draft Archives - Patricia Roberts-Miller

Book Proposal for “Deliberating War: Where There is a Will, There is a Ferry”

In 2003, Bill O’Reilly declared a “War on Christmas.” Or, to be more precise, he declared that there already was a war on Christmas being conducted by “liberals” (sometimes “secular progressives”), and therefore “we” had to fight back. Just why “secular progressives” would care very much about Christmas, let alone engage in war about it, might seem puzzling, and so O’Reilly explained the long-term goal of this war:

“Secular progressives realize that America as it is now will never approve of gay marriage, partial birth abortion, euthanasia, legalized drugs, income redistribution through taxation, and many other progressive visions because of religious opposition. But if the secularists can destroy religion in the public arena, the brave new progressive world is a possibility. That’s what happened in Canada.” (Wildau)

To anyone familiar with the principles of argumentation, or even Canada, this description is absurd. And yet O’Reilly was not the first person to insist that there was already a “war on Christmas,” nor that specific and normal policy disagreements should really be understood as part of “liberals’ war” on America (Coulter), business (Lin), Christians (Media Matters “Fox News”), Christmas (Gibson, O’Reilly, qtd. in Wildau), conservatives (Hasson), the family (Stoll), men (“Coming War,” Venker), the police (Grassley, MacDonald), religion (Gregg), Republicans (Knefel), the rich (Perkins), the right (Hanson), statues (Robertson), suburban property values (Limbaugh), Trump (Goodwin), the unborn (Cassidy), white males (Lifson), white people (Cegielski), “you and your family” (O’Reilly, qtd. in Stabile).

This reframing of normal policy disagreements as war is common all over the political spectrum. Both Avik Roy (an editor for Forbes) and Congressional Representative Barbara Boxer agreed that the dispute over Obamacare was a “war on women.” Roy said Obamacare was a war on women, and Boxer said opposition to it was. I regularly receive mailings about the war on the environment, education, science. Nor is the framing of politics as war very new. Criticism of slavery was characterized as treason, as was disagreeing with 17th century Massachusetts authorities about the precise nature of salvation.
Because it is so common to refer to a policy disagreement as a war on the in-group, it is tempting to dismiss the frame as a metaphor, simply a rhetorical strategy to mobilize a base and get attention. That is, to treat the metaphor of politics as war as a meaningless stylistic choice (mere rhetoric). Another way to dismiss the significance of the framing is to normalize it, to say that politics is a kind of war. Advocates of such a strategy often cite the 19th century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz: “War is politics by other means.” The former approach treats the politics as war frame metaphorically and the latter literally, but neither takes the frame seriously. And both thereby normalize treating policy disagreements as skirmishes in a larger war.

There have long been people who argued that metaphors of war for disagreements was something to be taken seriously (Kenneth Burke in War of Words [unpublished until 2018], George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By [1980]). This book is in that tradition, arguing that treating normal policy disagreements as war constrains democratic deliberation to varying degrees depending on the kind of war imagined. It does so for several reasons, and in several ways.

First, even under the best of circumstances, deliberating about war is vexed. A community has (or should have) the opportunity to deliberate about whether we should go to war, how it’s being conducted, when and whether to end it, and, in retrospect, what happened and why. Yet many people sincerely believe that we shouldn’t deliberate about whether to go to war; if we are attacked (or are about to be attacked), we should—in a state of anger and outrage—respond with however much aggression is necessary to crush the antagonist. Many people believe that a community shouldn’t deliberate about war once it’s started, since to question whether to continue the war dishonors those who have already died for it, or who are currently risking their lives for it. For similar reasons (dishonoring those who have sacrificed), we shouldn’t deliberate about a war afterwards—whether it was well-conducted, necessary, could have been ended earlier. Thus, for many people, we shouldn’t deliberate about a war before, during, or after—that is, at all. In such a situation, those who call for deliberation are easily characterized as cowards, ditherers, unmanly overthinkers, traitors, dupes of the enemy. Characterizing a disagreement as war makes deliberation harder.

Second, this deep aversion to deliberating about war can be strategically manipulated by rhetors who want to evade deliberation for other reasons. This book doesn’t advocate a very complicated model of “deliberation,” instead settling for “good enough” deliberation—more or less reduced to treating others’ (and Other’s) arguments as we’d like ours treated, and holding in- and out-group arguments to the same standards. Although a fairly low bar, it’s one a large number of rhetors can’t or don’t want to meet, so, instead of deliberating, they evade, truncate, or vilify deliberation. They argue that the truth is obvious, only bad people disagree with them, and deliberation aids the enemy. The more that an community believes that the situation is war, the less likely we are to insist on deliberation—the more likely we are to exempt in-group rhetors, political actors, and institutions from moral, legal, and rhetorical norms.

Third, there are kinds of wars, and not all kinds have the same consequences for the extent to which we allow in-group actors to violate moral, legal, and rhetorical norms. Wars can vary both in terms of means and ends. There are and have long been legal and/or moral norms concerning the means that antagonists use. Even before the United Nations, there were expectations regarding such issues as treatment of civilians, civilian territories, neutrals, neutral territory, POW, exchange of prisoners, and so on.

Wars have different ends, ranging from limited territorial to political/physical extermination of the Other. Wars with limited territorial goals (such as the 1859 Pig War) assume the continued coexistence of all parties (except the pig). At the other extreme are wars oriented toward the complete destruction of a political, cultural, religious, or ethnic entity (the Third Punic War, Hitler’s goals in WWII). While limited political goals doesn’t necessarily mean limited destruction, or limited violation of norms (e.g, the Iraq invasion had limited goals—regime change—but high levels of destruction and norm violation), wars of extermination necessarily require almost complete violation of norms. Communities faced with an antagonist determined on our destruction generally give complete moral, legal, military, and rhetorical license to in-group actors. Thus, paradoxically, a political or military leader who wants to violate norms can get license to do so by claiming that the community is already faced with an antagonist determined on in-group extermination. They can get permission to conduct a war of extermination by claiming it already is one.
So, if politics is war, what kind of war?

If it’s a war of extermination in which actors are granted full license to violate any and all legal, moral, and rhetorical norms, then it’s a war on democracy.

[DRAFT] Part of the introduction for Deliberating War

There are five ways of imagining policy conflicts that make it likely we will see ourselves as having no option but some degree of aggression—that is, to see a policy disagreement as discursively insoluble. The first is believing that one is a voice crying in the wilderness, a prophet sent by God speaking an unpopular and yet immediately recognized Truth. Claiming that no one is listening, that one is all alone, is a lively glimpse of being fourteen, and, as in the case of Muir, it isn’t necessarily entangled with victimization or persecution. By claiming that God is on one’s side, one does seem to be implying that opponents are un-Godly, a characterization that fosters motivism (discussed later). It also seems to imply that negotiation, bargaining, and even inclusive deliberation are problematic—prophets aren’t known for sitting down at a table with opponents and working out a yes-yes solution. But (again, as in the case of Muir), it’s often nothing more than rhetorical flourish, venting, or a bit of hyperbole. It doesn’t inevitably or necessarily prohibit using deliberation to find a political solution far short of violence against the Other.

The second is shifting from policy disagreements to questions of identity. If, for instance, there is a minister with a different interpretation of the faith/grace/works conundrum from us, we may feel threatened by his rhetorical success. If we confuse our feeling threatened with his being a threat, then we’ve made him the problem—not his rhetorical effectiveness, nor our ineffectiveness, nor the conundrum, but his presence in our community. A policy issue has become a conflict of identities.

The third is to frame that conflict of identities in terms of essential, almost ontological, strife between good and evil—those who disagree with us do so, not out of principle, but out of their identity as bad people, and their loathing for good. John Winthrop, for instance, categorized all the conflicts as parts of Satan’s plot to destroy the Puritan project. Cotton Mather, when more or less forced to admit that the witch trials had been badly managed, still deflected responsibility, maintaining that the events were Satan’s fault.

Once such a plot is posited, then it cannot be falsified. Disconfirming evidence (for instance, that the witchcraft convictions depended on violating evidentiary norms, that there is a long history of disagreement about Scripture) is deflected and dismissed. Hutchinson’s death at the hands of Siwonoy is proof that she was wrong; he doesn’t draw that conclusion about others killed in wars on indigenous peoples. It’s only evidence when it confirms the already existing beliefs.

Because we are threatened with extermination by an Other plotting against us, we have moral license. “Moral license” is the fifth way of imagining policy conflict, and it follows from the others. We don’t condemn victims who violate ethical norms in order to save themselves or their group; moral license means that individuals or groups are free to violate those norms while still claiming the moral highground. One of the crucial tenets of reasonable deliberation is that discourse rules (e.g., is it okay to lie?) are reciprocal—all parties are held to them. But, if it is a question of extermination, we’re likely to allow the victim to lie, but condemn lying in the aggressor. If we believe ourselves to be already or imminently victimized, we are likely to believe ourselves and our in-group rhetors and leads to be justified in lying—to be unbound by any discourse rules, especially reciprocity. Thus, if we are rhetorically successful in persuading ourselves or others that we face an existential threat, we are less bound to find non-violent ways of resolving the conflict, and will be seen as more justified in violating norms. Sometimes that violating of moral and rhetorical norms is hypothetical, as when slavers justified mass killings of African Americans on the grounds that the slaves would do it if they could (what’s called “the wolf by the ears” argument).

What I hope this list suggests is what will be pursued in this book: there is a complicated relationship between rhetoric and war. The more that we believe that our disagreements can be solved discursively—that is, the more faith we have in the power of pluralistic approaches to persuasion and deliberation–, the less likely we are to believe that our only choice is war. The more that we are persuaded that there is an evil Other already at war with us, and determined on our extermination, the less likely we are to value or demand inclusive, pluralist, and reasonable rhetorical approaches to our disagreements. The more we are persuaded that this war is total war, signified and engaged in major and minor ways, the less likely we are to believe that there are neutral actions or actors, and the more likely we are to find ourselves treating normal policy disagreements as themselves a kind of war. When politics becomes a kind of war, I will argue, we have to think carefully about what kind it is.

This isn’t a book about military strategy, or military history; it’s about rhetoric. We’re primed to reason badly when it comes to questions about war because the prospect of being the victim of violence activates so many cognitive biases, especially binary thinking. Under those circumstances, deliberation can easily be framed as opting for cowardly flight instead of courageous fight, as unnecessary at best and treasonous at worst. It’s precisely because disagreements about war are so triggering, so to speak, that we need to be deliberately deliberative. To say that we should deliberate reasonably before going to war is banal in the abstract, but oddly fraught in the moment, and this book uses several cases to explore why it is that we often evade deliberation even (or especially?) when the stakes are so high.

But, if war and deliberation are incompatible, then war and democracy are incompatible, because democracy thrives on deliberation. This isn’t to say that every decision about a conflict should be thoroughly deliberated—that would be impossible and unwise—but that deliberation doesn’t weaken the will for war if there is a strong case to be made for that war. If advocates of war can’t make their case through reasonable policy argumentation, then they probably have a bad case, and it’s likely an unnecessary war. War triggers cognitive biases, and so deliberation is necessary to counter the effects of those biases—contrary to popular belief, we can’t simply will ourselves not to rely on biases; deliberating with people who disagree can, however, do some work in reducing the power of the biases. But, not all rhetors want us to reduce the power of cognitive biases. Because we are averse to deliberating about or during war, rhetors engaged in normal political disagreements who are unable or unwilling to advocate a policy rationally are tempted to claim that this isn’t normal politics; it’s war. If they can persuade their base that this situation is war, then they won’t be expected to deliberate. The cognitive biases triggered by war will motivate the audience to believe beyond and without reason, and some political leaders and media pundits want exactly that. We shouldn’t.