As I’ve said so often that I’m certain the four people who read my blog regularly are really tired of reading, there aren’t two sides on any issue. The moment we frame an issue as a question of two choices, we have started clearing our political throat for demagoguery.
The reason I’m committed to what might be a crank theory about how to represent political commitments is that, if we realize those commitments are very specific when it comes to policy, then we have a world in which coalitions are possible. For instance, people all over the political spectrum support reform of the criminal justice system, especially bail reform. Some, but not all, conservatives support it. If we think of the issue of bail reform as a partisan issue, then, instead of being able to argue the policy merits of the policy of bail reform, voting about bail reform becomes performance of in-group loyalty.
One of many reasons I like the metaphor of political affiliation being a color spectrum (rather than, for instance, a continuum or matrix) is that it raises the possibility of talking about intensity. One of many fallacies of the left/right continuum model is that it suggests that centrists aren’t irrationally passionate—only the people at the extremes are. I’ve known some people who are extremist about the need for everyone to have “centrist” policies, and people who are mildly committed to policies labelled “far left” or “far right.” And the “extremes” get muddled—where on that continuum do we put people who are extremely committed to libertarianism, pacifism, whatever the GOP or Dems are promoting now, a strong safety net and humanitarian intervention, a strong social safety net and homophobic legislation, a strong social safety net but only for white people?
I think, from the perspective of rhetoric and persuasion, that the degree of commitment is among the most important variables. It’s far more important than where a person fits on some false continuum.
And I say this because of years of arguing with people all over the political spectrum, and also the non-political spectrum, and finding people who, whether it’s about raw dog food, immigration, if something can’t be called hummus if it has sugar, Santana’s guitar playing, Trump, whether Tolkien is racist, single-payer healthcare, and, basically, every issue:
1) insist that their advocated course of action is so right that anyone who disagrees with them is corrupt, stupid, or evil;
2) and they therefore frame the issue as a binary between their specific policy agenda (right) and anyone else (wrong);
3) since everyone who disagrees with them is wrong for disagreeing, they refuse to look at any sources, sites, or data that say they might be wrong, and they only rely on in-group representations of that evil group
4) and they have a monocausal narrative about the problem they are solving.
In my experience, there is no position on any issue–“political” or not–that doesn’t have someone who argues this way. So, this isn’t about political affiliation (left or right)–it’s about how people think about beliefs. I think that people who fit the criteria above are extremists, whether the argument is about the virtues of Ezra Pound’s poetry or the Kyoto Protocols.
Using terms like “evil” doesn’t necessarily mean that one is making an extreme argument. Condemning slavery as an evil and condemning anyone who advocates slavery as evil isn’t necessarily an extremist position. Condemning Nazism as evil isn’t an extremist position.
But saying that the only way to end slavery or Nazism is [X], and that anyone who doesn’t support [X] is just as bad as slavers or Nazis, that’s extremism.
And here’s the point I really wanted to get to: in my experience, people drawn to extremism propose monocausal narratives. I don’t know why, and I have no studies to support my claim. This is just my experience.
It doesn’t matter if they’re talking about dog training methods, immigration, hummus, riots, World War I, the Paleo diet, or whatever. Extremists say that immigration causes all problems, only the presence of tahini causes something to be hummus, since the British failure to signal clearly that they would go to war made the Germans feel confident in their war plans then the British caused the war, and so on.
But nothing is monocausal.
Kristallnacht was signalled and spontaneous at the same time. Goebbels announced that “the Führer has decided that … demonstrations should not be prepared or organized by the Party, but insofar as they erupt spontaneously, they are not to be hampered.” Thus, Hitler didn’t specifically call for that action at that moment, but his years of rhetoric of Jews as an existential threat made people feel that he wanted the violence to happen, that he approved of it. And he did. People were, in Ian Kershaw’s words, “working toward the Fuhrer” by making it happen. And, of course, there were people involved in it who were formally Nazis. So, is Hitler responsible for Kristallnacht? Yes. No historian doubts it. No Hitler, no Kristallnacht. But, can historians find a direct order from him? No.
Imagine that Y happened (a driver hit a cyclist), and we all agree it was a bad thing. What caused it to happen? Imagine that the driver was speeding, texting, and drifted into the bike lane, and the cyclist was listening to a podcast and so didn’t notice the car coming into the bike lane. Extremists, in my experience, find ways to make the in-group not responsible because there were other contributing factors. So, anti-cyclists extremists (and there a lot of them) will say that, since the cyclist could have prevented the accident by seeing that the driver was in the bike lane, the driver wasn’t at fault. The driver wasn’t the only cause of the accident, and therefore not the cause at all.
That’s the argument extremist Trump supporters are making about the attempted insurrection.
Trump extremists are trying to claim that since his January 6 speech wasn’t the only cause of the riots, he didn’t incite them. But, as even the Wall Street Journal says, the problem is his and his supporters’ “war rhetoric.” And that is the most important cause of the attempted insurrection—you can’t keep using war rhetoric, that liberals are out to destroy us and everything we value that there has never been a worse situation, and then not expect them to get violent. Either Trump has been deliberately inciting violence or he’s an irresponsible idiot.
Hitler set the stage for Kristallnacht, and he left himself plausible deniability if public reaction was bad. When it didn’t get the reaction he wanted, the official Nazi line was that it had been spontaneous. So, someone saying that there is no monocausal narrative of Trump having incited the January 6th failed insurrection is someone who would hold Hitler faultless for Kristallnacht.
They are reasoning badly.
Trump has been supporting the notion of violent insurrection for along time. If what happened wasn’t what he wanted to happen, he would have instantly condemned it and stopped it, and he didn’t. Because it was the desired end of his rhetoric.[1]
Trump could have stopped the attempted insurrection that he inspired and incited through his speeches (and he even named the date that he wanted it to happen), but he didn’t, and he didn’t do what a responsible person would have done to make it stop, such as answering Pence’s calls and sending in the National Guard. He didn’t.
Either he’s irresponsibly incompetent, or he didn’t have a problem with what was happening.
By his defenders’ argument, Trump engaged in rhetoric that—as experts on rhetoric said it would–persuaded people that he wanted a violent incursion and insurrection on January 6, and he didn’t stop it once it started, and only denounced it when he was facing impeachment. Thus, by his defenders’ case, Trump either wanted that insurrection, or he’s so irresponsible and incompetent that he unintentionally caused an insurrection he didn’t know how to stop.
Either option is impeachable.
But, more important, Trump really wasn’t the only cause of the attempted insurrection. He’s responsible, and he should be held responsible, and he isn’t the only one that should be held responsible.
People who tried to storm the capital in order to stop the Constitution from being enacted as it is supposed to weren’t people who, until 2016, had accurate and informed understandings of politics, who appreciated democracy as a pluralistic governmental system, and who saw difference of opinion as legitimate. They were authoritarian populists, and that’s why they supported Trump. Trump didn’t cause authoritarian populism—he just rode the wave that others’ rhetoric had created.
For years, talk radio and Fox have been promoting authoritarian populist demagoguery. It’s demagoguery in that they reduce every issue to us v. them, with “us” very narrowly defined, and “them” being everyone else who are lumped into the most extreme “them.” So, if you didn’t (don’t) support the political figure or agenda that they supported at that moment, you were (are) a communist or socialist. Limbaugh, Fox, etc., advocate populism in that what they say perfectly fits what Jan-Werner Muller defines as what populists do:
[T]hey tend to say that they — and only they — represent what they often call the real people or also, typically, the silent majority. Populists will deny the legitimacy of all other contenders for power. This is never merely about policy disagreements or even disagreements about values which, of course, are normal and ideally productive in a democracy. Populists always immediately make it personal and moral. They also suggest that citizens who do not share their understanding of the supposedly real people do not really belong to the people at all. So populists always morally exclude others at two levels: party politics, but also among the people themselves, where those who do not take their side politically are automatically deemed un-American, un-Polish, un-Turkish, etc.
Work like Muller’s shows why the left/right binary (or continuum) is proto-demagogic at least and irrelevant at best. If we’re going to try to shove figures into the left/right binary (which makes as much sense as shoving all religions into Catholic or Protestant), then there are “left-wing” populists like Chavez and “right-wing” populists like Trump, who have the same rhetoric. Whether they’re claiming to be conservative or socialist doesn’t matter—they’re neither. What matters is that they’re populist in a very damaging way.
They’re authoritarian in that they’re saying that the real people are so threatened with extinction by a system run by elites (Them—the elite is entirely composed of out-group members, which is kind of hilarious if you think about it) that we cannot hold ourselves to normal standards. This is war.
Authoritarian populist demagoguery is profitable for a media outlet. It’s stimulating, like a Two-Minutes Hate, but more like the 24/7 Hate. It is guaranteed to generate an audience who will refuse to look at other information (which advertisers love); since it is all about generating in-group loyalty, then advertisers also benefit simply from having ads in that outlet—they look like they’re supporting the in-group.
Authoritarian populist demagoguery is a powerful fuel for setting an audience on fire.
And it’s never a controlled burn.