Followers Archives - Patricia Roberts-Miller

The one rhetoric to rule them all

When people think about rhetorical effectiveness, we imagine ourselves as the audience, and so we tend to universalize from our experience. If it appeals to us, we call it “effective,” as though our judgment is the only one that matters. And we condemn anyone who uses a strategy that doesn’t appeal to us as engaging in “ineffective” rhetoric.

But we really disagree.

Liberals (people who want progressive change, but gradually, and from within existing political, ideological, and media systems) get really uncomfortable with conflict, violations of civility, negative campaigns, what they perceive as “personal attacks.” They turn away from that; they advocate “positive” rhetorical strategies, that find common ground, humanize the opposition, and avoid calling anyone racism.

Some leftists (call them social democrats) think in terms of policies, and so they think that we need to keep the message on policy issues. In my experience, they tend to be more tolerant of conflict than liberals, as long as it’s conflict about policies. (I put myself in this category.) Some leftists (call them heirs to the Enlightenment) believe that they are advocating the right policies, and so we need to slam the opposition (which is anyone who has an even mildly different from them) and hold out for the right policies, refusing any kind of compromise. They advocate finding a political figure who refuses to compromise and promoting that figure.

I could go on. There are lots of other positions conventionally categorized as “leftist” that I’m not talking about. My point isn’t to create an exhaustive taxonomy of “the left,” but to show that people who have a very similar end in terms of policy agenda have very different standards about “effective” rhetoric.

I also think every one of these positions (and a bunch of the ones I’m not listing) is valid. There are times when finding common ground, kindness, and listening is a wonderful approach. Projects like Hands Across the Hills and Divided We Fall are tremendously valuable. But even they show that this deeper and more charitable understanding of people who disagree with us doesn’t generally lead to changing positions on policy issues.

What’s a little misleading about the three examples above is that I’ve only used positions for which there is a match between the rhetorical and political preferences, and that isn’t always the case. (There are people who are deeply committed to the kind of policy agenda often called “far left” and the civility model of rhetoric, for instance.). Sticking with examples where the rhetoric and politics match just makes the topic easier to discuss.

Speaking of which, as I keep saying, I think the whole tendency to reduce our complicated policy and ideological options to left v. right (whether a binary or continuum) is gerfucked. But, because it is the way we talk about politics in the US, that false binary is hard to avoid (much like trying to talk about racism in the US without talking about white v. black).

The media is committed to the left/right binary because it enables the horse race frame, which people mistake as “neutral.” It’s also simply easier. Reporting that relies on analyses of policy agenda is slower, takes more expertise, and requires a deeper understanding of history and politics than journalism majors provide. The left/right binary makes marketing more straightforward, and it’s more profitable. It’s easier to get a loyal audience for a network or outlet (and advertisers like loyal audiences) by appealing to us v. them (right v. left), and generating outrage about Them. Outrage is good for the bottom line.

Paradoxically, living within an informational enclave enables people who are in fact highly factional in our beliefs and behavior to imagine ourselves to be independent thinkers. A person who watches Fox all the time might take pride in their not always agreeing with what they see; sometimes they side with Wall Street Journal (or they brag that they never watch Fox, and get all their information from The Blaze). Or, we might say that Rachel Maddow is too extreme (or not extreme enough), and we’re independent thinkers because we don’t agree with everything in The Nation.

If we accept the false binary (or continuum) then we’re likely to essentialize the opposition (attributing the same beliefs and motives to everyone who disagrees). And that brings us back to the point of this post (you thought I’d lost it): we shouldn’t assume that all audiences are the same. In addition to the fact that we might have wildly different goals in a disagreement (discussed elsewhere), even if we’re talking about trying to persuade someone to agree on a specific policy, the kind of strategy we most prefer might not be the one most effective with them.

Right now, I’m seeing a lot of critics of Trump who are arguing with each other about the best way to try to persuade his supporters to stop supporting him, or at least hold him accountable. There are people who argue we should let the little stuff (his tendency to drink water with two hands) go, and focus on his corruption of democratic institutions (such as reframing SCOTUS decisions in terms of support for him personally, his demands for loyalty), or on his policies. I don’t think we have to choose one.

Some of his supporters are Followers, and, as I’ve argued elsewhere, rational discourse is not the way to persuade them to change their support. Their support doesn’t have a rational basis. Some of his supporters are strategic—they loathe him personally, and are very worried about his policies, but they believe that Joe Biden wants to turn the US into the USSR (except with more homosexuality), and so they sincerely believe they have no choice. I think that’s a position that’s open to persuasion, but it involves persuading them first that they need to get a broader range of sources of information, and that means trying to do something about inoculation. There are people who argue that there is no difference between Biden and Trump, so there’s no point in voting (a stance that benefits Trump more than it does Biden). A fair number of those people are trolls, but not all. I haven’t found that they’re open to rational argumentation, but maybe I haven’t found the right strategies.

People have different reasons for supporting Trump, and are different in terms of what rhetorical strategies will be effective for them. The search for the one rhetoric to rule them all is fruitless.

How persuasion happens

Some time in the 1980s, my father said that he had always been opposed to the Vietnam War. My brother asked, appropriately enough, “Then who the hell was that man in our house in the 60s?”

That story is a little gem of how persuasion happens, and how people deny it.

I have a friend who was raised in a fundagelical world, who has changed zir mind on the question of religion, and who cites various studies to say that people aren’t persuaded by studies. That’s interesting.

For reasons I can’t explain, far too much research about persuasion involves giving people who are strongly committed to a point of view new information and then concluding that they’re idiots for not changing their minds. They would be idiots for changing their mind because they’re given new information while in a lab. They would be idiots for changing their mind because they get one source that tells them that they’re wrong.

We change our minds, but, at least on big issues, it happens slowly, due to a lot of factors, and we often don’t notice because we forget what we once believed.

Many years ago, I started asking students about times they had changed their minds. Slightly fewer many years ago, I stopped asking because I got the same answers over and over. And what my students told me was much like what books like Leaving the Fold, books by and about people who have left cults, changed their minds about Hell or creationism, and various friends said. They rarely described an instance when they changed their mind on an important issue because they were given one fact or one argument. Often, they dug in under those circumstances—temporarily.

But we do change our minds, and there are lots of ways that happens, and the best of them are about a long, slow process of recognition that a belief is unsustainable.[1] Rob Schenck’s Costly Grace reads much like memoirs of people who left cults, or who changed their minds about evolution or Hell. They heard the counterarguments for years, and dismissed them for years, but, at some point, maintaining faith in creationism, the cult, the leader of the cult, just took too much work.

But why that moment? I think that people change their minds in different ways partially because our commitments come from different passions.

In another post I wrote about how some people are Followers. They want to be part of a group that is winning all the time (or, paradoxically, that is victimized). They will stop being part of that group when it fails to satisfy that need for totalized belonging, or when they can no longer maintain the narrative that their group is pounding on Goliath. At that point, they’ll suddenly forget that they were ever part of the group (or claim that, in their hearts, they always dissented, something Arendt noted about many Germans after Hitler was defeated).

Some people are passionate about their ideology, and are relentless at proving everyone else wrong by showing, deductively, that those people are wrong. They do so by arguing from their own premises and then cherry-picking data to support that ideology. They deflect (generally through various attempts at stasis shift) if you point out that their beliefs are non-falsifiable. These are the people that Philip Tetlock described as hedgehogs. Not only are hedgehogs wrong a lot—they don’t do better than a monkey throwing darts—but they don’t remember being wrong because they misremember their original predictions. The consequence is that they can’t learn from their mistakes.

Some people have created a career or public identity about advocating a particular faction, ideology, product, and are passionate about defending every step into charlatanism they take in the course of defending that cult, faction, ideology. Interestingly enough, it’s often these people who do end up changing their minds, and what they describe is a kind of “straw that breaks the camel’s back” situation. People who leave cults often describe a sudden moment when they say, “I just can’t do this.” And then they see all the things that led up to that moment. A collection of memoirs of people who abandoned creationism has several that specifically mention discovering the large overlap in DNA between humans and primates as the data that pushed them over the edge. But, again, that data was the final push–it wasn’t the only one.

Some people are passionate about politics, and about various political goals (theocracy, democratic socialism, libertarianism, neoliberalism, anarchy, third-way neoliberalism, originalism) and are willing to compromise to achieve the goals of their political ideology. In my experience, people like this are relatively open to new information about means, and so they look as though they’re much more open to persuasion, but even they won’t abandon a long-time commitment because of one argument or one piece of data—they too shift position only after a lot of data.

At this point, I think that supporting Trump is in the first and third category. There is plenty of evidence that he is mentally unstable, thin-skinned, corrupt, unethical, vindictive, racist, authoritarian, dishonest, and even dangerous. There really isn’t a deductive argument to make for him, since he doesn’t have a consistent commitment to (or expression of) any economic, political, or judicial theory, and he certainly doesn’t have a principled commitment to any particular religious view. It’s all about what helps him in the moment, in terms of his ego and wealth. That’s why defenders of his keep getting their defenses entangled, and end up engaging in kettle logic. (I never borrowed your kettle, it had a whole in it when I borrowed it, and it was fine when I returned it.)

The consequence of Trump’s pure narcissism (and mental instability) and lack of principled commitment to any consistent ideology is that Trump regularly contradicts himself, as well as talking points his supporters have been loyally repeating, abandons policies they’ve been passionately advocating on his behalf, and leaves them defending statements that are nearly indefensible. What a lot of Trump critics might not realize is that Trump keeps leaving his loyal supporters looking stupid, fanatical, gullible, or some combination of all three. He isn’t even giving them good talking points, and many of the defenses and deflections are embarrassing.

For a long time, I was hesitant to shame them, since an important part of the pro-GOP rhetoric is that “libruls” look down on regular people like them. I was worried that expressing contempt for the embarrassingly bad (internally contradictory, incoherent, counterfactual, revisionist) talking points would reinforce that talking point. And I think that’s a judgment that people have to make on an individual basis, to the extent that they are talking about Trump with people they know well—should they avoid coming across as contemptuous?

But for strangers, I think that shaming can work because it brings to the forefront that Trump is setting his followers up to be embarrassed. That means he is, if not actually failing, at least not fully succeeding at what a leader is supposed to do for his followers. The whole point in being a loyal follower is that the leader rewards that loyalty. The follower gets honor and success by proxy, by being a member of a group that is crushing it. That success by proxy comes from Trump’s continual success, his stigginit to the libs, and his giving them rhetorical tactics that will make “libs” look dumb. Instead, he’s making them look dumb. So, pointing out that their loyal repetition of pro-Trump talking points is making them look foolish is putting more straw on that camel’s back.

Supporting Trump, I’m saying, is at this point largely a question of loyalty. Pointing out that their loyalty is neither returned nor rewarded is the strategy that I think will eventually work. But it will take a lot of repetition.

[1] Conversions to cults, otoh, involve a sudden embrace of this cult’s narrative, one that erases all ambiguity and uncertainty.

What do Followers want?

Eichmann on trial in Israel

I’ve known a lot of people, both personally and virtually, who were Followers. Sometimes they changed churches multiple times, sometimes philosophies, political ideologies, identities (like the guy I knew in college who flailed around from preppie to Che-Marxist to tennis fanatic—each with an entirely new wardrobe), with each new identity/community the one to which they were fully committed.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with changing wardrobes, identities, churches, even religions. People should change. What made (and makes) these people different is how they talk(ed) about each new conversion—this group was perfect, this group made them feel complete, this group/ideology answered all their questions, gave meaning to their lives, was something to which they could commit with perfect certainty.

That they went through this process multiple times, and kept failing to find a community/ideology that continued to satisfy them never made them doubt the quest, nor doubt that this time they found it. And I thought that was interesting. Each of these people was just someone in my circle of acquaintance for a few years, and I eventually lost track of them—in three cases because they’d joined cults.

There were (are) a lot of interesting things about these people, not just that their continued disenchantment never made them reconsider their goals, but also that they didn’t see themselves as followers at all, let alone Followers. They saw themselves as independent people, critical thinkers, autonomous individuals of good judgment—who were continually searching for, and temporarily finding, a group or ideology that enabled them to surrender all judgment and doubt. That’s a paradox.

In the mid-thirties, Theodore Abel, an American sociologist, offered a prize of 400 German marks for “the best” personal narrative of someone who had joined the Nazis prior to 1933—essentially a conversion narrative. In 1938, he published a book about it. The Nazis sounded like my various acquaintances, not in terms of being Nazis, but as far as simultaneously seeing (and representing) themselves as autonomous individuals of purely independent judgment who were seeking a totalizing group experience—one that demanded pure loyalty and complete submission.

They were Followers.

In the Platonic dialogue Gorgias, Socrates gets into an argument with two people who want to study rhetoric so that they can control the masses and thereby become powerful, perhaps even a tyrant. When Socrates asks why, one of them answers, more or less, “For the power. D’uh.” And Socrates says, “Does the tyrant really have the power?” Socrates points out that the tyrant is, in a way, being controlled by the masses he’s trying to control. He can’t, for instance, advocate what he really thinks is best, but only what he thinks his base will go along with.

It’s a typically paradoxical Socratic argument, but there’s something to it. The tyrant can only succeed as long as he (or she—not an option Socrates and the others considered) gives the Followers what they want. In other words, if we care about tyrants, we should see the source of power as Followers. Instead of asking why tyrants (or demagogues) do, we should ask what Followers want. So, what do Followers want?

Here’s the short version. They want a leader who speaks and acts decisively for them, who is a “universal genius,” and whose continued success at crushing and shaming opponents not only gives them “agency by proxy” in that shaming and crushing, but confirms the followers’ excellent judgment in having chosen to follow, and who is supported by total loyalty.

That’s the short version. Here’s the longer.

They want a leader who is a “universal genius,” not in the sense of a polymath (someone trained or educated in multiple fields), but in the sense of a person who has a capacity for seeing the right answer in any situation, without training, or expertise, or prior knowledge. This genius can lecture actual experts on those experts’ fields, correct their errors, see solutions they’ve overlooked simply because of his extraordinarily brilliant ability to see.

Followers’ model of leaderhips assumes that there is a right answer, and that’s something else that the followers want—the erasure of a particular kind of uncertainty. They don’t mind the uncertainty of a gamble, as long as the leader expresses confidence in his ability to succeed at what is obviously to him the right course of action. They mind the uncertainty of a situation that might not have a single right answer, or in which an answer isn’t obvious to them, or, even more triggering, in which the right answer isn’t obvious to anyone. That anger and anxiety are heightened if they are responsible for making the choice, since now they face the prospect of being shamed if they turn out to be wrong.

Avoiding shame is important to Followers, and they often associate masculinity with decisiveness. Not just the decisiveness of making a decision quickly (they don’t always require quick decisions), but of deciding to take action, to do something, powerful, dramatic, clear. Followers like things to be black and white, and they want a leader whose actions are similarly stark, and who advocates those actions in similarly stark terms. Followers don’t like nuance, hedging, or subtlety, but that doesn’t mean they reject all kinds of complexity.

They don’t mind complexity of a particular kind. Followers can enjoy if the leader explains things in ways that don’t quite make sense, or endorse an incoherently complicated conspiracy theory—the leader’s ability to understand things they can’t confirms their faith that he is a genius. That the leader is confidently saying something that doesn’t quite sense is taken by Followers to mean that, while things might seem complicated to the follower, they are clear to the leader. Thus, the leader has a direct connection to the ways of the universe–universal genius. Not quite making sense confirms that perception of the leader as a person who clearly sees what is unclear to others, but hedging or nuance would suggest that the leader does not perceive things perfectly clearly, and that is unacceptable in the leader.

Followers’ sense of themselves as people with excellent judgment—autonomous thinkers who are completely submitting their judgment to the leader–requires that the leader always be confident, clear, and describe issues in black and white terms.

This part is hard to explain. These Followers I knew kept looking for a system of belief that would mean they were not only never wrong, but never unsure, never in danger of being wrong, of being shamed. And, like many people, they equated clarity with certainty and certainty with being right, and they equated nuance and hedging with uncertainty, and uncertainty with being more likely to be wrong. Thus, a leader who says, “This is absolutely true–even if it isn’t– is more trustworthy than one who hedges because the first leader has more confidence. Being confident is more important than being accurate. (“It’s a higher truth,” Followers tell me.)

It’s interesting that, sometimes, a leader can take a while to make a decision, but, when he does make it, he has to announce his decision in unequivocal terms and enact it immediately, since that signals clarity of purpose and confidence. To put his decision into the world of deliberation and disagreement would be to allow the decision of a genius to be muddled, compromised, and dithered. Followers mistake quick action justified by over-confidence for a masculine and decisive response. They mistake recklessness for decisiveness–because they admire recklessness, since it signals faith, will, and commitment.

Followers need the leader to give them plausible narratives that guarantee success through strength, will, and commitment. So, what happens when the leader fails? At that point, we get scapegoating and projection. Oddly enough, Followers can tolerate complicated conspiracy narratives, even ones they can’t entirely follow, as long as the overall gist of the narrative is simple: we are good people entitled to everything we want, and They are the ones keeping us from getting it. We are blameless.

Followers don’t care if the leader lies. They like it. They don’t feel personally lied to, and they like that the leader can get away with lying—they admire that degree of confidence, and the shamelessness. They want a shameless leader. They want a leader who isn’t accountable; they want one without restraints. They don’t see the leader engaging in quid pro quo, violating the law, or even openly lining his pocket as a problem, let alone corruption. They think that’s what power is for. And, as with the lying, they admire the shamelessness.

They also like if the leader says ridiculously impossible things; they like the hyperbole. They think it signals passionate commitment to their cause because it is unrestrained.

They don’t expect the leader to be loyal to individuals, although the leader demands perfect loyalty from individuals, and Followers demand perfect loyalty from the leader’s subordinates. If leader’s aides betray the leader in any way, such as revealing that the leader is incompetent, Followers are outraged, even if everything the aide says is true.

This part is also hard to explain, so I’ll try to explain. A Follower I knew was on the edges of a cult run by a man who called himself various things, including Da Free John. At one point, Da Free John had followers who came forward and accused him of, among other things, egregious sexual harassment. Those accusations inspired my friend to get more involved with the cult. When I asked about the accusations, he was angry with the people who had made the accusations. His argument was something along the lines of, “They knew what they were getting into, and they betrayed him.” In other words, as far as I could tell, he was willing to grant the sexual harassment, but blamed the victims, not just for being victims, but for being disloyal enough to complain about it.

Albert Speer was condemned for his disloyalty, as though he should not have admitted to any flaws in Hitler (I think condemning him for his being a lying liar who lied is reasonable criticism, but not disloyalty). Victims of abuse by church officials are regularly condemned for their disloyalty, as though that’s the biggest problem.

Followers pride themselves on their ability to be loyal, and they will remain loyal as long as the leader continues to be a beacon of confidence, certainty, decisiveness. That commitment can even withstand some serious failures on the part of the leader, for a few reasons. The most important, mentioned above, is they refuse to listen to any criticism of the leader, even if made by informed people (such as close aides). Followers only pay attention to pro-leader media, and they dismiss as “biased” any media (or figure) critical of their leader. This dismissing of criticism of the leader as “biased” is not only motivism, but ensures that Followers remain in informational enclaves, ones that will spiral into in-group amplification (aka, “rhetorical radicalization“).

If the leader does completely fail, they are likely to blame his aides, rather than him (as happened with a large number of Germans in regard to Hitler). To admit the leader was fallible would be to admit that the Follower had bad judgment, and that’s not acceptable.

So, what I’m saying is that Followers are people who put perfect faith in a leader, a faith that is impervious to disproof, and they refuse to look at any evidence that their loyalty might be displaced. The conventional way to describe that kind of relationship is blind loyalty, but they don’t think they have blind loyalty (they think the out-group does). They think their loyalty is rational and clear-eyed because they believe they have the true perception of the leader, one that comes from an accurate assessment of his traits and accomplishments. They believe the leader is transparent to them.

But, if this isn’t blind loyalty, since they refuse to look at anything outside of their pro-leader media, it’s certainly blindered loyalty. And it generally ends badly.