media Archives - Patricia Roberts-Miller

On systemic demagoguery; or, how the media creates and rewards demagogues

There is a narrative that our system of policing is fine; there are just a few bad individuals in every group. That metaphor belies the narrative. Bad apples corrupt a system. As has been shown by representatives of police unions saying that they cannot do their jobs if they are held accountable for killing people in their custody, escalating violent situations, or assaulting people who have done nothing wrong, the system doesn’t allow for justice. Even the defenders of police violence are admitting it’s a job that can’t be done if police are held to the same laws they’re supposed to be enforcing. Police violence isn’t a problem of individuals who choose to do something they know is wrong; it’s about the selection and training of police, how juries are selected, how prosecutors tolerate lying, how bail works (or doesn’t), SCOTUS rulings. We have systemic police violence.

Focussing on Derek Chauvin is simultaneously important and trivial. He isn’t important as an exceptional individual because he isn’t exceptional. If we think he’s exceptional, we miss the point. But that doesn’t make him trivial. He’s important because he’s a sign of how the system operates. While Chauvin should be punished, throwing him out of the police, putting him in jail, that won’t end the problem.

Trump is the Chauvin of demagoguery.

There are people wringing their hands about Trump, including some of the very people who created the rhetorical and media systems that took him on the escalator to the Presidency. They reject Trump, but they haven’t rejected their own demagoguery or their participation in the demagogic media system that enabled his rise.

Trump is important, but not because he’s unique, and not because of his individual intentions. They’re bad; they’re murderous and vindictive and lawless, and he has no intention of being held accountable. And he persistently engages in demagoguery–it’s not only how he argues, but how he governs. But making him the problem, as though we can solve our political problems by making sure Biden gets elected, makes no more sense than thinking police violence has ended now that Chauvin is fired.

Jeffrey Berry and Sharon Sobieraj, in their deeply troubling The Outrage Industry, argue that, “once a candidate is in office, outrage continues to be a path to career advancement [because] research shows that members of Congress who are more extreme in their politics receive more coverage in the mainstream press” (179). Unfortunately, they have the data to support that claim. The media rewards demagoguery with free publicity.

This wasn’t surprising to me. It confirmed a crank theory I’d had since I was in Berkeley in the late seventies and eighties. Or, more precisely, the era when I gave up on TV news. I gave up on TV news for a few reasons.

First, I did the math. In a half-hour news program, there would be fluff, sports, weather, and ads. A half hour would get about six minutes of actually useful news. At that time, the LA Times was a great paper. I could spend that half hour reading the LA Times, and be much more usefully informed than the half hour watching the news. There was also California Journal (it might still exist), a journal with thoughtful bi-partisan information about politics.

Second, even if I abandoned half-hour news programs, and tried to watch longer ones, they were no better. They brought on speakers, but they didn’t bring in the major figures. For instance, at that point Jerry Falwell had a smaller following than, say, the leader of the PCUSA or ELCA (mainstream Protestant organizations). But, when there was a question about religion, media brought on Robertson or Falwell.

Similarly, when it came to issues of race, they’d bring on Al Sharpton, at that point a much less important figure than any of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

The “problem,” from a ratings perspective, was that the leader of a major mainstream Protestant church would say something reasonable, nuanced, and calming; Robertson or Falwell would be polarizing. Some people would hate them; some would love them. But no one would think that what they were saying was too complicated or nuanced to understand. And no one would listen to an interview with them without being outraged. The nuanced, carefully articulated, and calming response on the part of someone who actually (at that time) spoke for more people that the demagogues Robertson or Falwell wouldn’t get the demagogic (us v. them) connection that was more profitable in terms of viewer loyalty that Robertson or Falwell got.

There was a slightly similar “problem” about representation when it came to race. Or, maybe, more accurately, there was the same problem, but with different consequences. My Congressional Rep was Ron Dellums, a fearless badass, and smart af, including about his rhetoric. That was true of most (all?) of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Any one of them spoke for more people than Sharpton did at that point. But the media went to Sharpton.

The irony is that, as far as I can tell, Dellums’ policy agenda was identical to Sharpton’s. So this wasn’t about the media fulfilling the role it often claims of being important for democracy. This was about profiting on the basis of racism, and thereby reinforcing racism. Someone like Dellums would have troubled racists’ perceptions of what black political figures were like. Dellums would have outraged racists in an uncomfortable way that meant they changed the channel. Sharpton didn’t.

This is no criticism of Sharpton. He was and is much more complicated than the “Sharpton” that was invoked (and still is) on reactionary and racist media. The problem isn’t that he went on major media and argued for his view. It’s great that he took that opportunity. The problem is that racist systems try to look not racist by engaging in rhetorically and economically profitable tokenism. Sharpton was right to go on those shows. Those media were wrong for not giving equal time to Dellums, Jordan, and various members of the Black Caucus.

And viewers were wrong, and racist, for not rejecting tokenism. This isn’t about what decisions Sharpton made. This is about a system that profits from racism.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the pleasures of outrage, about why viewers and media choose some kinds of outrage and not others. There are good kinds of outrage. Not only is there the kind of outrage that mobilizes people to do something about oppression, but there is the kind of outrage at finding core beliefs challenged. That’s a very unpleasant outrage. It enables change, it destabilizes ideology, it calls a person to rethink core beliefs. It sucks for ratings, since most people just change the channel. Dellums would have presented that kind of outrage.

Sharpton didn’t. Racists like Sharpton. They like being outraged about him because the media representation of him can fit him into racist narratives (Limbaugh still uses him to stoke racist outrage). They wouldn’t have liked being outraged by Dellums. So, Dellums didn’t get the coverage that Sharpton did; the leaders of the ELCA, PCUSA, and so on didn’t get the coverage that Falwell or Robertson did because the kind of outrage that reinforces in-group/out-group thinking is profitable. The kind of outrage that is the consequence of simplistic in-group/out-group thinking getting violated is not.

Racism is a systemic problem. And it’s profitable because demagoguery is profitable, and racist demagoguery is particularly profitable. Limbaugh’s demagogic racism has made him a millionaire.

We’re in a culture of demagoguery because it’s profitable. Both Trump and Chauvin should both be held accountable for what they’ve done. But holding them, as individuals, accountable won’t do anything to change the system in which they and people like them flourish.

How Trump supporters argue, and a lot of people who don’t support Trump

national enquirer cover

I got interested in demagoguery, and panicky about democracy, in about 2000, when I acquired an acquaintance (call him Chester) who relied entirely on Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the National Academy of Scholars. That acquaintance was helpful for me to understand how some people think about what it means to be informed and how to make political decisions. For instance, it surprised me that, when he would make a claim to me, and I would always prove him wrong, it never made him reconsider his sources. Also, he would later never remember that interaction. He never remembered being wrong. That was interesting.

He was also interesting for letting me know what the new politically correct line was for the GOP. Political correctness originally referred to the way that Stalin would announce a shift in position (Nazis are enemies, Nazis are allies, Nazis are enemies) and people who wanted to have the correct line immediately adopted it. He went from ranting about how terrible Democrats are because they want to invade privacy to enthusiastic support for the PATRIOT Act.

His way of arguing was interesting. Sometimes, what he said was simply wrong, but more often, what he did was to give a datum that was true (“2 + 2 = 4”), and use that datum to support a claim it didn’t actually logically support (which was always “Democrats are evil”). Early on in our acquaintance, he made some claim about nuclear power plants that was simply wrong, and I cited an article in The Economist that showed he was. He didn’t admit he was wrong; he was simply astonished I read The Economist.

He couldn’t imagine that someone like me would read sources with which I disagree. That was projection on his part. He engaged in a lot of that. He never read anything, unless it was required for work, that might trouble his very clear, and very angry, worldview.

He taught me two things. First, people like him–who thought he understood what is a logical argument–really don’t. That the datum is true doesn’t mean the argument is true. The datum might not be logically related to the argument. But that is how a lot of people reason. It’s confirmation bias masking itself as rational argument. He was a complete sucker for any “This Democrat is evil because cars have engines” arguments—that is, arguments about Democrats being terrible supported by data completely unrelated to the claim. But, and this is interesting: he would have seen how bad the logic was had exactly the same argument been made about Republicans.

He was a person thinking himself rational when he was just drowning in confirmation bias and outrage flavor-aid. Confirmation bias means that we scramble around looking for data that support our beliefs, and accept any data that supports our beliefs as objective and true while rejecting as “biased” anything that contradicts what we want to believe. We can’t cite a principle (other than in-group fanaticism) that would explain why we take this datum as proof that They are bad, and exactly similar datum as not relevant to whether We are bad.

That doesn’t make him any different from most of us. And that is the problem. He thought his beliefs were rational and true because he could find evidence to support them. But, even when the data was true, the inference wasn’t. He sucked at logic, but he was fine at facts. It isn’t about facts; it’s about logic.

Second, his commitment to his group was nonfalsifiable. I sometimes (rarely) tried to bring that up, and he deflected the issue of his beliefs being nonfalsifiable by saying “They are just as bad.” Again, that’s completely illogical. His binary of us (people with his pretty narrow political agenda) versus them was illogical, in that it was nonfalsifable, and relied on arguments he would have rejected if applied to him. It was an unprincipled argument.

He couldn’t find a logical principle that would support his judgments, but his judgments were all supported by the ideological principle that They are terrible.

And that “They are terrible” is persuasive in the media sphere in which he was cocooned because of the math of demagoguery.

Imagine that there are two parties: Rottweiler and Pitbull. You vote Rottweiler, and you hate Pitbulls. If you are irrational in your commitment to the Rottweiler party, you will start to engage in a weird kind of accounting. Any instance of Rottweiler misbehavior is erased if you can cite any instance of Pitbull misbehavior. So, if a Rottweiler Senator is caught openly taking bribes from the Squirrel Conspiracy, you will think that doesn’t count because the Assistant Associate Assistant to the Mayor of Peculiar, Missouri is Pitbull, and once let someone buy him a milkshake.

That’s the math of demagoguery. That was Chester’s math.

As lots of people point out, if you falsely categorize the world into us v. them, and you live in the careful cocoon of what your in-group media tells you what they believe, then you are saying that rottweilers are the best because there was this one pitbull that attacked people. You are in the bizarre math of “us v. them” reasoning.

He never listened to anyone who disagreed; everything he knew about what “They” believe came from his in-group sources. He and I once had a conversation about a book that he’d never read, and yet which he was convinced was indefensibly bad. I tried to point out that maybe he should read it, but that went nowhere. That was how he reasoned–his in-group sources told him it was bad because it made [this argument], and even though I told him (and I’d actually read it) that it hadn’t made argument, he wasn’t willing to listen. And he also told me, on two occasions, that all leftists (including Chomsky and Orwell) don’t believe in any kind of realist notion about epistemology or language (they do—he admitted he’d never read either author).

Sometimes he said things that were actively false, and I’d send him links, and he would find ways to dismiss any evidence that his sources were bad. He is the angriest person I know, and the most misinformed.

If you thought this blog post was about how terrible Republicans are, then you’re reasoning like Chester.

I don’t think there are two sides, but I think there is demagoguery, and I think demagoguery is all over the political spectrum (but not equally so).

Demagoguery isn’t a rhetoric that powerful people use to seduce the clueless and powerless objects of persuasion. Demagoguery is how far too many people reason, and how far too much media frames issues.

In a culture of demagoguery, rhetors promoting demagoguery (all over the political spectrum, and in venues from political debates to neighborhood mailing lists):
• insist (and sincerely believe) that our political options are divided between the obviously right option and the one advocated by people with actively bad motives (and the dupes who are seduced into supporting the obviously bad choice) because they only consume media that tells them that is the case;
• argue deductively from in-group premises. So they say that, for instance, “high taxes decrease incentive, so they decrease innovation, so they hurt an economy” or “supporting a centrist candidate is wrong, so if we want a progressive political agenda, we should refuse to support centrists.” Neither of those claims is either falsifiable or empirically defensible.
• argue that they are right because they can find data to support their claims, even if the data is material out of context, actively false, or irrelevant.
• express outrage, pretending that their outrage is principled, when it’s really just outrage about out-group behavior, and not principled outrage about the action.

We are not in a post-fact world. Saying that we are is exactly what got us here. It’s suggesting that a good argument has true facts. Terrible arguments can have true facts.

Engaging in effective and reasonable political deliberation isn’t about whether you have facts. We all have facts.

It’s about whether your facts are relevant to the claim you’re making, whether they prove the point you’re making (as opposed to simply being an illustrative example), whether they mean what you say they mean in context, and whether that “fact” would be just as meaningful if it supported a claim you don’t like.

We aren’t in a post-fact world; we’re in a post-logic one.

Democracy and Inoculation

Showing that politics is not a continuum, but more like a scattershot

Were I Queen of the Universe, no one would graduate from high school without knowing the difference between causation and correlation, and no one would graduate from college without understanding the rhetorical concept of inoculation.[1]

Democracy requires understanding opposition points of view. Our current media undermines democracy by relying heavily on inoculation—regardless of which “side” your media is on. It makes you think you know the opposition point of view when you really don’t. It presents you with a weak version of an argument, so that you won’t even listen to the stronger version—you will reject as stupid someone who disagrees with your party line.

It does that through two strategies.

First, most media relies on the false frame of there being “two sides” (Dem v. GOP) to every issue. There isn’t. There is no issue that is accurately bifurcated into two sides, let alone two sides that map onto the two major political parties. That false frame takes the rich, entangled, and nuanced world of policy options, and reduces it to an identity issue—do you see yourself as liberal or conservative?

In our current world, all politics is identity politics. And it’s a deliberate evasion of policy argumentation.

That’s a bad world, a damaging frame for democratic politics, and a different post. Here I’ll just use the example of what to do regarding drug addicts to point out it isn’t a Dem v. GOP issue. There are people who are opposed to legalized abortion who prefer rehab to jail for drug addicts—are they conservative or liberal? There are people who want no government restrictions on the “free” market who also want no criminal penalties for drug use—conservative or liberal?

Let’s just walk away from the notion that there are “two” sides on any issue. There aren’t. There isn’t even a continuum. There are people who really disagree.

The second strategy builds on the first. It’s inoculation. Once you’ve persuaded your audience that the complicated world of political decisions is actually a zero-sum fight between us and them, then you need to persuade your audience of a particular construction of Them. This is a little complicated. You have to acknowledge that there is a group that disagrees with your group’s positions, but you know that, if your audience looked into the issue with any effort, they’d find it’s more complicated than you are trying to pretend it is—they’d find there are lots of people who disagree, and those people have some good arguments. So, you’ve got the tricky task of making your audience believe that they know what They believe while persuading them that they shouldn’t actually look into Their argument in any detail.

You rely on inoculation.

Vaccines, inoculation, work by giving the body a weak version of a virus, so that, when the body gets the stronger version, it shuts that shit down.

Con artists often use inoculation. They tell their marks that there are people out to get them, and give a weak version of the criticisms, framing it all as part of their being the real victim here, and it often works. The mark refuses to listen to criticisms of the person conning them on the grounds that they know what that critic will say, and they already know it’s wrong. They don’t. They haven’t listened. Inoculation is about persuading someone not to listen to anyone else because you believe (falsely) that you already know what they will say (you don’t.) It works because the con has established what feels like a real connection with the mark.

That’s how it works in politics and media too.

People who inhabit rabidly factional enclaves believe that they are not rabidly factional—they believe that they have impartially considered “both” sides (mistake number one—there aren’t only two sides) because they believe they are thoroughly informed as to what “the other side” thinks.

They aren’t. Matthew Levendusky has shown that factionalized media spends more time talking about how awful They are than they do defending their group. So, it doesn’t actually argue for a policy; it argues against an identity. And it does so in a way that makes people feel good about themselves (we aren’t as dumb as those assholes) while trying to ensure that the audience doesn’t try to understand why people disagree.

What I’m saying is this: the biggest problem in our political situation is that we rely on media that spends all of its time with two messages: we are good because those people are assholes; they’re such assholes that you shouldn’t even listen to them but repeat these talking points we are giving you.

Here’s what I think. People really disagree. The real disagreements in our world are not usefully divided into two groups. You should never rely on an in-group source to represent any out-group argument accurately. You should try to find the smartest versions of opposition arguments.

I love vaccines. I think, when it comes to biology, we should all get vaccinated. When it comes to politics, we shouldn’t. Polio might kill you; a different political point of view won’t.

[1] I’d also insist that Billy Squier’s “Stroke Me” be put on mute for a couple of years, just because I’m really tired of it. I’m open to persuasion on this.