Tag: fox news

For complicated reasons, my book was given to a very conservative FOAF, who dismissed it on the grounds that I picked a conservative as my exemplar of a demagogue. The funny thing is: I didn’t. I picked a progressive. The sad thing is: he has been well-inoculated by his media.

This is someone I admire, because I know that he is a loving, supportive, compassionate, and smart father and husband. This is a good person, a kind person, and also very, very smart. And dead wrong. That person was engaged in projection. I didn’t pick a conservative; I picked a hero.

Earl Warren was Republican, yes. And I have rarely, but not never, voted Republican (and I haven’t always voted Dem or GOP). But Warren was a progressive Republican, who did a tremendous amount to clean up politics in California at a time when the California Democrat Party was often pretty awful. Had I been a California voter at the time, I would have voted for progressive Republicans.

Warren’s behavior on the Supreme Court was a bright spot in our nasty history about SCOTUS rulings; he overturned Plessy v. Ferguson; he got a unanimous decision. He changed American history for the better.

My point was that even really good people can find themselves in demagoguery. And so I picked an in-group rhetor—one of my heroes–as an example of demagoguery.

But this smart and good person (let’s call him John) dismissed my entire argument because he thought he had caught me out on secretly picking an out-group example. And I hadn’t. Compressed in that unhappy conclusion is what is wrong with our current political situation. John thinks that engaging in political discourse is not listening to the evidence of people who might disagree with you, but refusing to listen to anyone who might disagree, which he thinks is their being “biased.”

He rejected my argument about demagoguery on the grounds that it must be wrong because he believes I am a liberal, and therefore biased, and therefore my argument about demagoguery is biased. And I mean the term “rejected”—my sense is that he wasn’t even willing to consider it. I don’t care that he disagreed with me; I care that he believes he should not listen to anyone who disagrees with him. But I don’t really disagree with him. He just assumed I did because I’m not in-group. In other words, and this is important, he was biased not to listen to me. And so he didn’t.

My argument is that we all engage in demagoguery, and we are all drawn to engaging in demagoguery instead of engaging in the harder work of arguing about policy. That isn’t an argument he needed to dismiss. He never tried to understand my argument—he assumed that my argument was somehow an argument for my in-group. That was projection on his part.

My argument is that politics should be arguments about policy instead of some bizarre world in which there are only two options, and those two options are identities. Why would he dismiss that argument?

There are two possibilities: either he believes that his group has policies so weak that they can’t be defended through the reasonable standards of policy argumentation; or, he believes that “bias” makes a person’s entire argument dismissible.

He believes that, once you have determined someone to be “biased,” you don’t need to consider their argument. And, while that is what his media tells him, and what he might have learned in college classes on argumentation, that is a really flawed model of bias.

Again, this is a smart and good man, and, had he not been primed to reject any “out-group” information as “biased” and to assume that everyone only praises in-group and only condemns out-group, he might have read my argument differently. That assumption, that you would never criticize an in-group member, was projection.

But he was primed (or inoculated, to use the technical term) to reject any “out-group” arguments, as soon as he could find a way to see me as out-group. And that inoculation happened in two ways: first, he was repeatedly told that his policy agenda was the true body politic (his perception of the situation was objective); second, he was persuaded that the health of the body politic relied on one group being in control, and that anyone who disagreed with his political agenda was a kind of virus, so he shouldn’t even let their (my) ideas into his head.

He was persuaded that we are not in a democracy (in which, as the Federalist Papers, and various other documents argue, we benefit from disagreement) but a situation in which there is only one right policy agenda, and anyone who disagrees with that agenda should be crushed in any way necessary.

That’s really awful. It’s untrue, but I have to say that, crawling around the world of public argumentation, it’s the one thing on which far too many people agree (all over the rich world of non-binary political ideologies): we are in a moment of existential crisis, in which our group—the only good and true group—is threatened with extermination, and therefore anything we do to crush Them is justified; if we cannot win, we should at least make them lose.

We do not have a political world in which our options as a country are in zero-sum between two groups. We have never been there. We never will be there. For instance, many Libertarians, progressive Christians, conservative Christians, fiscal conservatives, and Progressives can agree that rehabilitation is a better choice than prison for first- and second-time drug offenders. If we stop thinking about politics as a binary, then we might also see that there are places of agreement as far as needing better health care.

Had Romney won, would Romneycare (aka Obamacare) have been the law of the land? Would John have supported Romneycare for the country had President Romney advocated it?

I think he would have.

Would many Dems have supported Romneycare had President Romney supported it? Probably not.

And that is what is wrong with our current political discourse.

Would I have voted for Romney? No. I didn’t. Would I have voted for Romneycare for the US. Hell, yes.

Can John say the same?

Does he put policy above party?

Here is the problem with that question: we are in a culture of demagoguery, in which every decision is crunched into a binary and then we can have a zero-sum WWE fight about the two options. We are in a world in which decisions are made badly.

My argument is that, when it comes to politics, John and all the very many other Johns all over the maps of political positions think politics is a zero-sum WWE fight between Dems and [whatever the GOP is currently putting forward as Republican policy]. In other words, I’m saying that John [and all the other Johns, who think that policy follows from identity, and our world is a binary between good and bad people] believe that politics is a question of identity. People in his in-group have good policies, and so should be supported, and people who aren’t in that group should be rejected without considering their arguments.

As it happens, reasoning that way—reduce the choices to two, make the decision on the basis of affective identification—is the basis of a lot of scams. It’s never the basis of good decision-making. But it’s always the basis of profitable media coverage.

So, what if John decided to reason, not by party, but by policy? What if John decided to argue about policies, and not identity? What if John decided that he would ignore party, and instead hold all people and parties to the same standard? What if John decided that he really valued this guy who said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”?

He would stop getting his information from rabidly partisan sources.

He would work to get information from various points of view. He would try to understand why people disagree with his policies. He would treat political issues the same way he would treat other questions.

Imagine, for instance, that there is an argument about how to manage sewage for a large-ish house in an area with clay soil. Would John only listen to experts of his in-group? If so, I have some shares in the Brooklyn Bridge I’d like to sell.

No, he wouldn’t. And he hasn’t.

We are in a world in which media tell us that all issues are questions of good v. bad people. I disagree with John about many things, and I know he is a good person.

I could have done this same post with people on other places on the political spectrum (not binary, or continuum), but I really admire John. He is good people. And I think his policy concerns are legitimate (which isn’t to say I agree with them—I don’t, but I might be wrong, and he might be right). It isn’t that I think his arguments are wrong; I think his way of thinking about politics is wrong—as a zero-sum battle between two identities.

That way is unhappily common all over the digital world, as I unfortunately know.

I won’t say that “both sides” do that, because that’s still accepting the media-convenient but always-demagogic premise of there being two sides.

People have beliefs; people have values. Countries have policies. Let’s argue about them. That someone disagrees with you—which, in our demagogized culture, is reason not to listen to them—is a reason to listen, not reject.

John only criticizes out-group and only praises in-group, and he projected that on to me.

I think we all need to criticize in-group. Warren was a good man. So is John. I think Warren was wrong to support race-based mass imprisonment, and I think John is wrong to support Trump. But I think they are both good people.