Tag: machiavellianism

[RSA talk] “Obscured Ends and Amoral Means: The Flickering Moralism of Machiavellian Approaches to Rhetoric”

chart showing four RVN governments between November of 1963 and September of 1964

This paper came out of my being puzzled by a paradox I kept running across in the various deliberative train wrecks I study—the intermittent moralism of Machiavellian approaches to public policy disagreements. “Machiavellianism,” only orthogonally related to what Machiavelli actually said, claims to treat means as morally neutral, often in service of some version of power politics or neo-Social Darwinism. But this amoralizing of means is both rhetorical and flickering—American intervention in Vietnam, for instance, was advocated on the grounds of moral necessity and amoral power politics, sometimes in the same document.

What I’ll pursue in this paper are some of the somewhat paradoxical rhetorical consequences of this disingenuous framing of means as amoral.

I’ll focus on US decision-making regarding Vietnam in August of 1964. August of 1964 is one of several moments of escalation, with attention generally on LBJ’s decision to lie in order to get the Tonkin Gulf Resolution passed on August 7. But I’m more interested in the chaotic debacle that was General Nguyễn Khánh’s not-quite month as Chief of State. I’ll start by discussing the objectives (ends) at the time, the necessary conditions for success, the actual conditions (as described by US decision-makers), the means they chose, and finish with how Machiavellianism played into it.

Ends In an August 10 “situation report,” Maxwell Taylor, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and recently appointed US Ambassador to the Republic of Vietnam said that the “Communist strategy” was not
“To attempt to defeat the superior Republic of Vietnam military forces in the field or to seize and conquer territory by military means. Instead, it is their announced intention to harass, erode and terrorize the population into a state of such demoralization that a political settlement favorable to the Communists will ensue.” (#306, 657).
Robert McNamara would later identify policies in 1964 as oriented toward “the objective of destroying Hanoi’s will to fight and its ability to continue to supply the Vietcong” (In Retrospect 152). In an important –strategy setting—document in August of 1964, McGeorge Bundy said we must “make it clear both to the Communists and to South Vietnam that military pressure will continue until we have achieved our objectives [….] leaving no doubts in South Vietnam of our resolve” (#313, 675). By persuading “the Communists” that the US would not give up Vietnam, it was hoped that “the Communists” could be persuaded that a divided Vietnam—much like Korea—was the best deal they could get, and therefore take it.

Necessary Conditions To achieve those ends—a Hanoi willing to agree to a divided Vietnam—certain conditions had to exist. RVN had to be an effective and largely victorious force, capable of exterminating the insurgency without alienating the populace. The “pacification” program was crucial for achieving several of the conditions—denying communist support for the Viet Cong, maintaining the morale of the populace, achieving military victories—and it depended on “clearing” certain areas of Viet Cong agents and supporters. South Vietnam had to have a competent, trusted, and stable government. The South Vietnamese people needed to support that government, and support the war (which could only happen were the first condition met). The US had to signal willingness to throw limitless resources at the conflict. These various conditions tended to be characterized as issues of “morale” (or its opposite—“defeatism”) in official documents, documents that admitted none of those conditions were present.

Actual Conditions In that August 10 “situation report,” Taylor acknowledged that the South Vietnamese military was weak, while trying to put a positive spin on it: “In the view of US advisors, more than 90 percent of the battalions of the army are at least marginally effective.” (#306; 661). The pacification program was “proving to be a most difficult one primarily because of the inefficiency of the ministries, their ineptitude in planning and their general lack of spirit of team play” (Taylor 659). In a memo ten days later, Taylor said, “that the present in-country pacification plan is not enough in itself to maintain national morale or to offer reasonable hope of eventual success.” But the worst was the government. The US had endorsed the November 1963 coup on the grounds that Diem was corrupt, incompetent, and tremendously unpopular. He had collaborated with the Japanese (unlike Ho Chi Minh, who fought them), was brutally persecuting Buddhists, and may have been considering a peace treaty with Ho. The hope was that replacing Diem would increase Vietnamese commitment to the war by putting in place a more popular, competent, and bellicose government. It didn’t work (as can be seen in the chart at the top.

Taylor said
The most important and most intractable internal problem of South Vietnam in meeting the Viet Cong threat is the political structure at the national level. The best thing that can be said about the present Khanh government is that it has lasted six months and has about a 50-50 chance of lasting out the year [….] It is an ineffective government beset by inexperienced ministers who are also jealous and suspicious of each other [….] However, there is no one in sight who could do better than Khanh in the face of the many difficulties which would face any head of government [….] The attitude of the people toward the Khanh government, mostly confused and apathetic since its inception, is only slightly more favorable than a few months ago. Despite considerable efforts, Khanh has not succeeded in building any substantial body of popular support. (657-658).

August 13, 1964, McGeorge Bundy presented a plan called “Next Steps in Southeast Asia, “a highly important document” (Logevall 217). McNamara would later say that “the memo and its derivatives became the focus of our attention and acrimonious debate for the next five months” (In Retrospect 151). The first sentence of the section, “Essential Elements in the Situation” is “South Vietnam is not going well” (#313, 674).

Taylor responded to Bundy’s “Next Courses of Action” (which he endorsed that one assumption behind Bundy’s proposal (which he believed to be correct) is:
The first and most important objective is to gain time for the Khanh Government to develop a certain stability and to give some firm evidence of viability [….] A second objective in this period is the maintenance of morale in South Viet Nam, particularly within the Khanh Government [….] he must stabilize his government and make some progress in cleaning up his own operational backyard. (690)

The Course of Action that Bundy’s memo advocates, and Taylor endorses, “relies heavily upon the durability of the Khanh Government. It assumes that there is little danger of its collapse without notice or of its replacement by a weaker or more unreliable successor” (692). Ten days later, worried about a coup, Khanh himself would resign and skedaddle to Dalat. He had to be coerced to come back and form a triumvirate. There were no illusions about the instability and unpopularity of the government, and yet the US was pursuing a plan that, as was repeatedly insisted, depended upon a stable and popular government, which US officials knew they didn’t have. They did, however, have one that wouldn’t negotiate with Hanoi.

The Means
One of the “means” necessary for success was preventing peace talks: “We must continue to oppose any Vietnam conference” (#313). After listing the various means the US should take, Bundy says,
These actions are not in themselves a truly coherent program of strong enough pressure either to bring Hanoi around or to sustain a pressure posture into some kind of discussion. Hence, we should continue absolutely opposed to any conference. (#313; 678).

That this was the means was not publicly admitted. But the conservative and “realist” political scientist Hans Morgenthau had figured that out, snarkily noting in an article in New Leader in June of 1964:
Our main immediate problem is apparently not to win the war against the Viet Cong but to prevent the ascendancy of an anti-war government in Saigon. What we are saying and doing must, then, have as its main purpose to prevent the collapse of the morale of General Nguyen Khanh’s government and of its military forces (44).
Thus, American Vietnam policy in 1964 was to prevent negotiations with Hanoi until the morale, bellicosity, and military effectiveness of the South Vietnamese was such that Hanoi (and China) would believe that a divided nation was the best they could possibly get: “We need to apply “a combination of military pressure and some form of communication under which Hanoi (and Peiping) eventually accept the idea of getting out” (#313). The “Next Course” also advocated dropping leaflets, increased training of RVN forces, mining of the Haiphong harbor, “tit-for-tat” actions, only acknowledging successful military actions. Taylor said, “The US Mission has recognized in its information and psychological programs the need to present the Khanh government in its most favorable light at home and abroad, particularly in the United States” (# 306 660).

What I hope is striking to you is that the means were profoundly rhetorical; they were about persuasion—persuading the North Vietnamese they couldn’t win, and the South Vietnamese that they could. South Vietnamese needed to be persuaded to support the war, and both the South Vietnamese and Americans needed to be persuaded to have faith in the Khanh government—its stability, competence, and resolve. But even the American officials themselves weren’t persuaded of any of those things. So, the Machiavellianism came to be the approach to public deliberations—critics of American policy in Vietnam had to be smeared, discredited, and deflected. Preventing reasonable discussion of Vietnam policy itself became a means necessary for the ends.

Machiavellianism
I mentioned earlier that McNamara said the US objective was destroying Hanoi’s will to fight and ability to support the Vietcong. He said, “Neither then nor later did the chiefs fully assess the probability of achieving these objectives, how long it might take, or what it would cost in lives lost, resources expended, and risks incurred” (152).

The amoralizing of means didn’t mean they were actually neutral—there is nothing morally neutral about napalm—it just meant that people could deflect or even demonize public discourse that criticized the ends or means. The ends (and therefore the morality of the means) are themselves outside the realm of argument—they’re simultaneously obscured and circular (since the postulated morality of the ends or intentions justifies being dishonest about what the ends or intentions actually are). We can’t argue reasonably about the ends—because they’re postulated as moral—and we can’t argue at all about the morality of the means. Thus, amoralizing policies (the means) necessarily results in the demoralizing and depoliticizing of public discourse. The point I’m makingis that US officials (like many others) were Machiavellian not just in terms of their use of napalm, but their approach to public discourse. And my crank theory is that one necessarily leads to the other.

What is happening with the GOP and the Speaker election isn’t just karma—it’s causality. And it’s bad for everyone.

Bill O'Reilly claiming there is a war on Christmas
from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToLdVCb1ezI



The GOP has been setting fire to democratic norms since the 80s. That isn’t a hyperbolic insult I’m throwing at them. It’s what Gingrich said he wanted to do. He said, quite openly (and still says), that he wanted to make government dysfunctional so that people would vote for the anti-government party, which would be the GOP. The GOP persuaded its base that they should abandon democratic norms and treat politics as war.

Let’s stop there for a second.

In the 80s, there was an internal GOP conflict among three kinds of elites. There were (and still are a few) Eisenhower-style conservatives who wanted a prosperous and stable nation, containment as a foreign policy, a moderate social safety net, and a reasonably protected working class (essentially the 1956 GOP platform), an end to de jure segregation. Then there was the group that had long dragged the Democratic party into the muck: a kind of toxic white evangelical populism that was rabidly racist, in favor of a social safety net only as long as didn’t threaten segregation, and committed to theocracy (that is, they believed that the government should promote and fund their very narrow notion of “Christianity”). The third group was neoliberal, Randroid, and selectively libertarian.

Two of those groups were Machiavellian.

Machiavellianism is often misunderstood. Psychologists use it to mean what used to be called sociopaths—that is, people who have no empathy, are amoral, and only look out for themselves—but that isn’t what Machiavelli advocated. He didn’t advocate a world free of ethical considerations, or amorality. He was deeply concerned with moral leadership, but morality, he and others argued, has two parts. There are means and ends. It is moral, he argued, to engage in actions we would normally consider immoral if those actions enable us to achieve a moral end.

He argued that the ends justify the means. That is, if you’re trying to do a right thing, there are no constraints on how you get there. (In other words, an important plot point of every action movie.) Thus, the only ethical consideration is whether your “ends” (your intention) are good. You can still think of yourself as an ethical person, even if you do or endorse actions that violate the ethical norms you claim to value, because you’re doing so for a good cause.

The easiest way to get people to behave like Machiavellians is to persuade them that they are threatened with extinction—there is an Out-Group that is trying to destroy Us. Then, they (we) will give ourselves moral license all the time feeling that we are the moral ones.

And that is the turn that pro-GOP rhetoric and pro-GOP demagogues (like Rush Limbaugh) took in the 80s. They weren’t the only rhetors who made that rhetorical choice. The claim that there is some “they” who is at war with “us” is a tiresomely popular rhetorical move. The argument that we must now abandon rhetorical, legal, ethical, and constitutional norms because we are faced with Evil is always present, and it’s always a bad argument.

And what’s happening with the GOP speakership shows why.

The choice that many pro-GOP politicians made in the 80s—and again, Gingrich is open about this—is that government itself was the Evil. So, the GOP made the government dysfunctional because they believed that it would gain power for them. I can’t say they’re wrong. It’s long been amazing to me how many GOP voters I’ve known who say, “Why should I pay taxes? There’s a pothole on my commute. We should cut taxes even more.”

In other words, cut resources to something (such as public schools or infrastructure), then, when those schools and infrastructure are crappier, mobilize the anger that people feel about the now crappier schools or infrastructure to argue for cutting taxes even more—because, clearly, the government can’t do a good job.

In the 80s and 90s, the GOP discovered that demagoguery worked to mobilize voters and support. As I’ve argued elsewhere, demagoguery isn’t specific to any place on the political spectrum, but it isn’t equally distributed. Demagoguery depends on the actively false notion that our complicated, nuanced, contextual, and uncertain realm of policy options can be reduced to a binary (or continuum) of two groups.

When a group (it’s never just an individual) decides that they will engage in demagoguery to gain or maintain power, they always do so by imagining an in-group, and then declaring that that in-group is already at war. This war is one already declared by The Out-Group (which is a fantastical nut-picked monstrosity of a villainous straw man) , and if you don’t realize it, you’re not really in-group.

Because The Out-Group is determined on our destruction, we are justified in anything we do, and breaking any norms. We can do the things we condemn The Out-Group for doing, while still claiming the moral high ground, because we have good intentions. We become Machiavellian.

Here’s one rhetorical problem. Imagine that you’re a media personality, ambitious political figure, Machiavellian with a lot of money, or person or industry that wants a specific policy. If you know that you couldn’t possibly succeed at getting your policy passed if you had to advocate in a realm of reasonable disagreement, then what you would do would be to demonize reasonable disagreement. You would say, “THEY are at war with us, so you should stop asking for reasonable disagreement and instead commit yourself to the policies that purify our community of Them.”

That’s what authoritarians do.

That’s what authoritarians with shitty policies do.

Deflecting the question of whether this policy is a good one (does it solve the need as reasonably narrated, is it the most reasonable in light of other options) to whether it means a win or loss for The Out-Group is always authoritarian.

If “conservatives” (who claim to be the “real Americans”) are threatened with extinction—the narrative of the GOP for forty years—then the correct response is to stand firm and reject all the democratic norms. That’s been the GOP rhetoric for forty years. The problem they’re now facing is that their rhetoric was persuasive. In other words, the GOP is now facing the logical and rhetorical consequences of its own rhetoric.

What is happening with the election of the Speaker of the House is a fight about exactly how to abandon democracy. And the fight is between two ways of thinking about authoritarianism: competitive authoritarianism (what McCarthy advocates) or a sloppy out-right authoritarianism (what Boebert advocates).

GOP candidates and pro-GOP media have spent years saying that Democrats/liberals/socialists (aka, anyone not purely committed to whatever the GOP happens to be advocating at that moment) are determined on the extermination of the in-group. Therefore, there is no such thing as a legitimate policy disagreement—every question, from whether you wear a mask to whether you are opposed to Russian hegemony of Europe, is not a policy question, open to policy argumentation, but an opportunity to demonstrate your determination to exterminate the “liberals” who want to exterminate Us.

As much as it may be pleasurable to watch Republicans in disarray, this is not a good situation. This is various levels of terrible. They are in disarray only because they disagree about what, exactly, constitutes the people of purity, and what, exactly, they should do to exterminate the unpure—that is, anyone who disagrees, in or out of the party.

Various powerful people in various times have thrown fuel onto the fire of a demagoguery they thought would benefit them.

That kind of demagoguery is never a controlled burn.







The salesman’s stance, being nice to opponents, and teaching rhetoric

books about demagoguery

I mentioned elsewhere that people have a lot of different ideas about what we’re trying to do when we’re disagreeing with someone—trying to learn from them, trying to come to a mutually satisfying agreement, find out the truth through disagreement, have a fun time arguing, and various other options. There are circumstances in which all of these (and many others) are great choices—I think it’s an impoverishment of our understanding of discourse to say that only one of those approaches is the right one under all circumstances.

We also inhibit our ability to use rhetoric to deliberate when we assume that only one approach is right.

I’ll explain this point with two extremes.

At one extreme is the model of discourse that has been called “the salesman’s stance,” the “compliance-gaining” model, rhetorical Machiavellianism, and various other terms. This model says that you are right, and your only goal in discourse is to get others to adopt your position, and any means is justified. So, if I’m trying to convert you to a position I believe is right, then all methods of tricking or even forcing you to agree with me are morally good or morally neutral.

From within this model, we assess the effectiveness of a rhetoric purely on the basis of whether it gains compliance. For instance, in an article about lying, Matthew Hutson ends with advice from someone who has studied that lying to yourself makes you a more persuasive liar.

“Von Hippel offers two pieces of wisdom regarding self-deception: “My Machiavellian advice is this is a tool that works,” he says. “If you need to convince somebody of something, if your career or social success depends on persuasion, then the first person who needs to be [convinced] is yourself.””

The problem with this model is clear in that example: if you’re wrong, then you aren’t going to hear about it. Alison Green, on her blog askamanager.org, talks about the assumption that a lot of people make about resumes, cover letters, and interviews—that you are selling yourself. People often approach a job search with exactly the approach that Von Hippel (and by implication, Hutson) recommend: going into the process willing to say or do whatever is necessary for you to get the job, being confident that you’ll get the job, lying about whether you have the required skills or experience (and persuading yourself you do).

Green says,

“The stress of job searching – and the financial anxieties that often accompany it – can lead a lot of people to get so focused on impressing their interviewer sthat they forget to use the time to find out if the job is right for them. If you get so focused on wanting a job offer at the end of the process, you’ll neglect to focus on determining if this is even a job you want and would be good at, which is how people end up in jobs that they’re miserable in or even get fired from.
And counterintuitively, you’ll actually be less impressive if it’s clear that you’re trying to sell yourself for the job. Most interviewers will find you a much more appealing candidate if you show that you’re gathering your own information about the job and thinking rigorously about whether it’s the right match or not.”

Van Hippel’s advice comes from a position of assuming that the liar is trying to get something from the other (compliance), and so only needs to listen enough to achieve that goal. The goal (get the person to give you a job, buy your product, go on a date) is determined prior to the conversation. Green’s advice comes from the position of assuming the a job interview is mutually informative, a situation in which all parties are trying to determine the best course of action.

If we’re trying to make a decision, then I need to hear what other people have to say, I need to be aware of the problems with my own argument, I need to be honest with myself at least and ideally with others. (If I’m trying to deliberate with people who aren’t arguing in good faith, and the stakes are high, then I can imagine using some somewhat Machiavellian approaches, but I need to be honest with myself in case they’re right in important ways.)

At the other extreme, there are people who argue that every conversation should come from a place of kindness, compassion, and gentleness. We shouldn’t directly contradict the other person, but try to empathize, even if we disagree completely. We should use no harsh words (including “but”). We might, kindly and gently, present our experience as a counterpoint. Learning how to have that kind of conversation is life-changing, and it is a great way to work through conflicts under some circumstances.

It (like many other models of disagreement) works on the conviviality model of democratic engagement: if we like each other, everything will be okay. As long as we care for one another, our policies cannot go so far wrong. And there’s something to that. I often praise projects like Hands Across the Hills or Divided We Fall that work on that model—our political discourse would be better if we understood that not all people who disagree with us are spit from the bowels of Satan. The problem is that some of them are.

That sort of project does important work in undermining the notion that our current political situation is a war of extermination between two groups because it reduces the dehumanization of the opposition. I think those sorts of projects should be encouraged and nurtured because they show how much the creation of community can dial down the fear-mongering about the other.

They are models for how genuinely patriotic leaders and media should treat politics—by continually emphasizing that disagreement is legitimate, that we are all Americans, that we should care for one another. But that approach to politics isn’t profitable for media to promote, and therefore isn’t a savvy choice for people who want to get a lot of attention from the media.

It also isn’t a great model for when a group is actually existentially threatened (as opposed to being worked into a panic by media). This model says, if we apply it to all situations, that, if I think genocide is wrong, and you think it’s right, I should try to empathize with you, find common ground, show my compassion for you. And somehow that will make you not support a genocidal set of policies? I do think that a lot of persuasion happens person to person, when it’s also face to face. I’ve seen people change their minds about whether LGBQT merit equal treatment by learning that someone they loved would be hurt by the policies they were advocating. I’ve also seen people not change their minds on those grounds. Derek Black described a long period of individuals being kind to him as part of his getting away from his father’s white supremacist belief system, but the guy went to New College; he was open to persuasion.

And I think it’s a mistake to think that kind of person-to-person, face-to-face kindness makes much difference when we are confronting evil. Survivors of the Bosnian genocides describe watching long-time friends rape their sister or kill their family. It isn’t as though Jews being nicer to and about Nazis would have prevented genocide. It wasn’t being nice to segregationists that ended the worst kind of de jure segregation. We have far too many videos that show being nice to police doesn’t guarantee a good outcome. People in abusive relationships can be as compassionate as an angel, and that compassion gets used against them. We will not end Nazism by being nice to Nazis.

That kindness, compassion, and non-conflictual rhetoric is sometimes the best choice doesn’t mean it’s always the only right choice. It can be (and often has been) a choice that enables and confirms extraordinary injustice. It’s often only a choice available to people not really hurt by the injustice. Machiavellian rhetoric is sometimes the best choice; it’s often not.