demagoguery Archives - Page 9 of 15 - Patricia Roberts-Miller

Rhetorical hyperbole, rhetorical responsibility, Donald Trump, Alex Jones, and other trolls

cat in blinds — Image from here: https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/8ksn7q/this_is_why_we_cant_have_blinds/

Alex Jones is in the midst of a lawsuit regarding his promoting the conspiracy theory that Sandy Hook was a hoax, perpetrated by the parents of dead children. One of his attorneys (Mark Enoch) has tried to argue that Jones was engaged in “rhetorical hyperbole:” According to the LA Times,

“Maybe it’s fringe speech. Maybe it’s dangerous speech,” Enoch said after playing portions of an Infowars episode. “But it’s not defamation. That is rhetorical hyperbole at its core.”

Because it’s rhetorical hyperbole, Enoch is arguing, Jones can’t be held responsible for the actual damage his actual words did, including that members of Jones’ audience have relentlessly harassed and targeted people whose children were murdered by someone who should never have had access to a gun.

This attempt at deflecting responsibility–Jones isn’t responsible for the consequences of what he said because he was just engaged in rhetoric–is common in demagoguery. Jennifer Mercieca has noted that Donald Trump regularly relies on the rhetorical device “paralipsis”: a rhetorical “device that enables him to publicly say things that he can later disavow – without ever having to take responsibility for his words.”

That specific rhetorical figure is part of a larger strategy that people engaged in demagoguery almost always use, which is that they make claims in the public sphere for which they refuse to be accountable. It’s a kind of rhetorical “plausible deniability,” which is when someone in power wants to order something to happen while maintaining the cowardly escape hatch of being able to deny they actually wanted it. If things go wrong, or the act gets exposed and condemned, the person who made the command can say that I didn’t really mean that. One of the most famous instances (which James Comey alluded to in his testimony) is when King Henry II wanted Thomas Becket killed, but didn’t want to say so explicitly. So, instead of saying, “Go kill him,” he is supposed to have said, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Several of Henry’s courtiers understood what he meant, and did what they knew he wanted. His later attempt to claim that isn’t what he meant didn’t work, and he had to do penance.

Most people don’t do penance for it, as all of us know who have ever had a bad boss, cowardly co-workers or relatives who wanted to say things for which they wouldn’t be held accountable. They either engage in indirection, as did Henry, or they refuse to put things in writing, make sure there are no third parties on phone calls or at meetings, use dog whistles. Or, and this is really the most pathetic claim, they say it was “just rhetoric” or “I was just making a joke.” That is, they are claiming they didn’t literally mean what they literally said. They’re saying they meant to be understood figuratively, except they did really mean what they said. They just don’t want to be held accountable for it.

Imagine that I hit your car. And you said, “Hey, you hit my car,” and I said, “I was just kidding,” or “It was just driving hyperbole.” You’d say, correctly, that, regardless of my intentions, I hit your car, and I’m responsible for the damage.

Jones is trying to argue that, although his rhetoric totaled peoples’ cars, he isn’t responsible because he was engaged in rhetorical hyperbole. But he wasn’t. Hyperbole is deliberate exaggeration meant to show that the rhetor is so committed to a position (or the in-group) that s/he is willing to say irrational things. It’s only rhetorical exaggeration if the rhetor believes that the audience is recognizing it as such. The Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition: Communication from Ancient Times (334) defines it as:
“A figurative device using self-conscious exaggeration to emphasize feelings and intensify rhetorical effect.” So, if hyperbole is a rhetorical figure, it’s self-conscious and deliberate exaggeration. If what Jones was saying about Sandy Hook was self-conscious exaggeration, and he didn’t mean it literally, then, once he realized that people were taking it literally, he would have made it clear that he was speaking figuratively. But he didn’t. So, either he did really mean it, or he was rhetorically reckless. It’s like giving someone a gun and telling them to use it for target shooting, but not taking it away (although you could) once you know they’re using it for threatening people.

Jones was trying to dodge responsibility for the harassment, but his attorney’s argument that it was rhetorical hyperbole makes him consciously responsible.

John Mulaney, in an episode of The Sack Lunch Bunch, answers a kid’s question about the show, about whether it’s sincere or ironic. He says something along the lines of, “If people love it, then it’s sincere; if people hate it, then it’s ironic.”

Except for a brief period in college when I was living places that wouldn’t allow cats, I have had cats my whole life. I love them. And anyone who lives with cats knows their enviable ability to recover quickly from disgrace. No matter what they’ve done—missed a jump, fallen off a table, gotten entangled in blinds—they immediately adjust themselves, look you straight in the eye, and very clearly say, “I meant to do that.” Mulaney is advocating the cat strategy for handling failure—refuse to admit it was failure, and just claim you meant it all along.

I think it’s hilarious when cats do it, but really sad when humans try to make the same move. Humans do it through claiming they were just joking or teasing or triggering the libs, but they weren’t. They were only joking when they realized they were hopelessly entangled in the blinds and look like fools.

In a culture of demagoguery, when large numbers of voters have abandoned thinking like citizens and have just become fanatically attached to doing harm to “the other side,” then a political figure who wants to succeed needs to out-fanaticize every other candidate. So, one candidate says, “We’ll hold firm on this,” and another says, “We’ll secede over this!” Perhaps that advocating secession was just intended as hyperbole, but if all the political figures of that group make the same claim, it’s no longer hyperbole. It’s a policy on the table. And then all the political figures are hopelessly entangled in the blinds. The responsible thing to do would be to try to walk it back. The cat approach to politics is to pretend you really meant it all along.

I’m completely willing to believe that Alex Jones promoted a narrative about the Sandy Hook shooting he didn’t believe, but that doesn’t make it rhetorical hyperbole. That makes it lying. He was willing to endanger the families of children killed at Sandy Hook because promoting a lie even he didn’t believe would profit him. It wasn’t rhetorical hyperbole; it was the nastiest version of Machiavellian careerism. He is claiming rhetorical hyperbole because he was just brave enough to put forward a narrative he liked, but not brave enough to own that he had put forward that narrative.
He’s a rhetorical coward.

I spend too much time crawling around dark corners of the internet arguing with assholes or watching them argue, and this is one strategy of trolls. They make claims they really mean, like the cat deciding to take on the blinds, and only claim it was all deliberate when they are thoroughly entangled and looking like idiots for what they said. A lot of trolls who suddenly claim they were just triggering the libs are just cats pretending they meant to get caught in the blinds. These people are argumentative cowards. They aren’t argumentatively brave enough to do the hard work of rationally supporting their arguments (which is why, if they really lose, they threaten violence—an admission that their position is unarguable). If you can’t make a real argument, you don’t have real arguments to make.

This is why I would not actually want any of my cats to be in a leadership position, even the one named Winston Churchill. They’re all about their dignity, and not about policy. Besides, all cats are anarchists.

There are other people who make claims from which they later walk back (sort of), but it isn’t the “Shit, this attacking the blinds thing was a bad choice.” These are people who use hyperbole or humor to test the waters.
People who are testing the waters say, “Segregation now! Segregation Forever!” or “I’ll go to Canada if this person is elected!” or “We’ll bomb them!” They want that policy, but they also want plausible deniability if it turns out that policy is unpopular.

These people are a different kind of coward. Unlike the cat who attacks the blinds and then is not willing to admit they made a bad decision, they’re deliberately cowardly about their own arguments. The cat is brave until things go wrong, and then a coward about its dignity. These people are cowards from the beginning. They know that they want to advocate a policy they can’t defend, so they make that argument in a way that maintains plausible deniability. They present a policy they want to support, all the while intending to disavow their advocacy of that policy if the reaction is too critical (something that happens all over the political spectrum).

And, if you ask me, that’s one thing that Alex Jones and Donald Trump have in common. Jones advocates conspiracy theories about a lot of things, perhaps something like anyone who disagrees with him, or any event that conflicts with his scapegoating narratives about who is good and who is bad. Trump dabbles in calling for violence against his critics, going for a third term, making the government openly single-party, inciting civil war. Neither is engaged in rhetorical hyperbole. I think we should consider that both have been testing the waters for just how far their base will go.

But, also, this means that those of us who engage with trolls should point them out for who they are—people who aren’t willing to argue. If they had a good argument, they would make it. If they can’t make a good argument, it’s because they don’t have one.

Flinging claims for Trump

picture of trump — This image is from here: https://www.snowflakevictory.com/

There is a pro-Trump website telling Trump supporters “how to win an argument with your liberal relatives.” One of the main arguments for Trump was (and is) that he would get the best people to work for and with him. So, this is the argument that the best people make for Trump, or, in other words, the best argument for Trump. Does this “best arguments for Trump” webpage have good arguments?

Someone making a rational argument

makes claims supported with good evidence, and so presents sources for claims;
can identify the conditions under which they would change their mind;
has claims that are logically connected, avoids fallacies, and applies standards across groups (so, for instance, if you want to say that you are appalled at feeding squirrels, you are just as appalled at in-group squirrel-feeding as you are at out-group squirrel-feeding);
engages the best out-group arguments, or, engaging a specific set of claims that aren’t good arguments, then at least the out-group claims are being presented accurately.

Engaging in rational argumentation isn’t very hard, and it’s easy to do if you’ve actually got a good argument. Rational argumentation isn’t about what claims you make, and whether they seem true to people who already agree, nor whether people making the claims think they’re unemotional. Rational argumentation involves a fairly low bar; it’s just the list above. And that list isn’t controversial.

If you take it out the realm of politics (where people are especially tribal), then it’s clear that “rational argumentation” is actually “sensible ways to think about conflict.” Imagine that you have a boss who says that you should be fired because reasons. You’d be outraged (justifiably) if your boss couldn’t cite sources, was just operating from in-group bias, unfairly represented what you’d said, and wasn’t listening. That’s a shitty boss. And it’s reasonable for you to ask that your boss make a decision about firing you rationally.

That’s a shitty boss because it’s a person who is making decisions badly. And we’ve all had that boss. What would it be like if we extrapolated from that shitty boss, who made decisions badly, to our own tendency to make decisions badly? What if we’re all the shitty boss?

But back to the Trump page—does it present good arguments? It fails every one of the criteria for rational argumentation.

For instance, it not only fails to link to sources to support its claims but it never links to an opposition.

Why not? Why not link to data that would support the claims it’s making? Why not link to the opposition with their, supposedly, terrible arguments? Well, perhaps because it can’t because then it would be clear how false the page’s claims are. Take one example. On two of the links, the claim is that “the 2020 Democrats are the ones who want to strip you of your private, employer-provided health insurance!” (“Trump approach”) That’s a lie in two different ways. First, some of the main candidates argue for something, single-payer health care, that might cause people to choose not to get health insurance from their employment, but instead from the government-based insurance—that’s what the pro-Trump healthcare page goes on to argue. So, the Dems don’t “want” to strip people of their private insurance—some Dem candidates want to give people a choice. (Sanders is the only one who has unequivocally said he would get rid of private insurance, not something, by the way, that a President can do without Congress.) If, as the pro-Trump page claims, so many people leave private insurance that the rates become unmanageable that would be because the government-funded insurance program is better than the private. In other words, this argument is an admission that the current system is inadequate.

Second, many Democratic candidates have not endorsed any such plan, so the claim that “the Dems” are advocating it is simply a lie. If what you’re saying is true, you don’t have to lie.

There is only one place that the site gives a link—to Biden saying that he insisted that a Ukrainian prosecutor get fired. The page admits that this claim has been debunked, but without any explanation or argument¬, insists it’s true. That isn’t an argument: that’s just direct contradiction.

That argument about Biden and the Ukraine is fallacious in that it is tu quoque (or, “you did it too!”). Whether Biden asked that the Ukrainian prosecutor be fired in order to prevent an investigation of his son’s activities has no relevance to whether Trump told Ukraine that he would withhold foreign aid (which he did, in his version of the phone call). Whether Trump is now refusing to allow people to testify in a trial—that is, obstructing justice—has nothing to do with anything Biden did. Tu quoque is how little kids argue—when caught with a hand in the cookie jar, claiming that little Billy also stole cookies is irrelevant. You might both have stolen cookies. But that’s a fallacy that runs throughout the pages—Trump’s reducing environmental protections is good because China is bad. Trump’s healthcare plan is good because the Democrats’ is bad. They might both be bad.

The set of claims about Ukraine has another fallacy that runs throughout the site: it says that “under President Obama, Ukraine never received this kind of lethal military aid AT ALL. It is thanks to President Trump, that the Ukrainians are getting the aid in the first place.” That is an example of the fallacy of equivocation (also called the fallacy of ambiguity), of an argument that is technically correct, but deliberately misleading (much like Bill Clinton’s “it depends upon what is is”). It looks as though it’s saying that Ukraine never got military aid from Obama AT ALL, something that is false. Technically, it’s saying that Ukraine never got “this kind” or “the aid”—meaning the Javelin missiles. That’s technically true, just as it was technically true that Clinton was not, at the very moment, having sex with an intern. But it’s misleading.

It’s hard to argue with someone engaged in equivocation, since it necessitates getting into the technicalities—that’s why people who aren’t arguing in good faith (that is, whose minds are not open to persuasion) engage in it.

Another common strategy of this site is to give Trump credit for what Obama or other Presidents did. For instance, the page on the environment begins, “America’s environmental record is one of the strongest in the world and the U.S. has also been a world leader in reducing carbon emissions for over a decade. We have the cleanest air on record and remain a global leader for access to clean drinking water.” Notice that this claim is vague, and so hard to disprove (like an ad that says, “We have the best prices”—compared to whom?): what record? Not the world record. It’s seventh. It isn’t even clear to me that the US now has the cleanest air in its record. But we can’t know what the claim is because it gives no sources. Similarly, the claim that “President Trump has taken important steps to restore, preserve, and protect our land, air, and waters” is unsupported, unexplained, and unsourced.

To the extent that the air is cleaner, it’s because of what was done in the past, by other people, particularly Obama, but also the Congress that passed the Clean Air Act and the 1990 Amendments.

The final problem with the page that I’ll mention (I could go on) is one that contributes significantly to the demagoguery of the page (and it is demagoguery): the implication is that anyone who disagrees with Trump is a “liberal,” and that simply isn’t true. A large number of people who believe that Trump should be convicted are conservative.

In short, the page doesn’t engage in rational argumentation. It doesn’t even engage in argument. So, would someone following the script provided by this webpage win any argument with any “liberal”? No. Because they wouldn’t be arguing. They’d be making claims, claims that are sometimes false, often misleading, almost always unsourced, and always unsupported, but never argued.

A person who followed this script and claimed to have won the argument would be like someone who claimed to have won a chess game because they turned over the board and fed the pieces to the dog.

If Trump can’t be supported with rational argumentation, then maybe it isn’t rational to support him.

Why Republicans shout

gaetz shouting — Image from: https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/10/politics/donald-trump-impeachment/index.html

Anyone watching the impeachment hearings has to notice that the Republicans shout. A lot. So do Fox News pundits. So did Kavanaugh. Had Christine Ford shouted, she would have been dismissed as irrational. Hillary Clinton got through extraordinary grilling without shouting; Obama never shouted. Shouting is the exclusive right of the Right.

How the GOP Loyalist media handles shouting is probably the single best example of how indefensibly irrational their rhetoric is. It isn’t rational; it’s just factional. Exactly the same behavior is condemned if out-group members engage in it, but admired if it’s GOP Loyalists.

It’s because the GOP Loyalist media is a media of fear, a media that promotes fear of immigrants, of Muslims, of Democrats. It’s all fear-mongering all the time. GOP Loyalists are so terrified that they can’t even be brave enough to take seriously any criticisms of their positions. People who sincerely believe that they’re right aren’t afraid of seeking out the best arguments saying we’re wrong. We believe that either we can take those arguments seriously and see they’re wrong, or modify our positions.

People who are too afraid to take seriously other arguments are secretly aware that their beliefs are too fragile to withstand reasonable interrogation.

People too afraid to listen to other points of view think they aren’t afraid since they’re standing strong and fierce and they’re shouting a lot. They’re like people standing in a dark bedroom with a shotgun pointed at the underside of the bed shouting about the hobgoblins they believe are under there. That’s what a coward does. A brave person would get a flashlight and look.

A coward blusters, shouts, and threatens violence against hobgoblins, and against anyone who gets a flashlight.

If the Republicans had good arguments against impeachment, they’d make them. They wouldn’t need to shout.

Arguing with GOP Loyalists

daily worker masthead I have a difficult time finding a good term to describe people who get all their information exclusively from what is sometimes called “the right-wing media sphere”—that is, Fox, Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Drudge Report. I don’t like calling it “right-wing” because I think one of the reasons we’re in the mess we are is the false binary (or no less false continuum) of right v. left. And, as is often remarked, it’s hard to look over Limbaugh or Fox and infer a coherent ideology that they’re promoting. They claim they’re against big government, debt, government spending, corruption in government, but they aren’t against those in principle—they defend big government when it comes to regulations they like, debt caused by wars and tax cuts, self-paying if it’s done by Republicans.

Those media and pundits aren’t consistently conservative—sometimes they’re very radical. They often reject basic principles of conservative ideology, such as promoting free trade, so it seems to me an important misnomer to call them “conservative.” What they are consistent about is promoting the election of Republican candidates, supporting the GOP in Congress, deflecting any criticism of GOP political figures (unless those are figures who dissent from or criticize the most extreme members of the GOP, in which case those figures are condemned as not true Scotsmen, oops, I mean not really Republican).

Unhappily, most research in political science relies on the binary or continuum, and I think it seriously confounds the results. A lot of the research relies on people identifying as “conservative,” but that doesn’t mean that they have a “conservative” ideology. A lot of research shows that people endorse “liberal” policies, so you have lefties insisting that they could win elections by promoting progressive policies, but that’s the wrong conclusion. Most people don’t vote on the basis of a policy agenda, but identity (and sometimes shark attacks), and there are two kinds of identities that a lot of voters like: some like the image of a “conservative” person; some vote for “the outsider who will go into Washington and kick some ass.” Thus, there are a lot of people who endorse progressive Democrat policies, but vote loyally Republican (see especially Rationalizing Voter, Stealth Democracy, Politics of Resentment, Ideology in America).

Sometimes I use the term “people who self-identify as conservative” since that’s really what much of that research shows. And here is where scholars of rhetoric could intervene usefully in the discourse of political science. It seems to me that a lot of political science assumes a coherent identity (I am a liberal); more recent work is usefully complicating that assumption (such as the work showing that people like the identity of independent, but who vote GOP consistently), but it’s no surprise to scholars of rhetoric. It’s consubstantiation.

I sometimes use the term “rabid factionalism,” since I sincerely think that’s accurate. There are various problems with that term, though, especially if you’re actually trying to reach people in that hyperfictional bubble. Benkler et al. call it a “propaganda feedback loop”—another accurate term. The problem, of course, is that people in a propaganda feedback loop never see themselves that way.

My first experience of recognizing that I was talking to people in a propaganda feedback loop was at Berkeley, and it was, if I remember correctly, the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade (Stalinists). There were four communist groups at Berkeley when I got there (maybe five), each of which had a very small number of members, and they mostly spent their time breaking up each other’s meetings. There were the Stalinists (they didn’t call themselves that—they might have called themselves Leninists) who handed out The Daily Worker (as far as I can tell, a Pravda-supported publication) and defended the USSR to the hilt. There were the Trotskyites, who spent most of their time fighting the Stalinists. There were Maoists, and the anarcho-communists (they worked at the Writing Center, and, interestingly enough, listened to a lot of New Age music).

A propaganda feedback loop, as Benkler et al. define it, is one in which
“media outlets, political elites, and publics form and break connections based on the contents of statements, and that progressively lowers the cost of telling lies that are consistent with a shared political narrative and increases the costs of resisting that narrative in the name of truth.” (33)

What was interesting to me about the Stalinists is that their defenses of the USSR relied on two strategies: 1) having at their fingertips all sorts of accurate statistics and information about the wrongs of the US; 2) dismissing any criticism of the USSR as biased on the grounds that it was criticism.

Of course, many of the things for which the Stalinists were criticizing the US were things the USSR was also doing: pollution, oppression of minority groups, corruption, imperialism. More important, the logical problem with the first strategy is that the US being wrong doesn’t make the USSR right. But it was the second one that intrigued me—it seemed to me an open admission of irrational loyalty. It meant that they could never engage in good faith argumentation, or a rational assessment of their own positions.
They were in a propaganda feedback loop.

Nothing so reminds me of those Stalinists as talking to someone who gets all their information from the GOP propaganda feedback loop (Fox/Limbaugh/Breitbart and so on). They make those two moves—they have lots of information as to what’s wrong with Democrats, but it’s a logical fallacy to assume that (even if the information is right, and it often isn’t) the Democrats being bad means the GOP is good. Ethical behavior is not a zero-sum, in which bad behavior on one side necessarily means better behavior on the other.

It’s a rhetorical mistake (one I often make) to dispute about those claims. They don’t really matter—for the GOP Loyalist (which is what I’m now thinking is the right term), they’re just examples of how awful Democrats are. If you persuade them that that example (or information) is wrong, they won’t change their mind either about Democrats or about their sources of information. As with the Stalinists, it’s that second argumentative strategy that matters: they will reject any disconfirming information, criticism, or dissent on the grounds that it is criticism and therefore “biased.”

It’s an admission of deliberately irrational loyalty.

I’m not saying that that deliberate irrational choice to remain in a propaganda feedback loop is limited to one place on the political spectrum (see How Partisan Media Polarize America), or even limited to politics–one reason I dislike the “two sides” model is that it limits our ability to talk about that problem because it so quickly turns into “you do it too!” And, while it’s true that there are lots of propaganda feedback loops, it isn’t true that both sides are just as bad–people who self-identify as liberal (0r left) are more likely to believe in fact-checking, consume media that issues corrections and has norms of accountability, and get information from disconfirming sources.

A lot of people ask me about how to argue with relatives who get all their information from the GOP propaganda feedback loop, and one thing I would say is: don’t feel that you have to. If they say, “Trump is the most effective President ever” or “Clinton laughed about a rape” you can, if you want, show them the video (she wasn’t laughing that a woman was raped) or give the data about Trump’s failure. But you don’t have to. One response is to ask them, “Do you get your information from sources that would tell you if he isn’t?” And then you can shift the argument about Trump to a discussion about information and deliberation.

Or, just refuse to argue, on the grounds that they don’t know anything about politics; they just believe. As long as they stay in that feedback loop, as long as they refuse to take seriously sources that disagree with them, they aren’t capable of a rational argument about politics. You can argue with them if you want, but it’s also possible to find various kind ways of saying that you aren’t arguing with them because they’re in a propaganda feedback loop, and then invite them to have more pie. Everyone likes pie.

Batboy and democratic deliberation

image of batboy

[Image from here]

One of my several useless superpowers is picking the wrong line, especially at the grocery store. And it isn’t because the people ahead of me are jerks trying pay with pennies or something; it’s just that the moment I get in that line is the moment that bar codes are wrong, or the computer can’t handle some kind of payment reasonably, or toads start falling from the ceiling. Okay, not that last one, but close enough.

And, because of this really sucky superpower, I have spent a lot of time looking at, and sometimes reading, magazines in the checkout line. And The National Enquirer had a kind of bad car crash fascination for me. It seemed to me the Etch-a-Sketch of news sources. The Etch-a-Sketch, if you don’t know, was a really fun device on which you could create various drawings (within limits) and then shake it and the previous drawing would disappear.

That, it seemed to me, perfectly described The National Enquirer. Every issue wiped clean the slate of a previous one. And, yet, every issue presented its information as obviously true. I remember—even read—the issue when a major star died of cancer. The previous week had the headline that he had been completely cured of cancer through a miracle treatment! The issue announcing his death didn’t mention that previous error.

That failure to admit error is important because admitting error is at the heart of effective decision-making—whether you’re thinking about what car to buy, what media you consume, how you behave at work, what kind of relationship you want, what movie reviewers you should believe, how you treat others, and how you should vote. You can’t get better unless you admit you were wrong. If you never admit you have made a mistake, then you’ll keep making that mistake.

If you’re willing to admit you’ve made a mistake, that’s great. But if you treat that mistake as a one-off, and not really relevant, then you’re still not learning from your mistake.

The point is not just that The National Enquirer was wrong about that actor, but that it was wrong to present its information as certain. Learning from mistakes doesn’t just mean that we learn that this claim was wrong (that actor had not been miraculously cured) but that our source is imperfect and its information is not certainly true.

When I mention this to students, about various sources (all over the political spectrum), some of them will say something along the lines of, “Well, yeah, but they got this right.” When I argue with people (again, all over the political spectrum) who are citing completely false information (claims on which their source has been shown to be completely wrong), I can sometimes get them to admit that error, but they still intend to rely on that source. They still refuse to admit their source is unreliable because, they say, “they got this other thing right.”

And that’s assuming I can even get them to admit that their source was wrong. Too often, they’ll refuse to look at any source that says their favored source is wrong simply on the grounds that it disagrees with them. That’s kind of shocking if you think about it.

Here is a person claiming something is true, and they refuse to consider any evidence that they might be wrong, on the grounds that the source is biased because it says they might be wrong. It’s a perfect circle of ignorance.

Good decision-making isn’t about getting some things right; it’s about being willing to admit to being wrong. No matter what your profession, if you go through that profession refusing to consider any criticism of you, your actions, and/or your policies on the grounds that only “biased” people would criticize you, you’re running your business into the ground.

Imagine, for instance, being a doctor. You were trained to believe that infections are the consequence of miasma. Would it be reasonable for you to refuse to read any studies that said that you were wrong about infections? Would you be a good doctor if you refused to pay attention to anything that complicated or contradicted your understanding of infection?

You’d be a lousy doctor.

You’d be a lousy doctor not because you’re a bad person, or because you mean to hurt people, or even because you’re stupid, but because being right means being willing to be wrong. Far too many people reason on the basis of in-group loyalty (I’m right because this seems right to me, and everyone like me agrees about this), and won’t admit that they’ve ever been wrong, let alone that they rely on sources that have been wrong. There are major media sources that regularly engage in the equivalent of “this actor is cured and whoops, now he’s dead but we’re still a reliable source!” And the consumers of those sources never conclude that the persistent inaccuracy of a source is a reason to doubt its reliability.

And that is what is wrong with our current state of public discourse. Too many people aren’t willing to admit to being wrong, and if they do grant a fact or two here and there, they aren’t willing to give up on sources.

It doesn’t matter where on the political spectrum your sources are; what matters is
1) Are you getting your information from a source that links to opposition sources (that is, is the source so confident in its representation of the opposition that it gives you direct access to their arguments, instead of their mediated version);
2) Do your sources admit when they’re wrong, and admit corrections clearly and unequivocally, without scapegoating? A source that never admits error is not a more reliable source—it’s bigoted propaganda;
3) Does your source make falsifiable claims? That is, does your source spend all its time ranting about evil the other side is rather than making falsifiable claims about what your side will do?

Again, imagine that you’re a doctor, or that you’re a patient seeing a doctor, and you’re trying to decide whether to get surgery, try medications, or perhaps make major lifestyle changes. Would you think that the way that the pundits on Fox or Rachel Maddow or various tremendously popular people on youtube argue would be a good way to make a decision about your health?

They all argue different things, but they all argue the same way: the correct course of action is obvious, and everyone who disagrees is spit from the bowels of Satan, and if you’re a good [in-group] member, you’ll make this choice and refuse to listen to anyone who says it’s the wrong choice.

Refusing to listen to out-group sources, dismissing as biased anyone who tells you that you’re wrong, believing that the only problem is that we have to commit more purely to the in-group—those are terrible ways to make decisions, in every aspect of a life.

Imagine that you’re in a hospital bed, and you’re presented with a variety of options, or you’re a surgeon, and you’re trying to decide what to do, and a doctor comes to you and says, “I support Trump [or Warren, or Biden, or whoever], so this the right kind of surgery for you.” Or, perhaps, “I’m a Republican, so I’m going to choose this surgery.” As a patient or surgeon, you’d recognize that’s a terrible way to make decisions. A good surgeon would assess the choices regardless of politics; no even remotely competent surgeon would make a decision about a surgical practice on the basis of the political affiliation of the people advocating this practice versus that.

Since we recognize that loyalty to party would be a terrible way to make decisions about policies regarding our bodies, why not admit it’s equally terrible when it comes to policies about our body politic?

This is no time for compromise

When confronted with a world in which decisions that seemed certainly and obviously right (think of the arguments for invading Iraq as a policy option we should feel certain is correct) that turn out to be wrong, things get a little vexed for the people who insisted what they’d been saying was obviously true. Turns out they were not so obviously true after all. In fact, they were false.

Fox and various other media relentlessly promoted the WMD argument, as well as the argument that even Bush said was false (that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11), and when media and pundits were now faced with the problem that even the lowest bar of journalistic responsibility would involve their admitting they were either fools or liars, they either stopped talking about it, or claimed that Bush was responsible.

Their argument was often a little odd, though. They sometimes said that they couldn’t be blamed for being loyal to a person who had turned out to lie. I think that’s interesting. They were admitting that they saw their job as supporting the Republican Party, and not promoting the truth. The traditional distinction between a medium of party propaganda and a medium that is at least trying to be above faction is the willingness to investigate and report on information that hurts its preferred party.

Fox not only didn’t investigate the WMD claims, but it slammed anyone who said what turned out to be true. It promoted, relentlessly, a claim that was obviously a lie (that Iraq was behind 9/11)—even Bush said so–, and another set of claims that were deeply problematic (such as the WMD accusation, or various arguments Colin Powell made before the UN). Fox didn’t do that investigation, or if it did, it gleefully promoted what it knew to be a lie. (At this point, people who are deeply immersed in the tragic narrative that our complicated and vexed political options are reduced to the fallacious question of whether Dems or Republicans are better will say, but the Dems do it too! Maybe, but the Dems lying doesn’t mean that what Fox said was true. Fox was either irresponsible or dishonest, and any behavior on the part of the Dems doesn’t change that. If I rob a bank, that someone else did it too doesn’t magically change my robbing a bank from anything other than what it was.)

The failure to investigate was spread all over the political spectrum of media. For instance, Colin Powell’s speech before the UN was deeply problematic, but, instead of doing responsible investigation, or even reporting accurately (such as saying “Powell showed” when the accurate report would have been “Powell claimed”), media endorsed his problematic argument. His argument was so problematic that even the conservative–and pro-invasion–British periodical The Economist noted his case was thin in some places. But, in most media, his argument wasn’t reported as wobbly (and, again, not on any one place on the political spectrum).

Fox and various other media outlets were, from the perspective of someone who studies demagoguery, pretty extreme. It wasn’t just that they promoted various false claims–again, even ones Bush said were false–, but that they promoted those false claims as the only thing a reasonable person could believe. The amount of propaganda—that is, the factional promotion of false claims—is one reason that 40% of the American public believed that it should be legal to prohibit dissenting from the invasion.

What that means is that 40% of the American public were fine with silencing the point of view that turned out to be right. And that is really worrisome for democracy.

Even more worrisome is that the people I know who were part of that 40% have yet to admit that they were wrong to want to silence the people who turned out to be right. And their having been completely wrong about Iraq didn’t caused them to question the sources that led them astray, nor, more important, the underlying (and false) narrative that the correct course of action is so obvious to good people that dissent should be dismissed as biased or duped.

And that’s my experience with people all over the political spectrum–that people who believe that it is obvious that we should do this thing now, and that everyone who disagrees should be dismissed (as biased, ignorant, duped, dishonest) never admit that their having been wrong in the past is any reason to reconsider their narrative about political decision making.

When people are frightened, faced with uncertainty, or have failed, in-group entitativity increases. Group entitativity is what social psychologists call the sense a person has 1) that their mental categories of kinds of people (Christians, liberals, Texans) are Real; and 2) that their loyalty and commitment to their in-group is essential and unarguable. (Scholars in rhetoric would say that their sense of group identification is constitutive.)

Fear, uncertainty, and failure all increase the belief that The In-Group is Real, and thereby paradoxically encourage people to feel that the solution to our current problem is to purify the in-group. Politically, this means that a failure encourages people to believe that the solution is for the political group not to be a coalition of various interests, but for every member of the in-group, who is Really in-group, to commit more purely to a more pure vision of the in-group.

The train wrecks in public deliberation that I study all have calls for purer commitment to the pure in-group. But, at times, a group’s decision to stop disagreeing, and just work together has been effective. So, how do you disagree between the irrational response that what we need now is purity (because the in-group has failed) and what we need now is to stop disagreeing?

You don’t do it through deductive reasoning. You don’t do it through the circular reasoning process of deciding that only commitment to your narrative is right, and so only people who agree to that narrative can be right. You reconsider the narrative.

Or you don’t. Instead, you engage in Machiavellian unifying strategies.

The problem is that no political party can win an election without gathering together people with wildly different narratives. So, a party needs what rhetoricians call “a unifying device.” There are a lot (Kenneth Burke listed them pretty effectively in 1939).

The easiest strategy is to unify by opposition to a common enemy. Burke says that Hitler unified Germans (who were a very disparate group) by opposition to the Jews, and, while that was true in Mein Kampf (and Hitler’s ideology generally), when it came to the Nazis’ best electoral successes, it was by unifying voters against “Bolsheviks”—he included any form of socialism in that category (and his base knew he meant Jews). Hitler argued for purifying the community of dissenters.

William Lloyd Garrison made a similar argument in the era before the Civil War. Abolitionists couldn’t count on the government to help them, and they suffered a lot of failures. And so Garrison decided there was one right way to think about the vexed question of whether the Constitution allowed slavery, and he thereby alienated Frederick Douglass.

Hitler was evil; Garrison was not. In other words, the notion that the solution to our problem is to insist on one narrative and crush all dissent is something that both good and bad people share.

Good decision-making requires that, at some point, people stop arguing, and commit to the plan. If my unit has decided that we’re going to issue red balls to all dogs, then we need to get full-in on issuing red balls. But there needs to be an opportunity for the people who think the issuing red balls is a dumb plan. In other words, every good plan makes falsifiable claims.

In the decisions I’ve studied, when communities have decided to make disastrous decisions, or even made good decisions that ended badly, they have gotten feedback that their decisions were bad, and they decided that the response to that setback was increased in-group purity.

Responding to failure by believing that our problem is that our in-group was not pure enough, and that therefore the solution is to be more pure in our ideological commitment, is a natural human bias.

But it isn’t a useful way to deliberate.

“This decision by ‘the government’ is obviously wrong” as factional demagoguery

My poor husband. This weekend, we went to a farmer’s market because it was a beautiful day, and I didn’t have to work, and the farmer’s market is fun, and, long story short, a person from whom I was buying earrings said to me and Jim, “Some people think government is the problem, and some people think government is the solution.” Jim, being a sensible person, just stepped back a bit. I don’t really remember what I said after that (I was in a white-hot rage), but I know I said a lot.

I have spent my career working for big (and public) institutions, and got all my degrees at a big (and public) institution. And I spent far too much of my life irritated (and sometimes outraged) by various decisions that those institutions made—decisions that were, to me, not just wrong but obviously wrong.

There are, loosely, three categories of wrongness. There were decisions that were irritating and time consuming (such as providing physical documentation of every article I claimed to have published, having students sign for getting a small gift card, having to provide travel receipts). There were decisions that obviously ignored considerations central to the teaching of writing, for instance, or ethical practices regarding staffing. There were others that seemed to strike at the very notion of college education as a public good. All of those decisions were, to me, outrageously short-sighted. I was right. I was also short-sighted.

I’m really sorry about all that time I spent bloviating about how obviously dumb my administration was; it turns out that my administration was not necessarily being dumb. It turns out I was often the short-sighted one. I was right that about some decisions being unethical, and I was right about the harm some decisions did for the teaching of writing, but I was wrong to think that my Dean was the problem. Because I saw every entity above me as “administration,” I falsely identified the source of the problem, and therefore I never identified a workable solution.

And this is another post about the neighborhood mailing list, and how it exemplifies what’s wrong with American political deliberation. (Although, to be fair, I could use departmental faculty meetings to make the same point, with me as the person arguing very badly. I’ve also done my share of this on the neighborhood mailing list and various other places. I’ve loved me some pleasurable outrage about how obviously wrong the government, my university administration, the city is).

Anytime there is a change in our neighborhood, we look at the proposed policy from our perspective, and we think how it will affect us. That’s a valid datapoint. But that’s all it is–one datapoint. I earlier wrote about how the Big Bike narrative assumed that cyclists in our neighborhood are outsiders, when in fact a lot of the people cycling in our neighborhood (including some of the cyclists who are jerks) are neighbors. They are us.

And, let’s be clear, we are in a neighborhood with streets paid for by all citizens of Austin. The notion that these are “our” streets is no more rational than the belief that the trash can loaned to you by the city of Austin is your trash can.

In the case of Big Bike, the assumption is that there is a policy that is obviously right to all sensible people of goodwill, and it happens to be the one I hold. Thus, anyone who advocates a different policy is stupid, corrupt, duped, selfish, shortsighted. I’m saying that, for years, I thought that way about my universities’ policies that didn’t agree with what policies I thought we should have.

At every university, there have been irritating, complicated, and time-consuming, and, to me, obviously dumb, requirements about submitting documentation for travel, absences of students, rewarding students for participating in a study, hiring student workers, keeping track of purchases, exposing personal data about sources of income. It turns out that, in many cases, the policies I thought were obviously stupid were a response (perhaps not the best response, but often good enough) to a real problem I didn’t know existed. Because, at every university, those irritating, complicated, and time-consuming requirements were put in place because someone was an asshole. Someone filed false documentation, failed to note a conflict of interest, embezzled, falsely accused a student (or a student was a jerk and refused to admit to absences), exploited student workers, or filed a lawsuit.

I’m not saying that university is always right, but I have been wrong as to who was wrong. I have been at three universities with unethically low salaries for staff (University of Texas at Austin is one of them). I care about staff; that is part of my viewpoint. I’m not looking out for me; I’m looking out for others. And the salary structure at three of my universities was (and is) obviously ethically and rationally indefensible. I was (and am) right about all that.

I was, however, wrong to think that these unethical salary structures for staff were the consequence of my University administration being short-sighted in its policies about staff salaries. In two cases (I’m still unclear about UT-Austin), the salaries of staff were legislative decisions, and not the university.

I was right that the decision was wrong, but I was wrong as to who was wrong.

There is a different kind of decision in which I thought I was completely right, and the university was being stupid and short-sighted, and I was wrong.

When, for complicated reasons, I ended up on Faculty Council, I learned that most of what I thought about how the university ran was wrong, in all sorts of ways. Here’s one example: I had long thought it was obviously wrong to have the day before Thanksgiving a class day. A lot of students had to miss that class in order to get flights, and others risked their lives driving on a day with terrible traffic and accidents.

I sat at a Faculty Council meeting, and listened to someone explain that, because the fall semester is already shorter than spring (which I’d never noticed), and because of various legislated weirdnesses about the UT calendar, taking away that class day would mean that some of the Engineering departments would lose accreditation. Accrediting organizations require a certain number of labs, and removing that class day would mean they wouldn’t have enough labs.

We would, they said, have to refigure the entire calendar to ensure that they could have enough labs, and that any decision about that Wednesday should be delayed till that refiguring could happen. And I listened to faculty stand up and talk about how we should, right now, cancel that Wednesday class because of what it meant for them personally. Of course, were UT to lose its engineering accreditation, all those faculty would suffer far more than they were suffering by having a Wednesday class day. But they didn’t think of that because they assumed that their perspective was the only valid one.

And I realized I was them. I also assumed that the policies of the university should enable my way of teaching. And suddenly I empathized with engineers. I was engaged in epistemological selfishness, only assessing a situation from my perspective. A decision that was obviously wrong from my perspective (such as requiring that the day before Thanksgiving be a class day) was a great decision for a university that wanted to ensure its engineering programs were accredited.

My perspective about the day before Thanksgiving—enable students to leave earlier—was a legitimate one. But the perspective of the Engineering faculty concerned about losing accreditation was also legitimate. In fact, I’d say that, since my university would be seriously hurt by losing Engineering accreditation, and my students would be hurt, that my interests and the concerns of the Engineering faculty were intertwined. That my perspective was legitimate doesn’t mean it was the only one that should be considered. That the Engineering faculty had a legitimate concern doesn’t mean it was the only one that should be considered.

The University worked it out.

I’m not saying that all positions are equal, nor that we should never decide our administration has made a bad decision. I have twice been at universities with an ambitious Provost who made every decision on the basis of what would enable them to have great things on their cv because they saw this job as a stepping stone to being Chancellor. Try as I might (and I did try), there was no perspective from which their decisions were the best for the university—they were (are) splashy projects that look great on a resume but aren’t thought through in terms of principles like sustainability, shared governance, financial priorities.

I also sat at a Faculty Council meeting and listened to various faculty from business, math, and economics explain that a report arguing for major changes in various university practices had numbers that literally did not add up. And they didn’t, and those major changes never did save anywhere near the predicted amount. The changes were eventually abandoned.

Three times I have been at universities that had a state legislature actively hostile to my university, that made decisions designed to get the university to fail.

Big institutions make bad decisions. But they also make decisions that aren’t bad–they’re the best decisions within the various constraints, or good enough decisions within the constraints. If we spend our lives outraged that the university, or city, or government isn’t enacting the policies we believe to be right, then we’re spending our lives in the pleasurable orgy of outrage. We aren’t doing good political work.

What I’m saying is that just looking at a policy, and assessing it from your perspective as a good or policy doesn’t mean it is a good or bad policy. You have to look at it from the perspective of the various stakeholders, after which you might decide it’s a terrible policy (because it might be). My university should not make every decision on the basis of what is best for me, or even people like me. My university has people with genuinely different needs from me. My university makes bad decisions, but that a decision is not the best one for me is not sufficient proof that it is a bad decision. My university should not be designed for me.

And, similarly, the government should not be designed for me. Or you. Or us.

The notion that, in regard to any question, there is an obviously right answer is epistemological selfishness. The notion that, because you can see flaws in a policy, that policy is obviously dumb and wrong, is just bad reasoning.

Every policy has flaws. You have to decide how to get to work. That’s a policy argument—you are deliberating the policy of getting to work. Is there a perfect route? Nope. Parenting, having a dog, gardening, buying a car—those are all policy deliberations. Is there a perfectly right decision? No. You have to deliberate among various pressing concerns—cost, size, resale value, gas mileage, loan options. Any big institution has to do the same weighing.

Despite the fact that we all get by in a world of vexed and nuanced decisions in our moment to moment decisions, when it comes to what we think of as “political decisions,” a troubling number of us reason the way I did for far too many years—that, when it comes to policy, my perspective is obviously right. Even though my personal life was not a series of perfect decisions, from the day to day (whether to bring an umbrella, wear a heavy coat, take that route to work) through the slightly more important (whether to grant an extension to my students, how to manage my time, agree to that commitment) to the big ones (whether to marry that guy, take that job, get that haircut), somehow I was convinced that I knew the right thing for my university, city, state, or country to do. I had made the wrong decision about a haircut multiple times, but, when it came to politics, my belief was some kind of perfect insight spit from the forehead of God?

My model of political deliberation–despite my long and documented history of being wrong, even when it came to major policy decisions in my personal life, I was magically infallible–is unhappily common.

My experience with big institutions—that they make policies that are ridiculous from my perspective, and even burdensome—is how most people experience the government. And that mantra—this big institution is terrible because their decisions don’t make sense from my perspective–is a constant mantra on my neighborhood mailing list. Every decision “they” make is not just dumb, but obviously dumb. And there are no good reasons or legitimate perspectives that might make “their” decision makes sense.

According to many people on my neighborhood mailing list, everything the city does is wrong. It isn’t just flawed, but completely, obviously, and pointlessly dumb.

And, unhappily, my neighborhood mailing list exemplifies how smart, well-intentioned, good people who are deeply committed to thinking about the public good reason.

My neighborhood mailing list is, ostensibly, non-partisan. But it isn’t. A recurrent (perhaps even dominant) topos (as people in rhetoric say) is that “the government” (an out-group) is making an obviously bad decision because “the government” is dominated by “special interests.”

That’s as political and factional as political discourse gets. It’s toxic populism. It’s the false assumption that there is some group (us) made up of “regular people” who see what really needs to happen. If anything happens that “regular people” (us) don’t like, or that hurts us in any way, then this is the government being dumb, oblivious, or corrupt.

Toxic populism dismisses that the policy we hate might help some other group of people by saying those people aren’t “real Americans.” For complicated reasons, I had to listen to some guy repeat what he said he had heard on Rush Limbaugh, about how Native Americans were getting “special” benefits from the government (those “special” benefits were simply honoring agreements). There was something about Native Americans not being “real” Americans that caused steam to come out my ears.

My neighborhood mailing list claims to be non-factional, but it tolerates dog whistle racism and demagoguery about graffiti. It also tolerates the “the government always fucks things up” rhetoric that is, actually, profoundly factional.

As various studies have shown (Ideology in America summarizes a lot of them), the public, on the whole, supports policies that we tend to identify as “liberal,” but votes for anyone who plausibly performs the identity of “conservative.” And “conservative” is associated with being opposed to government intervention—“the government” is associated with Democrats. This association explains why so many people complain about aspects of Obamacare that Republicans enacted (such as the failure to expand medicare).

And irrational.

In all those years when I was whingeing that the huge institution wasn’t enacting policies that were the best from my perspective, I was engaging in profoundly anti-democratic rhetoric. It was political, and it was factional. Rhetoric about how government sucks isn’t just anti-democratic; it’s pro-Republican.

The government screws things up, and we should engage in loud and vehement criticism when it does. But “the government” making a decision that inconveniences us and “the government” screwing up are not necessarily the same thing—the first is not evidence of the second. Good governmental policies inconvenience everyone at least a little.

After Proposition 13 passed in California (which greatly reduced the state budget), I frequently found myself in situations in which—in the same conversation—someone celebrated the passage of Prop 13 and bemoaned that government services had declined. They shot themselves in the foot and then complained they had a limp.

Americans, till Reagan, lived within a world of well-financed government projects—roads, bridges, water services, public schools, non-partisan science research. Since Reagan, the infrastructure has deteriorated. We now have people complaining that taxes are too high and the infrastructure sucks (which is why we should take more money from government).

We need to stop assuming that “the government” is always deliberately, stupidly, and obviously wrong. “The government” is neither the problem nor the solution; voters are.

I don’t remember much about what I said when I lost my temper with the guy at the farmer’s market, but I do remember one thing. I said, “If you think the government is the problem, then why haven’t you moved to Somalia?” (And, yes, I know, that situation in Somalia is more complicated than that, but, by that time, I’d figured out his sources of information, and that those sources said Somalia is hell.)

And then he did start talking about how the government should stick to what it does well and leave other things aside.

That’s the fallback position for people repeating Libertarian positions that are internally inconsistent but sound good as long as you don’t think too hard. I made no headway with him.

But, what I did see is that his position was thoroughly indefensible logically, and it was the position I have taken far too often in far too many situations. He thought the government was stupid because it made some decisions that he didn’t like. He didn’t notice that “the government” paved the roads that got customers to his place, enabled the trade that got him what he needed for his shop, ensured that he didn’t get robbed, enabled him to do something if someone wrote a bad check. He wants a government that gets him everything he wants and nothing he doesn’t.

And so do I. And that’s a bad way to think about government.

That a policy seems wrong to me doesn’t actually mean it’s wrong. I am not (yet) Queen of the Universe with perfect and universal insight. None of us is. People all over the political spectrum need to stop talking as though the government is the problem. It isn’t. We are.

“OK, Boomer” and intergenerational demagoguery

Growing up with relatives prone to saying really offensive and bigoted things, I quickly learned the rule: saying something offensive, even if it clearly insults someone sitting there at the table, is okay, as long as you’re older than the people who might object. The person who calls attention to how offensive that statement was, especially if they’re younger, that is who people blame for “starting the conflict.” Calling attention to demagoguery that other people haven’t noticed is seen as “confrontational,” and perhaps even “aggressive.” That is “divisive.”

Someone saying out loud that something was racist isn’t what started the problem—the racist (or otherwise bigoted) person did. But, time and again, I saw someone directly insult someone else at the table, sometimes openly, sometimes passive-aggressively, almost always through saying insulting generalizations about a group of which the other person was a member. Someone might say something like, “Well, young people today just don’t know how to work, and […]” then tell a rambling story about how they had to walk eight miles to school, uphill both ways. Most of the people at the table wanted to let all that demagoguery go by un-noticed. They got upset if the person who had, in fact, very clearly been insulted said, “I was just insulted.”

This is the “OK, Boomer” controversy, I think.

There has been divisiveness about generations for a long time, and it isn’t new. But I have to say that demagoguery about “young people today” (in current public discourse oddly often mis-identified as “millennials”) is pernicious and ubiquitous and damaging. Demagoguery about how awful this generation is is in everything from comment threads to best-sellers, and it’s often engaged in on the part of boomers, probably the most privileged generation ever. For instance, consider that this profoundly incoherent book about what’s wrong with young people is a best seller. It actually argues that this generation is the dumbest because they’re on the phones all the time, and therefore not reading.

It’s available in kindle.

And it’s worth remembering that Culture of Narcissism was written about boomers.

If you’re now outraged about divisiveness about generations because of the “ok, boomers” meme, then you are blaming the person at the table who says, “Wow, that was racist” as “starting the conflict.” You didn’t notice all the divisive demagoguery about young people today.

If you haven’t called out that pernicious and pervasive boomer demagoguery about kids these days, and you are condemning “ok, boomer,” then either put “I’m a demagogue” on your sleeve, or STFU. If you think that the “ok, boomer” meme has called attention to how boomers have been profiting by demagoguery about kids today, and you’d like to reduce the generational demagoguery by acknowledging the role of authors like Bauerlein, then go for it. But don’t pretend for a second that the “ok, boomers” people started intergenerational demagoguery.

They’re responding to it.

And I think it’s a pretty good response.

I think it’s asking boomers to hold young people today to the same standards they had to meet when they were 20. And good luck with that.

Demagoguery and stigginit to them (Maryland talk)

little girl eating crackers

Here’s my basic argument: demagoguery is best seen as the reduction of the complicated array of political—that is, policy—options to the false binary of us and them. There are various characteristics that reduction tends to have (projection, scapegoating, binaries, and others). But, here’s another part of my argument that matters: we’re all demagogues. We like demagoguery; we promote it. Demagoguery isn’t just something they do; in fact, if my book enabled you to be better at identifying their demagoguery, then I just contributed, unintentionally, to our culture of demagoguery.

We are in a culture of demagoguery. We are in a world in which every argument is assessed demagogically—that is, when presented with a claim, the first thing we want to know is whether the person is in or out group. If they’re in-group, then we’re open to their argument; if they’re out-group, we think skeptically.

Demagoguery assumes that our vexed and uncertain political world is really a zero-sum battle between us (good) and them (evil). Thus, any political action that helps them hurts us; any political action that hurts them helps us. It’s kind of like seeing politics as a game of basketball—if they make any baskets, that’s bad for us; if we keep them from making any baskets, that’s essentially a gain for us. One of their players getting injured, their getting a bad call against them, a bad bounce of the ball—that’s all good for us.
Except a loss for them isn’t necessarily a gain for us, even in basketball. If they got the bad call because it’s an incompetent ref, we’ll get hurt too. Setting fire to the stadium, committing an egregious foul that hurts their best player, delaying the game by supergluing the doors to their locker room, breaking the play clock, filing a lawsuit that prevents the game from being played—those are all actions that hurt the other team, but they don’t help us, and they might even hurt us more than they hurt the other team. And that is the problem with assuming that hurting or “stigginit” to them is necessarily a win for us. It isn’t.

This way of thinking about politics—hurting them is just as good as helping us because it amounts to the same thing—is also called the “fixed pie” bias. It’s a notorious cognitive bias, an unconscious way we approach decisions.
It’s as though all the goods in our shared world—access to clean water, good schools, low taxes, personal safety, good roads, honest political figures—are a pie. The more you get, the less I do, so anything that keeps you from getting pie helps me. But it doesn’t, even as far as pie. I’m not hurt by your getting good water; I’m not helped by your getting bad water. I can keep you from getting pie by throwing it out uneaten; I can harm your pie eating by poisoning the pie, and then we both die.

The zero-sum model is actively harmful in systems of mutual dependence. We all benefit by having a citizenry that doesn’t have anyone consuming water that has brain-damaging levels of lead, that has good public schools available to everyone, that has tax burdens shared reasonably, that isn’t afraid, that can trust that political figures are (on the whole) not making political decisions purely on the basis of what benefits them personally, nor are they trying to claim that—because they won an election—the law doesn’t apply to them.

We think politics is a zero-sum game because that’s how the media frame it—the media says there are two (and only two) sides to every political issue (the Democrats and the Republicans), and the media (through what is called the “horse race frame”) discusses every policy issue in terms of how it might help or hurt the Dems or Republicans in elections.
That isn’t information that citizens need to know. But it’s what media do because people think (falsely) that such coverage—this person is doing this to try to win an election—is objective. It isn’t. What we need to know is whether what various political figures are saying about policies is within the realm of rationally defensible policy argumentation.

But it’s hard to get that information because it requires reading the best arguments from a variety of points of view, and that’s really hard. The algorithms of social media mean you’ll get exclusively in-group sources.
And, so, a lot of people—especially people under the age of thirty—don’t rely on mainstream media sources (which, btw, includes Fox News, which is the main source of information for a plurality of people). They rely on whatever shows up in their world—youtube, perhaps Facebook, groupchats, google. That’s the same informational strategy that people over thirty have, but it’s just a different set of sources—more reliance on Facebook, cable and broadcast news. We are in a world in which most people make important political decisions on the basis of sources that will confirm our sense that we are right because we are good people, and so we are on the side of good, and we are opposing bad people who are, well, really bad.
Because they’re so bad, we shouldn’t listen to them.

This way of thinking about politics—we are in an action movie battle between the obviously good and the obviously bad—is how democracies end.

Of course, neither the Athenians nor the Romans were watching action movies, but they both tanked their democratic republics (neither was purely democratic, nor purely republic) because the rich and varied world of their political options got reduced to a zero-sum game between political factions. People were cheerfully willing to make decisions that hurt the community as a whole just because (they thought) it hurt “the other side” more than it hurt them. They burnt down their own stadium to keep “the other side” from winning.

What should they have done?

They shouldn’t have assumed that their side was so good, and the other side so evil, that winning at any cost was morally or even rationally justified. They shouldn’t have assumed that there were only two sides. That’s a false binary.

When I say this, a lot of people—who are still mired in thinking that there are two sides—assume that, since I’m saying that our political options are not accurately represented as a contest between good and evil, think I’m saying there is no evil, or there is no good, or all positions are equal. That’s another false binary: you either believe that there is a clear binary between good and evil and it’s easy to see and you’re some kind of hippy-dippy moral relativist.

I believe in evil. Slavery was evil. Nazism was evil. But, even in regard to slavery, there wasn’t a binary between two positions. There were people who argued that slavery was evil, but slavery had to be protected because reasons. This is called the “necessary evil” argument.

There were people who argued that slavery was evil, but we couldn’t possibly have freed slaves in our country (the anti-slavery/pro-colonialism argument), we should abolish slavery and immediately grant all slaves the full rights of citizenship, we should end slavery gradually, we should give slaves 40 acres and a mule, and others.

Demagoguery says there are only two choices. Democracy says there aren’t.
There are people making arguments in bad faith; there are bad arguments. But our political world is not a binary in which all the good arguments are on our side and all the bad arguments are on the other.
No one deliberately chooses to succumb to a rhetoric we recognize as demagoguery. We never think we’re suckered by demagoguery. They are.
And that is how a culture of demagoguery thrives.

Demagoguery withers when people recognize our own attraction to it, when we call out in-group demagoguery, when we hold in- and out-group rhetoric to the same argumentative standards.

Demagoguery thrives when we approach every issue from the perspective that the in-group deserves to be treated differently (because we are good, with good motives) from any out-group. It withers when we decide that we will treat others, and their arguments, as we would want to be treated. People who believe that you should treat others as you want to be treated are called to step away from thinking that any harm to others is a win for us. It isn’t.

Policy issues are about policies: Or, the problem of Big Bike

I’ve been writing about how the neighborhood mailing list exemplifies damaging (and proto-demagogic, if not actively demagogic) ways that Americans think about policy deliberation.

This one is about bike lanes. Our neighborhood happens to be a great place for biking, and, so, many people come to the neighborhood to bike. Some of those cyclists are total jerks. Some cyclists run stop signs, get really aggressive in intersections with pedestrians, have lights so bright they could trigger a migraine, and some have no lights at all; a surprising number shout at people at the off-leash dog park for having dogs off leash.

Yet, many cyclists argue that cycling is a public good. And that’s an argument with legs.

There’s a lot of research to show that electric cars aren’t actually all that green, nor are hybrids. They’re probably better than many cars, but, really, the greenest method of transportation is walking, biking, or bussing. Biking as a method of commuting is great for the environment. So, if there is one group that can claim the public good, it would be people who bike to work.

Most of them are not, at that moment, cycling to work, and I have no idea how many of them finish their route around the neighborhood and then get in a car and drive to work. And running or walking to work is just as good for the environment as cycling, so this doesn’t end the debate. And there is a debate.

My neighborhood has been debating a change to the bike lanes, and far too much of the argument has been about whether cyclists are good. That’s transmogrifying the vexed issues of how to encourage cycling rather than driving, reduce cycling/vehicle and cycling/pedestrian accidents, and deal with the pox of scooters into the irrelevant question of whether cyclists or non-cyclists are better people.

The question of whether our neighborhood should have bike lanes isn’t about whether cyclists are better people than non-cyclists, but about whether they have the right not to be killed.

Austin has decided to try to reduce vehicle/pedestrian and vehicle/cyclist fatalities to zero. That should be a shared goal for everyone in Austin. It isn’t a goal, however, for people who realize that making Austin a safer place for cyclists will mildly inconvenience us. The most sensible policy in terms of reducing vehicle/cyclist accidents would be one that would reduce the ability of people in my neighborhood to park on the street, including me and my husband.

The rational decision for the community as a whole will make parking in front of our house more limited. I’m very grumpy that the right decision isn’t the best decision for me personally—I’m not a cyclist, and I can get very grumpy about them. As I said above, a lot of them are total jerks.

But policies issues are never actually about which group is better. Policy issues are about policies.

The City of Austin had hearings about the issue of planning of bike lanes. And various people argued in favor of policies that are demonstrably successful in terms of reducing car/cyclist (and car/pedestrian) fatal accidents.

And my neighborhood mailing list had people flinging themselves around about how there were a lot of people at the hearings who were cyclists. And they didn’t argue that the cyclists’ data was wrong, or that their argument was irrational. In fact, they didn’t engage in rational policy argumentation to refute the cyclists’ cases at all. Instead, they argued that the cyclists had all gone to the meeting and thereby overwhelmed the views of regular people. (I’m not citing or linking because these are neighbors.) They said, in other words, it was Big Bike.

This is the classic—and profoundly anti-democratic—way to describe political disagreements. I’m a scholar of how communities make bad policy decisions, and so I know that, when people are facing a decision in which members of that community have legitimately different positions, the first impulse is to deny that disagreement is legitimate on the basis of the identities of the people making the argument. The people who disagree are part of a special interest conspiracy (Big Bike), stupid, prejudiced, misinformed.

The irony is that: if you think that your political position is obviously right, if you think that you and only people who think like you are right (whether it’s about Trump, the damming and flooding of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, this change to teaching evaluations, bike lanes in my neighborhood, the need for the wall), you subvert democracy.

Democracy is about a world in which people argue together knowing that it isn’t a question about the right answer but about the policy that best seems to answer the needs we all present in the context of the information we now have. Democracy is a world of understanding that our world is more than my world.

Demagoguery is a world in which people whine that the policy doesn’t personally solve their specific issues.

People who whine that two or three times a year they have to be mildly inconvenienced, that the city doesn’t treat graffiti as a sign of our being on the edge of West Side Story levels of gang warfare (although, to be blunt, I would love to participate in any walking down the street with some kind of “Jets” song), that bagged poop in your trash is a crime against God and Nature and specifically prohibited by Leviticus, that the only reason we have argumentatively defensible bike lanes is that Big Bike flooded the hearing—they’re all demagogues. We’re all demagogues.

If you say that Bernie was obviously the right choice, and Hillary was a shill promoted by neo-liberals, if you say that Hillary was obviously the right choice, and Sanders supporters were dupes of Russia, if you say that Trump was obviously the right choice because Hillary’s corruption and unsafe email practices show she shouldn’t be President…. if you say that our vexed and uncertain world of an array of political options is really a world of the right answer (yours) and dumbass/evil/corrupt answers, you’re a demagogue.

You can, and should, be passionate about politics, and even passionate about the policy you’re advocating. But being passionate about your policy should mean that you’re passionate that it is the best policy among many, and that you passionately believe it can meet the standards of policy argumentation. Being passionate about solving a problem should mean that you’re so passionate about solving the problem that you’re willing to admit your plan is wrong. You should be so passionate about solving the problem that you treat in- v. out- group loyalty issues as distractions.

I don’t care whether you’re arguing that Trump is obviously right in everything, libs are obviously wrong in everything, GOPpers are obviously wrong in everything, Dems are obviously wrong not to support this candidate, or any other claim that frames vexed and nuanced and complicated issues as things in which there is an obvious right answer, your boss is a fool for not doing the right thing, your spouse is an idiot for not agreeing with you. You’re engaged in demagoguery. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. But you aren’t oriented toward a reasonable discussion of your policy options.

My neighborhood is not threatened by Big Bike.

A lot of cyclists in my neighborhood really are aggressive jerks. But a lot of them aren’t. And here is the most important point: they aren’t a they. They’re an us: a lot of them are neighbors. The people arguing for bike lanes are not an Other imposing their special interest on us; they are our neighbors, they are people who disagree with us.