. non-civilized binary was crucial to various projects of imperialism and extermination.

When that binary was popular, and (for complicated reasons) I happen to have read a lot of “scholars” and “experts” who endorsed that binary, none of them put their favored cultures in the “non-civilized” category. That’s one sign that a binary is part of a set of paired terms, in which everything good is associated with the in-group, and everything bad is associated with the out-group. The entry from the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences shows why it isn’t a concept much used by scholars (except for understanding rhetorics of exploitation):

“Thus, the significations accruing to civilization have been the following: European/Western; urban and urbane; secular and spiritual; law-abiding and nonviolent (i.e., limited to legalized violence, both within and between states); polished, courteous, and polite; disciplined, orderly, and productive; laissez faire, bourgeois, and comfortable; respectful of private property; fraternal and free; cultured, knowledgeable, and the master of nature. The uncivilized conversely are: non-Western; rural, or worse, savage; idolatrous, fanatical, literalist, and theocratic; unlawful and violent (i.e., given to violence outside juridical procedure); crude or rude; lazy, anarchic, and unproductive; communistic, poor, and inconvenienced or beleaguered; piratical and thievish; fratricidal (or, indeed, cannibalistic) and unfree; uncultured, ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, and at nature’s mercy. Given this stark set of binaries, it is not surprising that the civilizing mission (a related concept that emerged in the nineteenth century) has often been the ideological counterpart of projects of colonial domination and genocide, especially in the non-Western world, but also in the European hinterland and vis-à-vis European minorities and subaltern classes.” “Civilization.” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by William A. Darity, Jr., 2nd ed., vol. 1, Macmillan Reference USA, 2008, pp. 557-559. Accessed 29 Nov. 2020.

As an aside, I have to note that I keep telling people that what is kind of a throwaway in Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric is actually crucial to understanding public discourse, especially as that discourse crawls up the ladder of demagoguery: the concept of paired terms. The civilized/non-civilized distinction is a great example of why the notion of paired terms is so useful. For each good term, there is a bad one, and so it reinforces the notion that there are two kinds of groups: good (in-group) and bad (out-group).

But, back to the Mead quote. The whole notion that there is some kind of line between civilized and uncivilized cultures is self-serving nonsense, and that was a point she often made. At the time that Mead was working, it would have been easy to notice that genocidal projects relied on this binary, even when it made no sense (Nazi rhetoric framed Slavs and Jews as uncivilized; genocides of indigenous peoples depended on pretending that they didn’t have organized cultures). And she noticed. There are problems with her research, and she was no saint, but, for her era, she was surprisingly aware of the political uses of cultural anthropology, and she tried to resist some of the nastiest uses.

The groups thrown into the “uncivilized” category were actually wildly different from each other. In other words, the distinction itself is demagogic—it’s saying that the complicated and nuanced world of cultures is really a binary. That binary, which was really just a strategically incoherent us v. them binary, “justified” violence against out-groups–all out-groups. Because this out-group is like that out-group, and that out-group is dangerous, all out-groups are dangerous in all the ways any individual out-group is. That’s what this binary does. The whole project of defining a culture as civilized or not is about rationalizing the exploitation, oppression, and/or extermination of some group.

There are two other points I want to make. First, if you pay attention to pro-GOP rhetoric, then you might be aware that they try to employ this same set of paired terms against “liberals.” If, like me, you pay attention to pro-GOP talking points, then you can see that they frame “liberals” (just as much a phantasmagoric construction as “Jews”) as (from the entry above): “non-Western; […] fanatical […] violent (i.e., given to violence outside juridical procedure); crude or rude; lazy, anarchic, and unproductive; communistic, poor, and inconvenienced or beleaguered; piratical and thievish; fratricidal (or, indeed, cannibalistic) and unfree.”

You might notice that I’ve removed “rural, or worse, savage; idolatrous” “literalist, and theocratic” “uncultured, ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, and at nature’s mercy.” Pro-GOP is either silent on those characteristics or actively promotes them as virtues.

And that bring me to the fourth point, and the most complicated.

Many years ago, I was talking with someone who hadn’t taken a history class since high school, but who, on the basis of a paper he wrote in high school, thought he was an expert on Hitler, whose opinion about Hitler was as valid as any actual scholar. Once, in front of a colleague who was a devotee of Limbaugh, I said, “Were I Queen of the Universe, no one could make a Hitler analogy without citing two scholars in support,” and he said, “Oh, so you think common people should be silenced.”

I was speechless. (That doesn’t often happen.) He was projecting his own tendency to think in binaries onto me—knowledge is either lay (true) or expert (head in the sky). That’s a Limbaugh talking point, but it had little to do with what I was saying. I was saying that lay claims about Hitler that were valid could be validated by appealing to experts. I didn’t (and don’t) see a binary of expert v. lay knowledge. After all, a lot of experts endorsed the notion of civilized v. non-civilized cultures. Experts aren’t always right, and they don’t always agree. If no expert supports a claim about Hitler (and there are lots of popular claims about Hitler that no expert supports, such as the notion that he was Marxist or even left-wing) then it’s probably a bad claim.

In addition, what does it mean to have lay knowledge of Hitler? This isn’t an issue for which there is direct experience v. expert (i.e., mediated) knowledge because I doubt there is anyone alive who had direct experience of Hitler. It’s all mediated. It’s all about what people have told us. All we have is what we have been told by teachers, articles we read, papers we wrote in high school. The reason this point matters is that it means that privileging lay knowledge on the grounds that it is more direct (less mediated) is nonsense.

If we acknowledge it’s mediated then we can talk about what mediates it. In other words, cite your sources, and then we can argue about your sources.

If we think about it this way—how good are your sources of information—then we can have a better argument about argument.

We aren’t in a world in which experts are right and non-experts are always wrong or vice versa. We’ve never been in that world because the whole project of responsible scholarship is not about being right, but about making the argument that looks the most right given the evidence we’ve got at this moment.

And here we’re back to people arguing that something that Mead may or may not have said is wrong because, although they aren’t cultural anthropologists, they have beliefs.

They can have those beliefs. And just because Mead has degrees they don’t doesn’t mean they’re wrong. They can engage in argumentation with Mead all they want (and there are a lot of reasons to engage in argumentation with Mead), but flicking Mead away because of something they assert to be true because it’s what they have been told without trying to understand why Mead (might have) said what she did or whether their sources were reliable is exactly what is wrong with our public discourse.

Showing that Mead is wrong in her definition of civilization requires understanding what she (might have) meant in that definition. She almost certainly meant that the civilized/non-civilized binary is nonsense, so saying her position was wrong because the civilized/non-civilized division should have been placed elsewhere doesn’t show she was wrong. It shows she was right.

“Liberals look down on you” is evil genius rhetoric: on demonizing rational argumentation

In an earlier post, I said that the GOP is, like any other useful political movement, a coalition. Thus, like any other coalition, it has groups with profoundly different policy agenda. The normal way to solve that problem is through bargaining, compromise, and deliberation. But the GOP can’t openly engage in those practices because two of the major members of its coalition believe that compromise is not acceptable (the fundagelicals and neo-Social Darwinists). The GOP has to persuade people whose political agenda is toxic populism, libertarianism only when it helps the wealthy, Dominionism, racism, ethical theatre about abortion, social and cultural reactionary knee-jerking, fundagelical and often end-times politics, and the carceral industry.

So, the GOP has to look tough, rigid, and supportive of regular folks while actually passing policies that do the opposite of what they’re advertised as doing (or the opposite of what they were previously advocating as the only ethical policy), and, above all else, keeping their supporters from looking at non-partisan data about the policies, candidates, or talking points. This coalition is very fragile, and falls apart if the people in it understand the positions of others in it. The last thing the current GOP can stand is policy argumentation.

Not all conservatives, and I sincerely mean that—this isn’t a list of all the sorts of people who vote Republican, but of the ones who create the rhetorical problem solved by “liberals look down on you.” I think our political discourse benefits by having people who are skeptical of social change and ambivalent about globalization, want small government, advocate being really cautious about military intervention (the traditional conservative position, abandoned by the GOP since Vietnam). I’m not saying they’re right, but I think the ideal public sphere has a lot of positions I think are wrong, as long as we’re all abiding by the rules of argumentation. The GOP can’t allow policy argumentation. And the “liberals look down on you” enables them to avoid it completely.

Here’s what I said in the previous post. Loosely, “liberals look down on you” enables GOP loyalists to feel good about having a rationally indefensible position, encourages them to dismiss dissent or uncomfortable information through motivism, makes politics an issue of dominance/submission, encourages GOP loyalists to feel victimized if they’re proven wrong (so the issue shifts from whether they were wrong to whether they were victimized), sets supporters up to make “Vladimir’s Choice” on a regular basis, makes having an irrational commitment seem a better choice than having a rational policy, and allows blazingly partisan standards to seem justified. It is and enables shameless levels of demagoguery.

As I keep saying, the whole “left v. right” false binary enables demagoguery. It enables this demagogic (it isn’t a question of policy but us v. them) move on the part of pro-GOP media because it’s always possible to find a non-GOP (and therefore, by the bizarre logic of the left-right false dilemma “liberal”) person who, for instance, treats disagreement as victimization. So, pro-GOP pundits can say, “Who are they to look down on us when they do it too?”

Were we to have an understanding of politics (and research on political affiliation) that wasn’t begging the question (research grounded in the assumption that “liberals” and “conservatives” reason differently) we could have better discussions about politics. Of course, were I to have a unicorn in my backyard that pooped gold, I could support various causes a lot more than I do. If wishes were horses and all that.

The “liberals look down on you” topos appeals to the epistemological populism (often falsely called “anti-intellectualism”) of the US. And here we get to two problems that puzzled me for years. It’s conventional to say that demagoguery is anti-intellectual, and that it’s grounded in resentment (what Nietzsche called ressentiment) and both of those claims seemed to me true, false, and damaging. Let’s start with the first—anti-intellectualism.

It’s true that demagoguery tends to have a rejection of “eggheads,” but it almost always cites expert sources. It isn’t opposed to expertise, but to a bad kind of expertise:

“Good” expertise confirms what common people know, what you can see by just looking. It shows why what sensible people already believe is right (even if it does so through very complicated explanations—here’s where conspiracy thinking comes in). “Bad” expertise says that what “common people” (and here “common people” is conflated with “in-group”) believe is wrong, that things aren’t exactly as they appear “if you just look.”

So, here we’re back at the point I make a lot. Demagoguery can thrive if we live in a world of argument (in which you have a good point if you can find evidence to support your claim), but it dies in a world of argumentation.

We don’t have a political crisis, but an epistemological one. Pro-GOP media can cite a lot of experts to support their positions, and dismiss as eggheads all the experts who don’t because pro-GOP media appeals to naïve realism and in-group favoritism (the truth is obvious to good people and good people are the ones who recognize this truth). That way of thinking about policy issues (there is a right answer, and it’s obvious to every sensible person, and anyone who presents data it isn’t right is not someone to whom we need to listen because their disagreement is proof that they’re bad) is far from restricted to the GOP, let alone to major political issues. (Do not get me started on my neighborhood mailing list fights about graffiti, putting dog poop bags in someone’s trash can on garbage collection day, bike lanes, or the noise wall).

I’ve spent a lot of time arguing with racists, and they always argue from personal experience.[1] Affirmative action is bad because they didn’t get this job, anti-racist actions in the work place are bad because they got reprimanded for being a racist, there is no racism in policing because (as a white person) they’ve never had trouble with the police. They believe that those datapoints are proof of their position, but a POC getting denied a job, a person failing to get anything useful done about racism in their workplace, a POC having trouble with the police—the same kind of evidence—none of that matters. That’s argument, but not argumentation.

Argumentation would be assessing personal experience as just another kind of data, subject to the same tests as other kinds of data—is it relevant, representative (or an outlier), reliable, and so on. As I said, the GOP can (and does) give its base arguments, but those arguments collapse like a cheap tent in a hurricane if they run into actual argumentation. So, why not give its base talking points that can withstand argumentation? It can’t, for several reasons.

It can’t have rational argumentation about abortion, for instance, because its policies aren’t supported by data. There are other issues on which the data is just plain bad (climate change) and can’t stand up to the weakest questioning. There are also issues for which the accurate and relevant data would make one member of the coalition of the happy, and another very unhappy. One group might be thrilled to find that Trump’s foreign policy has increased the chances of nuclear war in the Middle East, while that would sow doubt in the minds of other members of the coalition.

The GOP can’t actually give its base rational talking points that will serve its base well if they get into it with someone skilled in argumentation. All it’s got is ad hominem, whaddaboutism, and a kind of driveby shooting of data because that’s all it can have. So, what the GOP has to do is make a virtue of its greatest vice—make the ability to defend or attack policy claims through argumentation (what its critics can do and they can’t) a bad thing. Instead of acknowledging that being able to defend your positions through rational argumentation might be a good thing, they characterize it as what libs do. “Liberals look down on you” (for being unable to defend your position through argumentation) makes the inability to engage in rational argumentation a sign of in-group loyalty and a performance of in-group identity.

Just to be clear, I think that lots of “conservative” positions can be supported through rational argumentation. (That an argument can be supported through rational argumentation doesn’t mean it’s true—it just meets a certain standard.) The GOP can’t support its policy agenda through rational argumentation because it has wed itself to an identity of people who refuse to compromise, bargain, or deliberate and it’s a coalition. A coalition has to unify disparate groups with disparate needs and goals. It can do so through openly admitting that there are compromises that need to get made for strategic purposes that will, on the whole, benefit the coalition. There’s another strategy.

In 1939, Kenneth Burke, when talking about Hitler’s strategy in unifying the very disparate group that was the recently-created identity of “German,” said that unification through a common enemy is the easiest strategy with a disparate group. In the case of the GOP, the common enemy is rational argumentation.







[1] They also argue from data that doesn’t actually prove their point. For instance, in order to prove that policing isn’t racist they show data that African Americans are arrested more than white people. Logic isn’t their long suit. That’s why they need to make being bad at logic a good thing.

“Liberals look down on you” is evil genius rhetoric

headline "liberals look down on people"
Headline and image from here: https://stream.org/liberals-look-people-conservatives-look/

If you drift into the pro-GOP public sphere (meaning both the formal media and pundits, but also the people who are repeating the talking points in social media, at Thanksgiving dinner, or yard signs), then you’ve seen the talking point that “liberals look down on you.” It’s evil genius rhetoric.

It does a bunch of things at once, all of which benefit the GOP by distracting potential supporters away from its inability to defend its policy agenda through rational argumentation, while providing a feeling of certainty and self-righteousness. The GOP has five major problems in terms of talking openly about its policies.

First, it has the classic problem that toxic populism always has—wanting to get the support of working classes and the extremely wealthy, but those groups have opposing policy agenda. Any rational defense of particular policies would mean discussing in detail what the costs and benefits of the policy would be, and that would alienate some group. Since the GOP has opted for policies that give the rich material benefits at the expense of the non-elite, they have to keep any public discussion off the material consequences for the non-elite of their policies.

Second, a lot of people in the GOP don’t really want a democracy in which all citizens have equal access to voting and all votes count equally—they want a hierarchy of power, in which their supporters have more power (and more voting power) than any group that doesn’t fully support them. They don’t see any benefit in disagreement, so they want to end it thoroughly. Arguing against democracy in a democracy is tricky, and generally achieved by arguing that some other group has already so corrupted democracy that we need to abandon democracy temporarily to purify it of Them. Then we can get to a democracy of the believers (what Giorgio Agamben so elegantly described as “not-law”—we have to abandon the law to save it).

Third, they want to be seen as the party of principle, as God’s Party (they have to do this to keep the fundagelical vote), but they don’t have consistent principles. Neither do fundagelicals, except the “principle” that they are magically able to read Scripture unmediated, and therefore able to be absolutely certain about what God wants. In other words, the GOP has to hold on to the support of people who mistake rigidity for principle. This unholy alliance with people who value rigidity (and who hide their own compromises and changes by rewriting history) means that the GOP can’t engage in the compromises, negotiations, and deliberations that all healthy groups use to resolve disagreements.[1]

Fourth, GOP rhetoric flips and flops—immigration is good (Reagan) and bad (Trump); Russia is bad (every GOP figure till Trump) and good (Trump); chain immigration is bad (Trump) and good (Trump’s use of chain immigration for his family); the government is too powerful (GOP till 9/11) and should be given all the power (GOP after 9/11). There’s nothing wrong with a party changing position—that’s what they should do. I had a coworker who was a devotee of Rush Limbaugh. I watched that coworker love, hate, love, and hate John McCain, dependent on nothing more than whether Rush Limbaugh said McCain was really a Republican—that is, whether McCain was supporting whatever was the party line for the GOP at that moment. But neither Limbaugh nor the coworker said it that way, as though McCain had changed. Every time the (new) stance was presented as a recognition of McCain’s essence.

Parties change positions all the time—that’s fine, and potentially even good. The problem is that strategic changes of position are in direct conflict with the third desideratum.

Fifth, the GOP has become the party the Founders had nightmares about. The second, third, and fourth problems mean that they really don’t want a democracy. Those problems can only be solved with a one-party state. Democracy is premised on a content-neutral standard for behavior—that whether you’re Whig, Anti-Masonic, Jacksonian Democrat, Federalist, or whatever, you are held to the same standards as every other party. Supporters of the GOP (largely because of the rhetoric created in order to solve the second through fourth problems) don’t believe that the GOP should be held to the same standards as other parties. After all, if you’re the party of God, and they are the party of the Satan, then nothing you can do is wrong, and nothing they can do is right.

So, the GOP has to look tough, rigid, and supportive of regular folks while actually passing policies that do the opposite of what they’re advertised as doing (or the opposite of what they were previously advocating as the only ethical policy), and, above all else, keep their supporters from looking at non-partisan data about the policies, candidates, or talking points.

“Liberals look down on you” solves all those problems, mainly because it keeps people from noticing them, and it guarantees that people will look away if those problems are drawn to their attention. Loosely, it enables people to feel good about having a rationally indefensible position, encourages supporters to dismiss dissent or uncomfortable information through motivism, makes politics an issue of dominance/submission, encourages people to feel victimized instead of wrong, sets supporters up to make “Vladimir’s Choice” on a regular basis, makes having an irrational commitment seem a better choice than having a rational policy, and allows blazingly partisan standards to seem justified. It is and enables shameless levels of demagoguery.

It isn’t just the pro-GOP media machine that uses this kind of strategy (which can also have the form of something like, “They’ll say you’re crazy”)— cults, and cult-y churches, MLM, the skeezier kinds of self-help businesses (not all self-help books or businesses are skeezy) use it; it seems that some tech startups seem to use a version of it (Bad Blood describes it being common at Theranos), and I’ve run across in some fringe political groups. It’s just particularly damaging when it’s embraced by the mainstream media (and the pro-GOP media is the mainstream media). As I’ll argue in the last post in what will be a series (I hope just three, but maybe four posts long) non-GOP media engages in various taxonomies and frames that virtually guarantee the “liberals look down on you” rhetorical strategy works.







[1] The notion that people get their way by “sticking to their principles and refusing to compromise” is all over the political spectrum. Refusing to compromise only works for people who have more power—while throwing tantrums and refusing to settle works in an awful lot of families (and not necessarily on the part of the toddlers), it’s rare that it works in political situations except for people who have a tremendous amount of power. We love stories of individuals who refused to compromise, and thereby toppled oppressive regimes, but I don’t know that there is ever a time that happened. (I have more than once had confusing interactions with people in which I had to explain that FDR compromised—confusing because he was famous for compromising, perhaps too much when it came to issues of race.)




On arguing with Trump supporters V: it isn’t just Trump supporters

Tweet saying "Patricia Roberts-Miller should've let demagoguery die rather than try to explain it and bring it back."

I mentioned elsewhere that I’ve spent a lot of time wandering around the digitally-connected world arguing with assholes, and so I think some people have been surprised when I’ve said that the best response to someone who supports Trump is to refuse to argue with them. I’ve also said the same thing about people who get all their information from the pro-Trump propaganda feedback loop. And each time I’ve tried to be clear that I’m not talking about “conservatives” or all Republicans. I think our tendency to divide everything into left v. right is gerfucked.

I think it’s better to think about politics as something like a color wheel, with both tone and saturation. And there are people all over that spectrum who refuse to look at any information that might contradictor or complicate their beliefs, mistake personal conviction for proof, and are poster children for confirmation bias. In fact, I think we’re all that way on some issues and under some circumstances. So, not everyone who makes the mistakes I’ve talked about in this set of posts is a Trump supporter.

And I doubt every Trump supporter makes all those mistakes, but it does seem to me that everyone arguing for Trump does. Perhaps I’ve missed the good arguments, but I don’t think so.

I’ve focused on Trump supporters because they exemplify (not prove) what happens when in-group loyalty trumps rational argumentation–something we all do.

I mentioned the tendency to think that proving They are bad means that We are good, and it doesn’t. That Trump supporters argue badly is no guarantee that everyone else argues well. That their position is, they performatively admit, indefensible through rational argumentation is not proof that all other positions are grounded in rational argumentation.

Right now, all that seems to hold the pro-GOP coalition together is the ethical theater of abortion and feeling superior to the libs. Seeing that Trump supporters argue badly shouldn’t be part of forming an anti-Trump coalition in which we feel good about who we are because we’re better than they; it should be part of our seeing how we argue badly. And that’s what I hope people take away from this series. It isn’t just them.




Why I wish we would stop talking about left v. right in American politics

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

Discussions of American politics typically describe either a binary or continuum of left v. right, a model that is both false and damaging.

First, the false part. The model comes from the French Assembly, when one issue was at stake—what should happen with the monarchy, and so it was possible to describe the various people involved as on a continuum. The positions of participants ranged from wanting a strong monarchy, to constitutional monarchy, to no monarchy or aristocracy at all. They sat in a way that put those in favor of retaining a monarchy on the right, and those in favor of abolishing it on the left. So, it made sense in that moment.

It makes less sense when we’re talking about a variety of policy options, as we are when we’re talking about current politics. It seems to makes sense if the topic is voting patterns for Federal elections, in which case it’s pretty useful to say that there are people who
• will only vote socialist or Green;
• are varying degrees of likely to vote socialist/Green v. Dem;
• will only vote Dem;
• are varying degrees of likely to vote Dem or vote GOP;
• will only vote GOP;
• are varying degrees of likely to vote Libertarian v. GOP;
• will only vote Libertarian.
Notice, though, that it isn’t a binary, and that it’s more of a spectrum of colors going from green through turquoise, blue, lavender, red, orange, yellow. Notice also that it doesn’t make sense to talk about the points at either end as more “extreme.” If you pay attention to actual policy agenda and voting patterns, then it’s clear that Libertarians aren’t more extreme versions of Republicans—they have a different policy agenda–, and it’s the same with Green Party and Democrats.

It isn’t an accurate description of where people stand on particular issues, even polarizing issues like abortion, gun control, civil rights, or immigration. [1] When people are talking about policies, there can be coalitions for particular kinds of changes that draw from all over that spectrum (such as regarding prison reform, decriminalizing drug use, bail reform).

There are two other axes that are important for thinking about American politics. One is domestic v. foreign policy issues, mapped above. There are people who vote consistently Dem in regard to domestic policy, but are supportive of military intervention (generally for humanitarian reasons). There are people who vote GOP consistently in regard to domestic policy, but are opposed to military intervention (essentially isolationist).[2]

The other important axis is degree of commitment to one’s place on the spectrum—that is, the extent to which one believes that other positions are legitimate and should exist. There’s a sense in which this is one’s commitment to the process of democratic deliberation. Republicans will sometimes argue that we aren’t a democracy, but a republic. I think that’s a tough argument to make past the Jacksonian opening of citizenship rights, but it sort of doesn’t matter. We can call our sort of government a democratic republic, representative democracy, liberal democracy (not in the American sense of “liberal”). Regardless of which terms one uses, the point is that our country was founded on the notion that disagreement is beneficial, that a community thrives when there are multiple perspectives, that determining the best policy is challenging.

There are people all over the political spectrum who reject that premise, who believe that their (and only their) position is entitled to power and that all other positions should be silenced, or at least marginalized.[3] Those people should be described as extremists. A Libertarian or socialist who is a passionate supporter of their party is not necessarily any more of an extremist than someone who only votes moderate Democrat. I think we should reserve the word “extremist” for someone who wants the political sphere purified of everyone other than them.

Very few people (maybe zero?) care about every policy issue, but most of us have one or two about which we care passionately. When we talk about those one or two policy issues, commitment to parties weaken, since it’s unlikely that a party is going to promote the one policy we want exactly as we want it. For instance, global warming might be the biggest issue for both of you and me, but that doesn’t mean we’re in perfect agreement as to what we should do. I might think the Kyoto Accords are great, too weak, too strong, the wrong route, and you might take one of the other positions. Or, let’s say that we both strongly believe in strict limits on immigration—we’re extremely likely to disagree about the details (especially when it comes to enforcement). To get the votes, a political party is going to have to form a coalition of people who disagree—that’s easier if we don’t know we disagree. And that is easier if we keep the discussion to vague assertions of policy goals (the vaguer the better)[4]. It’s even easier if we don’t run for our policy agenda at all, but run against Them. And that’s what Outrage Media is all about—it’s about getting clicks, links, shares, views, and commitment by ginning up outrage about how awful They are (for more on this, I think The Outrage Industry is really useful, but so is Network Propaganda).

Just to be clear, sometimes there is a group that is awful. What the Outrage Media does, though, is group all of our opponents into that one category. For instance, a lot of media talks about how awful “conservatives” are, putting Libertarians, fundagelicals, neo-conservatives, Trump supporters, and GOP loyalists all into one group. Those are fairly different groups. For instance, Libertarians and the GOP both claim to value neoliberalism, but Libertarians have a stronger commitment to it (the GOP is very supportive of government intervention in the market despite claims otherwise). So, some people try to claim that Libertarians are just a more extreme version of Republicans.

But the Strict Father Morality of the GOP is more important to its policy agenda than neoliberalism (as is shown by how GOP political figures behave when the two values are in conflict, such as in the case of bailouts, corporate subsidies, military intervention, laws regarding drug use). And it’s in that regard—the one more consistent in GOP policy commitments–that Libertarians are not more extreme than the GOP.

In other words, thinking that the binary/continuum accurately represents political ideology (at least if we think that political ideology is representative of policy agenda) is inaccurate. It’s damaging because it’s nutpicking—we allow the Outrage Media to persuade us that the outliers of the outgroup(s) represent everyone who disagrees with us. We therefore not only fail to see possible shared policy options, but demonize compromise itself (it’s trucking with the devil). We aren’t even open to thinking about what might be wrong with our policy agenda because we dismiss everyone who disagrees with us. We are on the road to mutual extermination.



[1] There are people who consistently vote Democratic who are opposed to legal abortion and gay rights, for instance. Many self-identifying Republicans support far more control (and they support it far more) than the NRA or GOP would have you believe. Everyone is in favor of immigration, and very few people are in favor of unlimited immigration—the question is how much, and what to do about illegal immigration.

[2] You may have noticed I’m up to four axes (or at least three). In other words, we should either stop trying to create one map for everyone (and think and talk in terms of policies rather than identities) or else just try to map where people stand on specific issues. I think we’d discover a lot of common ground.

[3] There are, for instance, people who believe that we should purify the Democratic Party of all but the centrists—that’s just as much a politics of purity as people who believe the party should become purely progressive. People who argued for the political extermination of anyone who advocated integration claimed to have the moderate position, and may have sincerely believed they did. I intermittently run across supporters of the GOP who want the Democratic Party political exterminated, and they seem to see themselves, quite sincerely, as thereby eliminating “extremism”—but they’re advocating an extreme position. Their extreme commitment to their position is extremist.

[4] There’s some research that says that people likely to vote Dem are more likely to be policy wonks, and really want to hear and debate the details of policy. Thus, people trying to mobilize Democrats are in a double-bind, of needing enough policy talk to get the votes of the wonks like me, but not so much as to alienate potential voters.

The weird place of expertise in our culture of demagoguery

image of batboy


While I was working on demagoguery, I was continually puzzled by the problem of anti-intellectualism. The problem matters because, too often, we characterize demagoguery in ways that we would never recognize if we’re getting suckered by it. We tell ourselves that demagogues are frauds, dishonest, and manipulative, but our leaders and pundits are sincere, truthful, and authentic. Sure they have to lie sometimes, but they aren’t lying out of a place of dishonesty–it’s out of sincere concern, it’s necessary, and they’re basically truthful. Supporters of even the most notorious demagogues believed that they weren’t supporting demagoguery because they believed that Hitler, Theodore Bilbo, Fidel Castro, Joseph McCarthy, Cleon were sincere, truthful, and authentic.

In general, I think it makes more sense to emphasize the culture of demagoguery, since the people we identify as demagogues were only able to come to power because the culture rewards demagoguery.

Demagoguery says that we don’t really face complicated issues of policy deliberation in a community of divergent and conflicting values, goals, and needs about issues that don’t have perfect answers. It says that things just look complicated—they’re actually very simple. We just have to commit to the obvious solution; that is, the solution that is obvious to our side.

That insistence on the solution being obvious, on disagreement and deliberation as unmanly dithering, can look like anti-intellectualism since it means the rejection of the kind of nuance and uncertainty generally considered central to science or research. But I’m not sure it’s useful to call it anti-intellectualism, since people rarely think of themselves as anti-intellectual. Like emphasizing the honesty/dishonesty of demagogues, talking about the anti-intellectualism of demagoguery means we won’t identify our own demagoguery.

It’s true that demagoguery often relies on rejecting experts as “eggheads” or, in Limbaugh’s phrase, “the liberal elite.” That quality of anti-elitism often means that scholars characterize demagoguery as a kind of populism (e.g., Reinhard Luthin). But lots of populism isn’t demagogic, and rhetoric in a democracy is of course going to attack some elite group–the super-rich, the military-industrial complex, Fat Cat Bankers. After all, major changes will be to disadvantage of someone.

In addition, we don’t like to see ourselves as crushing some weak group; we like the David and Goliath narrative. The narrative of the spunky underdog fighting a massive power is so mobilizing that it’s often used under ridiculous circumstances. To condemn populism, therefore, just condemns rhetoric.[1]

As Aristotle pointed out, the elite can engage in demagoguery. Earl Warren’s demagoguery regarding “the Japanese” was directed toward Congressional representatives, and he was presenting himself as an expert summarizing the expert judgment of others. Harry Laughlin’s demagogic testimony before Congress regarding the supposed criminality and mental incapacity of various “races” was expert testimony–experts can be full of shit, as he was.[2] I think there is a different way of estimating expertise, but I’ll get to that in a bit.

At one point, I started to think that demagoguery simplifies complicated situations, and I still think that’s more or less true, but in a deceptively complicated way. Demagoguery can have very complicated narratives behind them, so complicated that they’re impossible to follow (because they don’t actually make sense). QAnon, 9/11 conspiracies, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, conspiracy theories about Sandy Hook–they’re the narrative equivalent of an Escher drawing (conclusions are used as evidence for conclusions that are used as evidence for the first conclusions).

They’re often complicated narratives, in that they might have a lot of details and data, but they’re in service of a simple point about which one is supposed to feel certain: the out-group is bad, we are threatened with extermination[3], and any action we take against them is justified because they’re already doing worse or they intend to. So, the overall narrative is simple: we are good; they are evil.

Or, perhaps more accurately, the overall narrative is clear and provides us with certainty. Demagoguery equates certainty with expertise. Experts are certain; demagoguery doesn’t reject expertise, then, let alone precision, but it does reject any “expert” opinion that talks in terms of likelihood. Demagoguery relies on the binary of certain/clueless.

Thus, in a demagogic culture, certainty (sometimes framed as “decisiveness”) is seen as real expertise, the kind of expertise that matters.

Demagoguery tends to favor the notion of “universal genius”–the idea that judgment is a skill that applies across disciplines. So, someone with “good judgment” can see the truth in a situation even if they aren’t very knowledgeable. “Good judgment” is (in this model) not discipline specific (so someone with a PhD in mechanical engineering might be cited as an expert about evolution because he’s a “scientist”).

What I’m saying is that there are five qualities that contribute to demagoguery that we’re tempted to call “anti-intellectualism:” 1) the rejection of uncertainty; 2) the related rejection of deliberation; 3) the emphasis on narratives that are, in their end result, simple (we’re good and they’re bad); 4) faith in “universal genius;” 5) the equation of expertise with decisiveness.

Our impulse when arguing with someone who is promoting a debunked set of claims is to say “It’s been debunked by experts.” But that doesn’t work because it hasn’t been debunked by the people they consider experts. Similarly, it doesn’t help to say that they “reject facts.” They think they don’t–they think we do. (And we do, in a way–we reject data, some of which might be true.) I’m not sure how to persuade someone promoting false information that it’s false, but I’m increasingly coming to think that we’ll be running in place as long as we’re in a culture of demagoguery.

We need a conversation about certainty.



[1] I think there is a kind of populism that is toxic, and it’s the kind that Muller and Weyland each call “populism.” I think it’s more useful to call that kind of populism “populist demagoguery” or, as do Berlet and Lyons, “toxic populism.”

[2] I talk about these cases a lot more here.

[3] When I say this, many people focus on the “extermination” part, as though I’m casting doubt on whether groups sometimes face extermination. I’m not. As a side note, I’ll say that I’ve long noticed that people who live and breathe demagoguery have trouble noticing restrictive modifiers, especially if they’re left-branching or the modifier isn’t immediately obviously meaningful to them. That’s a different post, but the short version is that a person who thinks demagogically will read “Zionist Christianity is not necessarily a friend to Israel” as a claim about Christians, not a very specific kind of Christian.

Yes, unhappily, many groups face(d) extermination, but the situation isn’t zero-sum between only two groups. Something that hurt the Nazis didn’t necessarily help the Jews; Jews had potential allies among groups that were neither Jewish nor Nazi; there were, and had long been, disagreements within the Jewish communities in Europe as to how to respond to anti-semitism. Even now, it’s hard to say what would have been “the” right response because there probably wasn’t only one right response.

[2] People not engaged in demagoguery aren’t obligated to argue with every person who disagrees with them, but if we reject every opposition argument on the grounds that simply disagreeing means someone is bad, then it’s demagoguery.

Racism, Biden, Trump, and the bad math of whaddaboutism

boxes

John Stoehr has a nice piece about what he calls the “malicious nihilism” of Trump supporting media and pundits. They’ve stopped trying to argue that Trump is not racist, since he explicitly stokes racism, but, they’re saying, since Biden is a Democrat, and Democrats used to be the party of racists, then Biden is racist too: “Fine, the GOP partisans now say, Trump is a racist. The Democrats are just as bad, though. May as well vote for the Republican.”

That’s just plain bad math.

It’s easy to point to so many things Trump and his Administration has said and done that are racist. Critics of Biden point to one thing he said, and what the Democratic Party was like prior to 1970. Those are not comparable. That way of thinking about Biden v. Trump ignores the important questions of degrees, impact, persistence.

It’s a weirdly common way of arguing about politics, though, and even interpersonal issues. There was a narrative about the Civil War for a long time which was that “both sides were just as bad,” and it was the mutual extremism about the issue of slavery that led to war.[1] The “mutual extremism” was this same bad math. There was one President between John Adams and Abraham Lincoln who didn’t own slaves (JQ Adams), Congress was so proslavery that the House and Senate both banned criticism of slavery for years (the gag rules), the Supreme Court ruled that African Americans could never be citizens. Criticism of slavery in slaver states could be punished by hanging; the Fugitive Slave Laws enabled slavers to kidnap African Americans in “free” states. Pro-slavery rhetoric regularly called for race war should abolition happen, and began calling for secession to protect slavery in the 1820s. Commitment to slavery was so dominant in slaver states that they went to war against the US.

There were pro-slavery Presidents; there was no abolitionist President (JQAdams would, after his presidency, become anti-slavery, but not clearly abolitionist). No state had a death penalty for advocating slavery; there was no gag rule for advocating slavery; abolitionists didn’t advocate civil war or race war; no one could go into a slaver state and declare an African American to be free and face the same low bar that kidnappers in the “free” states faced.

They weren’t both “just as bad” because they didn’t equally advocate violence, they weren’t equally powerful, advocating civil war was commonplace on only one side, the laws and practices they advocated weren’t equally extreme.

I wrote a book about proslavery rhetoric, and when I would make this point—“both sides” weren’t “just as bad”—neo-Confederates would say, “What about John Brown?” That’s the bad math. If, on one side, advocating and engaging in violence is commonplace, then one example on the other side doesn’t mean they’re both just as bad. You can even bring in Bloody Kansas and not get the amount of violence (and advocacy of violence) commonplace in supporting slavery to be anything close to the violence on the part of critics of slavery.

Here is my crank theory about why people reason that way. A lot of people really don’t (perhaps can’t) think in terms of degrees. They think in terms of categories (this is not the crank theory party—it’s a fairly common observation). Thus, you’re racist or not, certain or clueless, proud or ashamed; something is good or bad, right or wrong, correct or incorrect; you’re in-group or out-group, loyal or disloyal. They don’t think about degrees of racism, certainty, pride, goodness, loyalty, and so on.

There’s a funny paradox. Because they don’t think in terms of degrees (or mixtures—something might be loyal in some ways and disloyal in others), they believe that you either have a rigid, black/white ethical system, or you’re what they call a “moral relativist.” They actually mean “nihilist.” So, they hear “right v. wrong might be a question of degrees rather than absolutes” as saying there is no difference between right and wrong—one of their crucial binaries is “rigid ethical system of categories or nihilism.” That binary imbues those other binaries with ethical value—being rigid about loyalty v. disloyalty seems to be part of being a “good” person.

Because people like this think in terms of putting things in a box—something goes in the box of good or bad, racist or not racist, loyal or disloyal, then, if they can find a single racist thing related to Biden, he and Trump are in the same box. And, therefore, that box can be ignored when it comes to comparing them, since they’re both in it.

And this brings us back to Stoehr’s point. The attachment to rigidity, the tendency to think in terms of absolutes and not degrees makes these people actually incapable of ethical decision-making. Since wildly different actions are thrown into the box of “bad” or “racist,” people who reason this way can’t tell right from wrong. They can end up allowing, tolerating, encouraging, or even actively supporting wildly unethical actions because of their inability to think in nuanced ways about ethics. It’s moral nihilism.




[1] There weren’t only two sides, so the claim that “both sides” were anything is nonsensical. There were, at least, six sides. Pro-slavery/pro-secession, pro-slavery/anti-secession, anti-slavery/pro-colonization, anti-slavery/pro-full citizenship, anti-anti-slavery, anti-pro-slavery.

When every political issue is a war, shooting first seems like self-defense

train wreck
image from https://middleburgeccentric.com/2016/10/editorial-the-train-wreck-red/

For some time, we’ve been in a world in which far too much media (and far too many political figures) defenestrate public deliberation in favor of treating every policy decision as a war of extermination between two identities.[1] When a culture moves there, it’s inevitable that some group engages in what might be called “pre-emptive self-defense.” We’re there. It’s a weird argument, and profoundly damaging, but hard to explain.

The first time I ran across the proslavery argument, “We must keep African Americans enslaved and oppressed, because, if they had power, they would treat us as badly as we are treating them,” I thought it was really weird. I’ve since come to understand that it isn’t weird in the sense of being unusual. But it’s weird in the sense of being uncanny—it’s in the uncanny valley of argumentation in two ways. First, it’s turning the Christian value of doing unto as others as you would have them do unto you into a justification of vengeance: do unto them as they have done unto you, (which is a pretty clear perversion of what Jesus meant). Except, just to make it weirder, it isn’t what they have done unto you, but what they might do in an alternate reality. And that alternate reality requires that they are as violent and vindictive as you.

The argument is something like, “Yes, I am treating other people as I would not want to be treated, and as they have not treated me, but it’s justified because it’s how I imagine they would treat me in a narrative that also is purely imagined.”

This weird line of argument turns up a lot in arguments for starting wars. Obviously, wars start because some group attacks another; someone is the aggressor. So, when you think about pro-war rhetoric, you’d imagine that the side that is the aggressor would justify that aggression. They don’t. Instead, they present themselves as engaging in self-defense. They claim that their aggression isn’t really aggression, but self-defense because the other nation(s) will inevitably attack them. It’s self-defense against something that hasn’t happened (and might never). Pre-emptive self-defense.

For instance, Hitler invaded Poland because he intended to exterminate it as a political entity, exterminate most of its population, use it as a launching spot for a war of extermination against the USSR, and then make it (and other areas) a kind of Rhodesia of Europe, with “Aryans” comfortably watching “non-Aryans” act as serfs. But that isn’t how he justified it in his public rhetoric. In his September 1, 1939 speech announcing an invasion that had already started, he said the invasion was an act forced on him, that he had engaged in superhuman efforts to maintain peace, but Poland was preparing for war. Invading Poland was self-defense because Poland was intending to invade Germany, and had already fired shots (they hadn’t). [2] The various wars against the indigenous peoples of what is now the United States, even when they openly involved massacres, were rhetorically justified as self-defense because the indigenous peoples were, so the argument went, essentially hostile to “American” expansion, and therefore an existential threat.

In other words, pre-emptive self-defense says, we are going to invade this other nation while claiming that it isn’t an invasion but self-defense (although we’re the invaders) because they were going to be invaders or would be invaders if they could. That’s nonsense. That’s saying I’m justified in hitting you because I think that, were I in your situation, I would hit me.

It’s such an unintelligible defense that it isn’t even possible to put it into writing without ending up in some kind of grammatical moebius strip. Yet it’s obviously persuasive, so the interesting question is: how does that rhetoric work?

As I’ve often said, I teach and write about train wrecks in public deliberation, what are sometimes called “pathologies of public deliberation.” While there is a lot of interesting and important disagreement about specifics regarding the processes, on the whole, there’s a surprising amount of agreement among scholars of cognitive psychology, political science, communication, history of rhetoric, military history, social psychology, history, and several other fields about some generalizations we can make about what ways of reasoning lead people to unjust, unwise, and untimely decisions. And, basically, that agreement is that if the issues are high-stakes and the policy decisions will have long-term consequences, then relying on cognitive biases will fuck you up good. And not just you, but everyone around you, for a long time.

As it happens, deciding about whether to go to war, how to conduct a war, and whether to negotiate an end to a war are decisions that activate all the anti-deliberative cognitive biases. (Daniel Kahneman has a nice article explaining how some cognitive biases are pro-war.) So, there’s an interesting paradox: cognitive biases interfere with effective decision-making, arguments about whether to go to war (and how to conduct it) have the highest stakes, and those decisions are the most likely to trigger the cognitive biases. We reason the worst when we need to reason the best.

And what I’m saying is that we bring in that bad reasoning to every policy decision when we make everything a war. When people declare that a political disagreement is a state of war (the war on terror, war on Christmas, war on drugs, culture war, war on poverty), they are (often deliberately) triggering the cognitive biases associated with war. The most important of those is that our sense of identification with the in-group strengthens, and our tolerance for in-group dissent decreases. Declaring something a war is a deliberate strategy to reduce policy deliberation. It is deliberately anti-deliberative.

And one of the anti-deliberative strategies we bring in is pre-emptive self-defense. In war, that strategy consists of months of accusing the intended victim (the country that will be invaded) of intending to invade. Then, once the public is convinced that the country presents an existential threat, invasion can look like self-defense. In politics, that strategy consists of spending months or years telling a political base that “the other side” intends an act of war, a complete violation of the rule of law, extraordinary breaches of normal political practices (or claims they already have), then “us” engaging in those practices–even if we are actually the aggressor–looks like self-defense. Pre-emptively. Thus, pro-slavery rhetors insisted that the abolitionists intended to use Federal troops to force abolition on slaver states, pro-internment rhetors argued that Japanese Americans intended to engage in sabotage (Earl Warren said that there had been no sabotage was the strongest proof that sabotage was intended).

I think we’re there with the pro-Trump demagoguery about “voter fraud” (including absentee ballots, the same kind that Trump used–there is no difference between “absentee” and “mail-in” ballots)–it’s setting up a situation in which pro-Trump aggression regarding voting will feel like pre-emptive self-defense.

I asked earlier why it works, and there are a lot of reasons. Some of them have to do with what Kahneman and his co-author said about cognitive biases that favor hawkish foreign policy:

“Several well-known laboratory demonstrations have examined the way people assess their adversary’s intelligence, willingness to negotiate, and hostility, as well as the way they view their own position. The results are sobering. Even when people are aware of the context and possible constraints on another party’s behavior, they often do not factor it in when assessing the other side’s motives. Yet, people still assume that outside observers grasp the constraints on their own behavior.”

In the article, Kahneman and Renshon call these biases “vision problems,” but they’re more commonly known as “the fundamental attribution error” or “asymmetric insight” with a lot of projection mixed in.

The “fundamental attribution error” is that we attribute the behavior of others to internal motivation, but for ourselves we use a mix of internal (for good behavior) and external (for bad behavior) explanations. So, if an out-group member kicks a puppy, we attribute the action to their villainy and aggression; if they pet a puppy, we attribute the action to their wanting to appear good. In both cases, we’re saying that they are essentially bad, and all of their behavior has to be understood through that filter. If we kick a puppy, the act was the consequence of external factors (we didn’t see it, it got in our way); but petting the puppy was something that shows our internal state. In a state of war, even a rhetorical war, we interpret the current and future behavior of the enemy through the lens of their being essentially nefarious.

And we don’t doubt our interpretation of their intentions because of the bias of “asymmetric insight.” We believe that we are complicated and nuanced, but we have perfect insight into the motives and internal processes of others, especially people we believe below us. Since we tend to look down on “the enemy,” we will not only attribute motives to them, but believe that we are infallible in our projection of motives.

And it is projection. I’m not sure whether the metaphor behind “projection” makes sense to a lot of people now, since they might never have seen a projector. A projector took a slide or movie, and projected the image onto a screen. We tend to project onto the Other (an enemy) aspects of ourselves about which we are uncomfortable. If there is someone we want to harm, then projecting onto them our feelings of aggression helps us resolve any guilt we might feel about our aggression.

These three cognitive processes combine to mean that, quite sincerely, if I intend to exterminate you (or your political group, or your political power), I can feel justified in that extermination because I can persuade myself that you intend to exterminate me, since that’s what I intend to do to you.

Pre-emptive self-defense rationalizes my violence on the weird grounds that I intend to exterminate you and so you must desire to exterminate me. Therefore, all norms of law, constitutionality, Christian ethics are off the table, and I am justified in anything I do. It’s a dangerous argument. It’s an argument that justifies an invasion.



[1] And, no, “both sides” are not equally guilty of it. For one thing, there aren’t two sides. On which “side” is a voter who believes that Black Lives Matter, homosexuality is a sin, gay marriage should be illegal, we need a strong social safety net and should increase taxes to pay for it, abortion should be outlawed, the police should be demilitarized and completely changed? What about someone who believes there shouldn’t be any laws prohibiting any sexual practices or drug use, there shouldn’t be a social safety net, taxes should be greatly reduced, abortion should be legal, we shouldn’t intervene in any foreign wars? Those are positions held by important constituencies (in the first case many Black churches, and in the second Libertarians). Some environmentalists are liberals, some social democrats, some Republican, some racist, some Libertarian, some Third way neoliberal. The false mapping of our political world into two sides makes reporting easier and more profitable, and it enables demagoguery.

In addition, not all media engage in demagoguery to the same degree. Bloomberg, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Nation, New York Times, Reason, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post are all media that sometimes dip a toe into demagoguery, but rarely. Meanwhile, The Blaze, DailyKos, Fox, Jacobin, Limbaugh, Maddow, Savage, WND and pretty much every group named by SPLC are all demagoguery all the time.

[2] Hitler was claiming that “Germans” who lived in Poland were oppressed. But, he said, “I must here state something definitely; […]the minorities who live in Germany are not persecuted.” In 1939.

Some of the highlights from Trump’s interview on Fox

Trump

From this interview on Fox.

WALLACE:  But, sir, we have the seventh highest mortality rate in the world. Our mortality rate is higher than Brazil, it’s higher than Russia and the European Union has us on a travel ban.

[….]

TRUMP:  Kayleigh’s right here. I heard we have one of the lowest, maybe
the lowest mortality rate anywhere in the world.

TRUMP: Do you have the numbers, please? Because I heard we had the best
mortality rate.

TRUMP: Number, number one low mortality rate.

[…] [He’s lying. By some statistics, we have the tenth highest mortality rate.
John Hopkins has the US as seventh highest mortality rate. ]

WALLACE VOICE OVER: The White House went with this chart from the European CDC which shows Italy and Spain doing worse. But countries like Brazil and South Korea doing better. Other countries doing better like Russia aren’t included in the White House chart.

[….]

TRUMP:  [About the prediction that covid would go away in summer.] I don’t know and I don’t think he knows. I don’t think anybody knows with this. This is a very tricky deal. Everybody thought this summer it would go away and it would come back in the fall. Well, when the summer came, they used to say the heat — the heat was good for it and it really knocks it out, remember? And then it might come back in the fall. So they got that one wrong.

 [March 16, 2020, Trump said it would go away. He wasn’t alone in making that prediction, but it was a minority opinion, as covid was thriving in hot places even then. ]

[…]

TRUMP: [Fauci’s} a little bit of an alarmist. That’s OK. A little bit of an alarmist.

[….]

TRUMP: I’ll be right eventually. I will be right eventually. You know I said, “It’s going to disappear.” I’ll say it again.

WALLACE: But does that – does that discredit you?

TRUMP: It’s going to disappear and I’ll be right. I don’t think so.

WALLACE: Right.

TRUMP:  I don’t think so. I don’t think so. You know why? Because I’ve
been right probably more than anybody else.

[….]

 TRUMP: Chris, let the schools open. Do you ever see the statistics on young
people below the age of 18? The state of New Jersey had thousands of deaths.

Of all of these thousands, one person below the age of 18 – in the entire
state – one person and that was a person that had, I believe he said diabetes.

One person below the age of 18 died in the state of New Jersey during all of
this – you know, they had a hard time. And they’re doing very well now, so
that’s it.

[So, notice that, not only is unconcerned about staff, but he doesn’t seem to understand the concept of the children infecting others, let alone the issues related to long-term damage from the disease.]

[….]

TRUMP: And Biden wants to defund the police.

WALLACE: No he, sir, he does not.

TRUMP: Look. He signed a charter with Bernie Sanders; I will get that one
just like I was right on the mortality rate. Did you read the charter that he
agreed to with…

WALLACE: It says nothing about defunding the police.

TRUMP: Oh really? It says abolish, it says — let’s go. Get me the charter,
please.

WALLACE: All right.

TRUMP: Chris, you’ve got to start studying for these.

WALLACE: He says defund the police?

TRUMP: He says defund the police. They talk about abolishing the police.

[It doesn’t.]

[….]

TRUMP: Because I think that Fort Bragg, Fort Robert E. Lee, all of these
forts that have been named that way for a long time, decades and decades…

WALLACE: But the military says they’re for this.

TRUMP: …excuse me, excuse me. I don’t care what the military says. I do –
I’m supposed to make the decision.

[….]

WALLACE: You said our children are taught in school to hate our country.
Where do you see that?

TRUMP: I just look at – I look at school. I watch, I read, look at the
stuff. Now they want to change — 1492, Columbus discovered America. You know,
we grew up, you grew up, we all did, that’s what we learned. Now they want to
make it the 1619 project. Where did that come from? What does it represent? I
don’t even know, so.

WALLACE: It’s slavery.

TRUMP: That’s what they’re saying, but they don’t even know.

[…]

TRUMP:  Biden can’t put two sentences together.

[….]

TRUMP:  I called Michigan, I want to have a big rally in Michigan. Do you know we’re not allowed to have a rally in Michigan? Do you know we’re not allowed to have a rally in Minnesota? Do you know we’re not allowed to have a rally in Nevada? We’re not allowed to
have rallies.

WALLACE: Well, some people would say it’s a health…

TRUMP:  In these Democrat-run states…

WALLACE:  But, wait a minute, some people would that it’s a health
risk, sir.

TRUMP: Some people would say fine

WALLACE:  I mean we had some issues after Tulsa.

TRUMP:  But I would guarantee if everything was gone 100 percent, they
still wouldn’t allow it. They’re not allowing me to do it. So they’re not —
they’re not allowing me to have rallies.

[….]

[About the test of his cognitive abilities—Wallace says it’s an easy test]

TRUMP:  It’s all misrepresentation. Because, yes, the first few
questions are easy, but I’ll bet you couldn’t even answer the last five
questions. I’ll bet you couldn’t, they get very hard, the last five questions.

WALLACE:  Well, one of them was count back from 100 by seven.

TRUMP:  Let me tell you…

WALLACE:  Ninety-three.

TRUMP: … you couldn’t answer — you couldn’t answer many of the
questions.

WALLACE:  Ok, what’s the question?

TRUMP:  I’ll get you the test, I’d like to give it. I’ll guarantee you
that Joe Biden could not answer those questions.

WALLACE:  OK.

TRUMP:  OK. And I answered all 35 questions correctly.

[On healthcare]

TRUMP:  Pre-existing conditions will always be taken care of by me and
Republicans, 100 percent.

WALLACE:  But you’ve been in office three and a half years, you don’t
have a plan.

TRUMP:  Well, we haven’t had. Excuse me. You heard me yesterday. We’re
signing a health care plan within two weeks, a full and complete health care
plan that the Supreme Court decision on DACA gave me the right to do. So we’re
going to solve — we’re going to sign an immigration plan, a health care plan,
and various other plans. And nobody will have done what I’m doing in the next
four weeks. The Supreme Court gave the president of the United States powers
that nobody thought the president had, by approving, by doing what they did —
their decision on DACA. And DACA’s going to be taken care of also. But we’re
getting rid of it because we’re going to replace it with something much better.
What we got rid of already, which was most of Obamacare, the individual
mandate. And that I’ve already won on. And we won also on the Supreme Court.
But the decision by the Supreme Court on DACA allows me to do things on
immigration, on health care, on other things that we’ve never done before. And
you’re going to find it to be a very exciting two weeks.

 

 

 

 

 

In-groups, out-groups, and identity politics

building with face on it
Mussolini’s headquarters just before an important vote

I often say that the first step in demagoguery is the reduction of politics to identity. And I’m often understood to be making an argument that is very different from what I’m trying to say. It’s important to understand that I’m talking about in-groups and out-groups from within social group theory. So, the “in-group” is not the “group in power.” It’s the group someone is in.

If you meet a new person, and ask them to describe themselves, they’ll typically do it by listing whatever happens to seem to be the most relevant social groups they’re in (their “in-groups”): Christian, Irish-American, Texan, teacher. If I were at a conference of teachers, it would be weird for me to say that I’m a teacher, since everyone there is (it isn’t information anyone needs), and that I am Irish-American would only be irrelevant. I’d list the in-groups most salient for that setting.

We all have a lot of in-groups; our membership in those groups is a source of pride. We also tend to have at least some out-groups. Out-groups are groups against which we define ourselves—we are proud that we aren’t in them. They can get pretty specific. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that my kind of Lutheran (ELCA) often takes pride in not being that kind of Lutheran (e.g., Missouri or Wisconsin synod); college rivalries are in-/out-group; fans of a band often take pride in not being the losers who are fans of that band (or kind of music).

There are two ways I’m often misunderstood when I say that the first step in demagoguery is the reduction of politics to in-group/out-group. The first is that, since I’m saying that social groups are socially and rhetorically constructed, people think I’m saying that social groups have no material reality, and that would be a stupid thing to say. Being a cancer survivor is a very real and material identity. Even categories that are purely socially constructed with no basis in biology (the notion of “Aryans” v. Central or Eastern Europeans) had the very real and material consequences of Hitler’s serial genocides. I’m saying that there aren’t necessary and inevitable connections among social group, material conditions, and how the groups are constructed. What it means to be a “cancer survivor” varies from one culture to another (whether it’s a point of pride or shame, for instance)—that real and material identity doesn’t necessarily or inevitably lead to a specific social group or political agenda.

Second, I’m often understood to be arguing for some Habermasian/Rawlsian identity-free world of policy argumentation in which arguments (and not people), like autonomous mobiles in space, engage with one another. That kind of argumentation is neither possible nor rational.

Of course our identity is relevant to our argument; it’s one of many things we should consider. For instance, that someone is a cyclist means that they can give useful information about what feel like the safest places to ride a bike where they live. That’s relevant information because they’re a cyclist. My opinion about what are the safest places to ride is not relevant because I’m not a cyclist. Unless I’m a traffic engineer who has a stack of studies about accidents in the city. The traffic engineer (who may or may not be a cyclist) and the cyclist have views that should be considered. Neither one is necessarily right.

Thinking about politics in terms of social groups become toxic when we think those groups are discrete (you’re either in one group or another) ontologically grounded categories (meaning that we think we know everything we need to know about an individual when we categorize them into a social group). That notion that, once I’ve put you into a social group I know everything I need to know about your motives, beliefs, politics, and moral worth (you’re a teacher, so you’re a liberal elitist who supports Biden because he’ll increase teacher salaries and you’re greedy). You might really be a cancer survivor, teacher, cyclist, or traffic engineer, but once I know your membership in any of those groups, I don’t immediately know everything about you.

Identity politics is healthy when it is about acknowledging that we have a system that privileges some social groups over others, that some social groups might be possible to ignore (a person could have a long and happy life without ever understanding the distinction between Missouri and Wisconsin Synod Lutherans) but that some are so interwoven into community identity and political rhetoric you can’t not see them (such as “color” in the US), that there are real material conditions of being identified as belonging to some groups versus others, that claims about groups are generalizations that may or may not apply to specific individuals because of overlapping group membership, that overlapping group identities mean that membership in a specific group that guarantee identical experiences (intersectionality).

Those approaches aren’t ways of thinking about identity and its relationship to politics that contribute to demagoguery.

While it’s probably cognitively impossible not to be strongly influenced by notions of in-group, not everyone does so in the same way. In-group identification seems to require some notion of out-groups (or at least non-in-groups). We’re only aware of the boundaries of the in-group (the line that marks “in” so to speak) if there are boundaries, and that means at least the possibility of being outside those boundaries. There must be non-in-group members for there to be an in-group. There also must be groups of people who are outside those boundaries—out-groups. We tend to define ourselves by not being out-group.

What varies is how much hostility we feel toward non-in-group members, whether we group them all as one out-group, and whether we narrate ourselves as in a zero-sum battle. I might take pride in being ELCA and believe that that group has better theology than Missouri Synod, but that pride in my in-group doesn’t require that I feel threatened by members of the Missouri Synod; it doesn’t mean I believe that it is bad for me if something good happens to them, or that it is good for me if something bad happens to them (zero-sum).

When we think in terms of zero-sum, we fail to see ways that we might have shared interests, values, or goals with an out-group or some of its members. We will settle for policies that hurt us, as long as they hurt the out-group; we deny goods to the out-group, even if their getting those goods might benefit us.

So, when I say that we shouldn’t reduce politics to questions of identity, I don’t mean that consideration of identity is always a reduction, but it is a reduction when we assume that there are only two identities, that they are internally homogeneous, and they are inevitably in a zero-sum relationship with each other.