Tag: demagoguery

Hans Morgenthau: what happened when a conservative criticized US policies in Vietnam

red scare ad for Dewey

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.

A rough sketch of what I wanted to write about the Weathermen in the Demagoguery book

building blown up by weathermen

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.





Why would people like us have supported appeasing Hitler?

nazi propaganda poster saying "death to marism"

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.










Demagoguery is not specific to democracies

Theodore Bilbo

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.




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.