On April 18, 1965, The New York Times published a long editorial written by Hans Morgenthau, in which he argued that, while he appreciated a recent statement of LBJ about Vietnam, on the whole, he thought that “the President reiterated the intellectual assumptions and policy proposals which brought us to an impasse and which make it impossible to extricate ourselves.” The assumptions were false, he argued, and the policies grounded in those assumptions were therefore unreasonable and unlikely to succeed. Morgenthau’s criticism of US policy in regard to Vietnam is interesting not because it was unusual (it wasn’t), but because the response to his criticism exemplifies how people avoid the responsibilities of democratic deliberation through motivism and fallacious arguments from association. That kind of response undermines useful policy deliberation, and ultimately contributes to authoritarianism. It doesn’t matter who it is used by or for.
Morgenthau was anti-communist, self-identified conservative, and one of the founders of what is generally called the “realist” school in international relations (e.g., Kissinger’s realpolitik). Thus, Morgenthau granted that China should be contained, but he argued that military intervention to prop up the Diem regime was not the way to do it. He argued that it was a fantasy to think that it could be contained in the same way that the USSR had been in Europe–that is, through “erecting a military wall at the periphery of her empire.” He insisted that the Vietnam situation was a civil war, not “an integral part of unlimited Chinese aggression.”
In many ways, Morgenthau’s criticism of US policy was more or less the same as others elsewhere on the political spectrum (like Henry Steele Commager,MLK, Reinhold Niebuhr). He said that Ho Chi Minh “came to power not courtesy of another Communist nation’s victorious army but at the head of a victorious army of his own.” (so this was not like Soviet aggression in Europe). Ho Chi Minh had considerable popular support, whereas Diem did not, and therefore this was not a military, but a political, problem. Morgenthau argued that, “People fight and die in civil wars because they have a faith which appears to them worth fighting and dying for, and they can be opposed with a chance of success only by people who have at least as strong a faith.” Supporters of Diem did not have at least a strong a faith because Diem’s policies resulted in his being unpopular (“on one side, Diem’s family, surrounded by a Pretorian guard; on the other, the Vietnamese people”). Morgenthau pointed out that trying to treat such situations in a military way–counter-insurgency–had not worked. The French tried it in Algeria and Indochina (i.e., Vietnam), and it didn’t work, and it wasn’t working for the US in Vietnam. Like other critics of US policy in Vietnam (e.g., MLK), he emphasized that Diem (and the US, by supporting Diem) had violated the Geneva agreement, especially in terms of refusing to have an election—a refusal that was an open admission that communism was not imposed on an unwilling populace, but a popular policy agenda (he notes, largely because of land reform). We were violating the fundamental characteristic of democracy—abiding by the results of elections—in some mistaken notion that it would protect democracy.
Morgenthau’s anti-communist, conservative, and realist opposition to Vietnam shows how false is our tendency to talk about policy affiliations in terms of identity (left v. right, “conservatives” v. “liberals”). To take a policy affiliation and assume it has a necessary relationship to an identity is anti-deliberative, anti-democratic, and proto-demagogic, and what happened to Morgenthau shows just how damaging that deflecting of argumentation is.
Being opposed to US policy in Vietnam didn’t necessarily mean that one was sympathetic to communism—it could, as it did with Morgenthau, be the consequence of such a commitment to anti-communism that one only wants to support polices that will actually succeed. Ironically, that would eventually be the position that Robert McNamara, the (liberal and Democratic) architect of US policy in Vietnam, would adopt. In his 1995 book In Retrospect, McNamara would say that he came to realize that everything people like MLK, Morgenthau, and Neibuhr had been saying was true. He didn’t mention them by name, or acknowledge that he could have listened to them. But he could have.
We now often equate opposing the Vietnam War with “liberals” and supporting the war with “conservatives” and we assume that “liberals” were Democrats and “conservatives” GOP. We do so, not because we’re operating from any coherent mapping of policy affiliation, but because reducing policy affiliation to a false binary or continuum of identity throws policy argumentation to the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. And that’s the point, especially if the policy agenda of a party is contradictory. Under those circumstances, instead of trying to defend policies, the most short-term effective rhetorical strategy is to go on the offensive, and deflect attention from one’s policies to the motives of the critics.
That’s exactly what the liberal and Democratic LBJ and his supporters did in regard to his Vietnam policies, as exemplified in their treatment of Morgenthau. Morgenthau put forward a sensible plan that was, it should be emphasized, grounded in anti-communism: (1) recognition of the political and cultural predominance of China on the mainland of Asia as a fact of life; (2) liquidation of the peripheral military containment of China; (3) strengthening of the uncommitted nations of Asia by nonmilitary means; (4) assessment of Communist governments in Asia in terms not of Communist doctrine but of their relation to the interests and power of the United States. In other words, the US should be prepared to ally itself with communist regimes, as long as they were hostile to China. This plan was similar to the policy the US justified as “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”–how we rationalized supporting unpopular authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records rather than allow elections that might lead to socialist or communist (even if democratic) regimes–but with a more realistic assessment of the varieties of communism and the possible benefits of those alliances. As Morgenthau says, “In fact, the United States encounters today less hostility from Tito, who is a Communist, than from de Gaulle, who is not.”
Realism, as a political theory, claims to value putting the best interests of the nation above “moral” considerations, and strives to separate moral assessments of the “goodness” of allies from their potential utility to the US. We were, after all, closely allied with Israel, Sweden, and various other highly socialistic countries; why not add North Vietnam to that list, as long as it would be an ally?
That’s an argument worth considering. Morgenthau thought we should. Clearly, McNamara should have. He didn’t. We didn’t. Defenders of LBJ’s policies neither debated nor refuted Morgenthau’s argument. Instead, they shifted the stasis to Morgenthau’s motives and identity, pathologizing him, misrepresenting his arguments, and depoliticizing debate about Vietnam.
The Chicago Tribune published a short guest editorial (from National Review) June 12, 1965, and it’s worth quoting in full:
Prof. Hans Morgenthau’s hyperactive role as a protestor against our policy in Viet Nam is embarrassing many of his friends, and may even be embarrassing to himself, who is not used to the kind of self-exposure he is submitting to or to the company he finds himself keeping. (He was, it is reliably reported, distressed to see a photograph of himself standing next to Linus Paulding, and we cannot believe he looks forward to sharing the Madison Square Garden platform with the infantile leftist, Joan Baez.)
Morgenthau is a fine scholar and a first-rate dialectician. His Asiatic policies are heavily conditioned by his adamant Europe-firstism—much as the politics of Dean Acheson were. Then too, in 1960-61, Morgenthau went to Harvard as a visiting professor, expecting appointment to a new chair of government, McGeorge Bundy, then dean, nixed it—and may thereby have lit a fuse that is now exploding in anti-Johnson (and anti-Bundy) rallies around the country.
The Tribune editorial doesn’t misrepresent Morgenthau’s argument—it doesn’t even acknowledge he has one—nor does it characterize him as a dangerous person. Instead, it infantilizes and trivializes him by associating him with Linus Paulding and Joan Baez, embarrassment, infantilism, and leftism. It never argues that he’s infantile, trivial, and so on—the argument is made through association (such as characterizing his criticism of US policy regarding Vietnam as a “hyperactive role”).
There is a gesture of fairness–acknowledging that Morgenthau is a Professor and intelligent, but with a smear and dismissal. Morgenthau was Jewish, and one of many anti-semitic strategies for othering Jews was to refer to them as “Asiatic” (and therefore not really white)—Morgenthau’s ethnic background is irrelevant to whether he’s making a good argument. But, given the anti-semitism of the time, it would discredit him for some audience members. Similarly, whether he was a “Europe First,” or even whether that’s a bad thing to be, is irrelevant to whether his claims are logical, reasonable, and so on. The narrative about what happened at Harvard—whether true or not—also has nothing to do with the quality of Morgenthau’s argument.
But, dismissing an opposition argument on the grounds that the person has bad motives for making it (and it isn’t therefore a real argument) is persuasive to people who believe dissent constitutes out-group membership. We have a tendency to attribute good motives to the in-group and bad motives to the out-group for exactly the same behavior. Thus, the editorial says Morgenthau’s stance on Vietnam is purely the consequence of an academic rivalry. Why not assume the same of McGeorge Bundy’s stance? Why not assume that Bundy, if he did “nix” Morgenthau’s appointment, did so out of personal spite, and personal spite means he is taking the opposite position on the war from Morgenthau?
The slippage between Cold War rhetoric and policies meant that, as in the case of Vietnam, the US was in the paradoxical position of claiming to promote democracy, freedom, and independence while helping major powers (like France) hold on to colonies, supporting anti-democratic (even openly fascist) governments, suppressing elections, and silencing free speech even in the US:
The cold war was an all-encompassing rhetorical reality that developed out of Soviet-American disputes but eventually transcended them to reach to American perceptions of Asia and to American actions against domestic dissidents. This ideological rhetoric became so embedded in American consciousness that it eventually limited the political choice leaders could make, created grossly distorted views of adversaries, and finally led to the witch-hunts of McCarthyism. (Hinds and Windt xix)
Given the way the Cold War rhetoric paired terms worked, to criticize an “ally” or any US policy could be framed as endorsing the USSR. This despite the fact that we were often not promoting democracy, that not all forms of communism were imposed by a Soviet-led minority on an unwilling populace, and that silence of dissent was one of the main criticisms of the USSR. Thus, in service of battling an enemy one of whose crimes was silencing dissent, we silenced dissent.
Image from here: https://csl4d.wordpress.com/2017/12/27/policy-argumentation/
I’ve often mentioned that I think Van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s rules for rational-critical argumentation are useful. But they’re written in a way that makes them really hard to understand, and I’ve long wanted to put them into more straightforward language. I’ve procrastinated doing that because first I have to explain a bunch of things. The first is one that most people don’t even consider: what are we doing when we disagree?
We’re in such a world of neoliberalism that the assumption is that we’re trying to sell each other something, or we’re competing for a market. But the notion that discourse must be a sales pitch is just one way of thinking about disagreement.
I’ve written and re-written about the various ways of thinking about what we might be trying to do when we disagree, and what I’ve written always ends up heady and abstract and hard to follow. So I’m going to go with a flawed analogy, one I’ve lifted from Aristotle.
Let’s think about wrestling. Also, let’s imagine the wrestlers are Winston and Emma (just so I don’t end up in ambiguous pronoun reference).
Why are Winston and Emma wrestling?
They might be wrestling because they’re trying to kill each other. This wrestling has no rules, no limits, and no goal other than the permanent extermination of the other.
They might be wrestling as champions of their communities; they’re not trying to exterminate the other, but to destroy the other’s political power, and generally to gain some specific political outcomes (change in territory, control of the government, exploitative relationships legalized). In other words, this would be modern warfare in light of the possibility of community judgment– post-Geneva convention warfare.
Or, perhaps, they’re wrestling for even more specific policy outcomes. They’re wrestling over who gets the salmon tonight. Tomorrow, they’ll wrestle again for who gets it tomorrow. This kind of wrestling may or may not have limits on what is allowed. If it doesn’t have limits, it’s outcome-specific demagoguery; if it has limits, particularly regarding tone and civility, then it’s decorous argument (note that’s “decorous,” not “rational”).
Perhaps Winston is a bully, or a faux-bully, who talks a lot about how he beat up others, and he’s using that status as a strong guy to recruit others to his group, or encourage them in their bullying. Emma might choose to wrestle with him to show he’s a bully and a fraud. Since this is most effective when it stays within the rules for rational-critical argumentation, I always think of it as the rational-critical alpha roll. (The point isn’t to engage Winston in rational-critical argumentation, since he probably isn’t interested in it, but to show show that he isn’t, and to shame him. Some people argue that’s what Socrates is doing in some dialogues.)
They might be wrestling as part of a for-profit show, in which everything is scripted, and they’re just following their scripts because the pay is great. This is argutainment. The point is the conflict, not resolving it, because the conflict becomes unprofitable the second it’s resolved. So, Emma and Winston have to keep fighting. But that’s also unsatisfying, since the audience will attach to one or the other.
The most profitable version of this scripted wrestling is that Winston is in-group for the audience, and always nearly loses, and rarely loses, and in which Emma cheats egregiously while the ref isn’t looking. Sometimes, after Emma has cheated relentlessly, Winston cheats once and wins. So, his win looks like payback. It’s still scripted, and it’s still really for show.
Another kind of argutainment is so dominant that I think I have to mention it. This is when Emma and Winston don’t actually wrestle at all. Winston wrestles with a plastic doll that has “EMA” written on it (or a man filled with straw) and wins (what a shock). I think of this as straw man argutainment.
Emma and Winston might be members of a college wrestling team, and the point of their wrestling is to bring honor to their college. (Or just to win.) There are lots of rules. This is decorous agonism.
Perhaps they’re friends, and they think it’s fun to wrestle. They each want to win, but not badly enough to hurt the other. There’s no referee because they’ll try to be fair. This is friendly wrangling.
Perhaps they believe that wrestling is a really good sport because it gives a healthy kind of flexibility and strength, and they want to wrestle with each other in order to improve themselves and each other. When we make the analogy to argumentation, this is rational-critical argumentation.
Sometimes Emma and Winston aren’t wrestling with each other at all. This is the tai-chi of argumentation, in which people simply admire the moves an individual makes. This has two types. One is very rigid, and says that there is a right way to make every move, and Emma and Winston can be assessed as to which one most fits the correct form, regardless of whether it’s actually a good way to wrestle. Let’s call this standardized testing. The second is that Emma and Winston each demonstrate the moves they like to make, and they simply watch each other, perhaps learning, perhaps not. I tend to think of that as the expressive model.
Generally, when people set out a list, it’s an expeditio—a list that sets one up for being the right choice. I think every one of these is a valid choice, depending on the circumstances. Every single one is also a bad choice, depending on the circumstances.
[As an aside, I’ll say that one grump I have about scholarship in rhetoric and writing is that it too often begins by assuming that only one of the above goals is valid, or that we all have to agree as to which is the model we should be promoting. That notion that there is only one kind of correct public discourse is a claim that can’t be defended through rational-critical discourse, which is kind of funny if you have the excessively pedantic sense of humor I have. I’m on the side of people arguing for various goals, various needs, various means, and teaching students that there are those different ways of arguing.]
One more piece of background information before I can get to the ten rules. The market model of knowledge says that the belief that sells the most is the best belief—that’s a version of the argutainment model. It says that the argument that pleases the most people is the best. There is, as far as I can tell, no evidence that claim is anything other than a Moebius strip of justification. Slavery, Nazism, eugenics, surgeons refusing to wash their hands, mullets—all of those meet the market model of belief standard for good belief. It’s a bad model. What’s popular, especially when not all opinions are weighted equally (the market model gives more preference to the opinions held by people with more money), is not necessarily what is ethical, in the long-term best interest of the community, or what the majority of people want.
If Winston and Emma are disagreeing about who should do the dishes, they could see it as a zero-sum argument—they win to the extent that they get the other to do the dishes. Their disagreement then becomes a way to get the other to submit. They’re either in outcome-specific demagoguery or decorous argument still oriented toward getting their way. If Winston and Emma see their disagreement about the dishes as a question of who wins, who gets the other to submit, or who is the better person, they’re seeing the disagreement about the dishes as just one of many instances that are really about a zero-sum contests as to which of them is a better person (or which one is doing more, or sacrificing more).
Fuck that shit. I had that marriage. It was bad.
So, let’s imagine that Winston and Emma disagree deeply but they don’t think the other is evil. They have, basically, two ways of approaching the disagreement that will serve them well. One is the expressive model, in which they each express what they believe, and they try to understand the other. Agreement, persuasion, argumentation—all of those are off the table. It’s just about listening. This way of approaching disagreement is incredibly powerful, as shown by projects like Hands Across the Hills or Divided We Fall.
That model is about resolving about our serious cultural problems that come from people who breathe deep in a media world that relies on the demonization of others. The expressive model is vexed when it comes to systemic issues, ones that don’t necessarily rely on the conscious intentions or feelings of individuals. Imagine that Winston refuses to wear a mask. He doesn’t intend to infect others or get infected; he thinks that, by doing exactly what his media tells him to do, he’s showing his individuality and independent judgment.
There is no way to get Winston to understand the irrationality of his position (and it is irrational) from within the expressive or argutainment model. From within those models, his position seems fine.
So here we are at the rational-critical model. It isn’t persuasive. It doesn’t work within the market model of discourse. It isn’t about selling anything. It isn’t about making everyone feel good. It isn’t about an agent who gains compliance on the part of the object.
It’s about both Emma and Winston believing, simultaneously, that their positions are so right that they can withstand the strongest counterarguments, and that they might be wrong, so they’re open to disproof. And these are the conditions of disproof. I find that, when I’m talking about this issue, I have to emphasize that these are not the rules everyone has to follow in every conversation (that’s why there’s this long lead up). You can have a great conversation without following these rules. If you’re playing soccer, and you pick up the ball and run with it, you’ve either committed a foul or you aren’t playing soccer any more. You might have just invented rugby.
If I say, “Here are the characteristics of warblers,” someone saying, “But kangaroos aren’t like that” is not actually proving me wrong. Kangaroos are great; I’m not saying they aren’t. But they aren’t warblers.
One more piece of background information. Because we are so polarized, if I say anything about Democrats or Republicans, hot cognition is triggered, so let’s imagine that there are two political parties—one led by Chester (called Chesterians), and the other led by Hubert (Hubertians), and they disagree about the best methods of keeping squirrels (considered bad by both parties) from getting to the red ball (considered good by both parties). Winston is a Chesterian, and Emma is a Hubertian.
Okay, the rules.
1. Freedom rule “Parties must not prevent each other from advancing standpoints or from casting doubt on standpoints.”
This rule prohibits argumentum ad baculum—Winston can’t threaten to hurt, fire, or harm Emma for disagreeing with him and still have their discussion be a rational-critical disagreement. Of course, there are lots of situations in which a good and productive disagreement might have Winston telling Emma she is not allowed to make certain arguments. If Emma is CEO and Winston is the company attorney, and Emma advocates a course of action that could get them sued, Winston would be wise to say, “If you advocate that ever again, I will quit as your attorney.” Winston might threaten to fire Emma if she keeps making racist arguments; Winston might threaten to break up with her if she says abusive things to him. It isn’t a rational-critical disagreement, but Winston might be wise to decide that a rational-critical argument was never on the table anyway.
Appeals to emotion aren’t necessarily a problem in rational-critical argumentation. They are fallacious (argumentum ad misericordiam) under some circumstances. If Winston says that it will break his heart if Emma makes certain arguments, and Winston really doesn’t want to hear that argument, he can set that boundary, but it isn’t a rational-critical disagreement from that point on.
In other words, people can set boundaries for discussions; if they can’t agree on those boundaries, then they might need to have a rational-critical disagreement about what those boundaries are. It might not be possible for them to agree on boundaries; it might be an issue that isn’t subject to rational-critical disagreement, or one of the people involved might be incapable of arguing rationally about it.
2. Burden of proof rule “A party that advances a standpoint is obliged to defend it if asked by the other party to do so.”
In general, the rule of thumb is that the affirmative (“A is B” or “A leads to B”) has the burden of proof because negatives (“A is not B” or “A does not lead to B”) can be hard to prove. For instance, if Emma and Winston are arguing about whether a politician, Hubert, is racist, it’s going to be almost impossible to have a good conversation unless Winston first says why he thinks Hubert is racist (he’s making the affirmative case, affirming that something is true). Then Emma can refute it (since she has the negative case, saying that Winston’s claim is not true). But, once Emma starts to refute that claim, then she has the burden of proof to support whatever claims she is making (such as that Winston has a bad definition of “racist”).
People try to avoid the burden of proof by shifting the stasis (that is, trying to change what the argument is about). Motivism, ad hominem, genetic fallacy, and various fallacies that result from binary thinking fall into this category. If Emma says to Winston, “Oh, you’re just saying that Hubert is racist because you’re a Social Justice Warrior, and you think you’re so woke,” that’s motivism and ad hominem (Emma gets a twofer!). She’s violated this rule because she’s trying to make Winston’s character the issue rather than Hubert’s racism. If Emma believes that only Chesterians think Hubert is racist, and she believes that all Chesterians are socialists, and all socialists are Stalinists, then she might say, “Oh, Hubert is racist? Well, how did that whole gulag thing work out?” and try to engage Winston in a defense of Stalinism. That’s a violation of this rule—she’s trying to make Stalinism the issue.
Most people arguing for conspiracy theories violate this rule—the more that they’re claiming there is a huge coverup, the more likely they are to avoid the burden of proof. People arguing about the existence of God throw the burden of proof back and forth like a long and boring tennis game.
A move that is often (but not always) a violation of this rule is the fallacy of tu quoque (sometimes called the accusation of hypocrisy). If Winston says, “Hubert is racist,” and Emma says, “Well, what about that time that a Chesterian said something racist?” she might be violating the rule. It depends on what claim Winston is making. If Winston is claiming that Chesterians are better than Hubertians, what she’s saying is relevant. If he’s saying that Hubert shouldn’t be in charge of the Senate Committee on Diversity and Inclusion, it’s irrelevant, and a violation of this rule.
This point—what are we arguing about?—is important for understanding fallacies, since a lot of moves are fallacious because they’re irrelevant. If Winston says, “Chester is a young and strong dog who can withstand the stress of protecting the red ball,” then Emma pointing out that Winston has a long history of lying about Chester’s health is relevant. It’s part of a rational-critical argument. But Emma arguing that Winston shouldn’t be believed because he likes Nickelback is an ad hominem since it’s irrelevant.
If Emma points out that Winston has often lied about Chester’s health and so shouldn’t be believed now, and Winston says that Emma really hurt his feelings, and she owes him an apology for hurting his feelings, he’s trying to shift the stasis to the question of his feelings. If he says that Emma shouldn’t criticize him because he recently broke a nail, and he’s really upset about it—it’s either a violation of the first rule (some claims are off the table) or this one. Or both!
3. Standpoint rule “A party’s attack on a standpoint must relate to the standpoint that has indeed been advanced by the other party.”
This rule prohibits the straw man fallacy—if Emma has a complicated and nuanced argument, and Winston attributes to her a really stupid argument, he’s violated this rule.
People violate this rule while thinking they’re making good arguments for three reasons: first, in-group/out-group thinking (which reduces everything to us v. them); second, and closely related, the tendency to think in paired terms; third, and perhaps most important, inoculation.
In a culture of demagoguery, and we’re in one, people believe that our vexed, complicated, varied, and nuanced world of policy options is reduced to two groups: us and them. Us is narrowly defined, and “Them” is simply anyone who is not Us. The research on us v. them thinking (in-group v. out-group) is clear that people committed to this way of thinking about the world homogenize the out-group. So, if your in-group is Wisconsin Synod Lutherans, and you’re deep in a culture of demagoguery, then you’re quite likely to believe that Evangelical Lutherans, Muslims, atheists, Satanists are pretty much all the same. [1] Therefore, you think you have proven that this ELCA person is bad by presenting an example of something a Satanist did or said. [2]
This rule and the “unexpressed premise rule” have a complicated relationship. In a good argument, people sort them out. In the fallacious version, the unexpressed premise is inferred by identity: the sort of person who argues this is a member of that group, and they also argue that. An example of false inferences from identity would something like this. Imagine that Emma argues that we should be nice to little dogs, and Chesterians are known for hating little dogs, then Winston might infer that she must not be Chesterian. If Chesterians are also known for hating squirrels, then Winston might infer that Emma must like squirrels. (That’s how the false inference about ELCA Lutherans being Satanists works.)
It feels like a logical inference, but only if Winston falsely assumes that all Chesterians are the same. The way his argument works is: Everyone is either A or B. All A do C. All B do D. Emma does not do C; therefore, she must not be A. Therefore, she must be B; therefore she must do D.
(Everyone is either Chesterian or Hubertian; all Chesterians hate little dogs; Emma does not hate little dogs; therefore, she must be Hubertian; all Hubertians like squirrels; therefore, Emma must like squirrels.)
His whole chain of inferences becomes at best a possible inference if there are options other than A or B (Chesterians or Hubertians), most (but not all) Chesterians hate little dogs, and so on. Winston is attacking Emma on a point not related to the standpoint she actually advanced.
4. Relevance rule “A party may defend a standpoint only by advancing argumentation relating to that standpoint.”
This rule is pretty straightforward; again, it’s about staying on-topic. It prohibits fallacies of relevance—such as ad hominem, ad misericordiam (irrelevant appeal to pity), ad vericundiam (irrelevant appeal to authority), and non sequitur (the large category of drawing a conclusion that doesn’t follow).
As mentioned above, an attack on the character of an interlocutor isn’t necessarily irrelevant and therefore not necessarily fallacious. Similarly, appeals to emotions or authority aren’t necessarily irrelevant. All arguments have an emotional connection—we disagree because we care about something. If we didn’t care at all—if we had no emotional attachment to the issue—we wouldn’t bother disagreeing. If Winston argues that being nice to little dogs helps squirrels get to the red ball, it’s because he believes that squirrels getting to the red ball is a bad thing. He doesn’t want it to happen. He is afraid of it happening.
If Emma believes that the Chesterian position about little dogs causes unnecessary cruelty to little dogs, then she cares about little dogs; it makes her sad. People who argue that a policy is good because it will save a lot of money or it’s bad because it will cost a lot of money have an affective attachment to money; they like it.
If Winston and Emma are disagreeing about whether little dogs are conspiring with squirrels, and Winston tells a highly emotional story about how a little dog once took food from a Great Dane puppy, that’s a violation of this rule. Not because it’s highly emotional, but because it’s irrelevant.
Appeals to authority are similar. Imagine Emma says, “Little dogs are not involved in the conspiracy; I am personally certain of this.” That’s probably an irrelevant appeal to authority—it’s an appeal to her personal conviction, and her personal conviction is irrelevant. It’s only relevant if she is an expert who has read every study on the issue, and looked at all the evidence. Emma saying, “Well, Ruth has concluded that squirrels are not involved, and she is a Supreme Court justice” (or Nobel prize winner, famous professor at a prestigious university, person with impressive degrees, tremendously successful entrepreneur) is a violation of this rule, since there isn’t a Nobel prize in the squirrel conspiracy.
Similarly, appeals to Scripture, a quote from Einstein, something your stylist told you that her brother-in-law’s chiropractor’s lawyer told him is an irrelevant appeal to authority.
It’s possible to have really fun and interesting conversations in which non-experts speculate on topics, but it’s just shooting the breeze.
The last fallacy of relevance I want to mention (there are lots more) is the big category of non sequitur. There are lots, and many lists of fallacies split them into different kinds. But, basically, they all come down to a tendency we have to think a true argument is a valid argument, and a true argument has the form of “true statement because another true statement.”
Emma might believe that “little dogs are good because many bunnies are fluffy.” Many bunnies are fluffy, but that has nothing to do with whether little dogs are good (although, personally, I do think they are). That argument about bunnies is irrelevant, even if true, so it’s a violation of this rule.
5. Unexpressed premise rule “A party may not deny premise that he or she has left implicit or falsely present something as a premise that has been left unexpressed by the other party.”
This one is really hard for some people to understand—that an argument they’re making might assume a premise of which they’re unaware. They think that you know what you’re assuming. We’re especially likely to violate this rule when we adopt an argument from another source that sounds good, and we haven’t really thought it through.
I got into this argument recently. Someone said something along the lines of, “Liberals are idiots because they appeal to stereotypes.” That’s appealing to a stereotype, but the argument assumes that appealing to stereotypes is idiotic. So, the person was saying they’re an idiot. I couldn’t get them to understand that their argument logically assumed a premise they didn’t believe. They got mad because they thought I was calling them an idiot, and I couldn’t get them to understand that by their own argument they were an idiot. They were calling themselves an idiot, and that’s what made it a bad argument.
We’re responsible for our premises. A lot of interesting disagreements arise because we disagree about the premises, and so we end up having to talk about things like whether stereotypes are bad, if we can reason without them (we can’t), what distinguishes good from bad stereotypes.
6. Starting point rule “A party may not falsely present a premise as an accepted starting point nor deny a premise representing an accepted starting point.”
This violation of the rule often goes by the phrase “begging the question” (a phrase that leads to a lot of confusion, since people now use that phrase to refer to something else entirely—when something we’re arguing leads us to have to consider another question), or “assuming what’s at stake.” It’s really a kind of circular argument.
So, if Emma were to say, “Okay, we both agree that size is unrelated to goodness,” that would violate this rule, since Winston assumes size and goodness are related. (Socrates does this all the time in Platonic dialogues, tricking his interlocutor to agree to a premise they don’t actually believe.) Van Eemeren and Grotendoorst give examples of people sliding premises into an argument via adjectives, adverbs, nouns or noun phrases (if Emma were to refer to “the ridiculous notion that size and goodness are related,” “Chester’s dishonestly arguing that,” “the delusion,” or “the proposition only promoted by idiots that…”).
Again, I’m not saying those sorts of moves are prohibited, but when a disagreement is in this realm, it isn’t rational-critical argumentation. It might be useful; it might be productive; it might be necessary. It just isn’t rational-critical.
I’ve run across the second part of this rule less often—when people try to deny a premise that is an accepted starting point (except in the kind of situation discussed in #5, and I don’t think that’s what they mean here). That’s probably because most of my disagreements are in social media, and so when people try to misrepresent the beginning of the argument, it’s easy enough to go up a thread and quote them.
It does happen sometimes—“I never said that…” when they clearly did. When it’s pointed out that they did say it, you can sometimes have a good conversation—they really did express themselves badly, leave out a word, use terms that have different meanings in different contexts. But if they did say it, and they won’t own it, this isn’t a good faith argument at all.
7. Argument scheme rule “A party may not regard a standpoint as conclusively defended if the defense does not take place by means of an appropriate argumentation scheme that is correctly applied.”
There are a few ways to think of this one, and here I part company with Van Eemeren and Grootendorst. They go on to describe a really limited way of thinking about argumentation that is hard to apply for how people actually think. They don’t seem to imagine disagreements that happen within the messy world of ideological commitments (including religion). I think we are all always within that world.
That we are always arguing from within our ideological commitments doesn’t mean we’re incapable of rational-critical argumentation.
They’re making a crucial point: it isn’t just what you say, but how you’re arguing for it. Winston might argue that little dogs are part of the squirrel conspiracy by: – relying on a single example of a little dog that was friends with a squirrel; – finding one quote from The Book of Dog that can be read as condemning little dogs; – arguing that since Goehring liked little dogs, defending little dogs makes you a Nazi; – appealing to one study that said little dogs are evil; – describing a personal experience with a little dog.
These are all argument schemes, ways of arguing.
If Winston is engaged in rational-critical argumentation (or even good faith argumentation—a lower bar, and a different post), then he is committed to viewing those ways of arguing being valid, regardless of what position they support. So, if Emma can provide a single example, find one quote from the Book of Dog, point out Hitler’s love of big dogs, cite one study, describe one personal experience, if Winston is engaged in rational-critical argumentation, he has to abandon his claim or find new evidence.
If Winston won’t abandon the claim or find new evidence, then his argument is grounded in ways of arguing he thinks invalid. Winston is admitting that he is using “argument” to defend a position he will neither abandon nor open to scrutiny.
In my experience, the sort of person who thinks a single example proves them right, but dozens of counter-examples are irrelevant isn’t open to persuasion at all. They’re also total suckers for cons because they tend to reason from in-group loyalty, and so anyone who appears to them to be in-group can sell them a used car with neither engine nor wheels.
8. Validity rule “A party may only use arguments in its argumentation that are logically valid or capable of being made logically valid by making explicit one or more unexpressed premises.”
For me, this is compressed in the previous rule, since I’ve never run across anyone who violates this rule who didn’t also violate #7. But, basically, if you’re engaged in rational-critical argumentation, you worry about the validity of the arguments you’re making, not just whether you’ve found talking points that make you feel good about the stance you already had.
9. Closure rule “A failed defense of a standpoint must result in the party that put forward the standpoint retracting it and a conclusive defense of the standpoint must result in the other party retracting its doubt about the standpoint.”
Eh, kind of.
A lot of arguments on social media end up with someone doing their impression of the knight that clearly lost. People need to enter a disagreement with some clear sense as to what it would mean to be proven wrong. If Emma and Winston engage in rational-critical argumentation, and Emma can’t defend her position, she really should say, “Yeah, I can’t defend this.”
And that should be an important moment of self-reflection. But she shouldn’t abandon an important belief just because she “lost” one argument. She should, however, look into why she “lost” it. Perhaps she was relying entirely on arguments her in-group media had told her; perhaps the argument moved fast, and she didn’t notice the skeezy moves of Winston; perhaps she needs to develop a more nuanced argument.
Perhaps she needs to get out of her informational enclave, and try to find and read the smartest opposition arguments.
Yeah, actually, we all need to do that.
10. Usage rule “A party must not use formulations that are insufficiently clear or confusingly ambiguous and a party must interpret the other party’s formulations as carefully and accurately as possible.”
It’s always puzzled me that Van Eemeren and Grootendorst make this the tenth rule (Habermas makes it the first).
It seems to me that the beginning of any disagreement is that people mean what they say.
The less charitable interpretation is that this rule is silly. I’ve spent years arguing with people, and I’ve rarely run across an individual who is deliberately ambiguous or who chooses to be unclear. People say things that seem clear to us at the time. If someone posts something, and later tries to say they meant something else, we’re litigating rule #6.
There are lots of people who are deliberately ambiguous (“what is is,” “quality,” “natural”), but that’s bad faith argumentation.
So,, if you do find yourself arguing with someone who refuses to clarify their position, they’re a jerk. They aren’t just refusing to engage in rational-critical argumentation; they’re also uninteresting.
[1] I’m sorry to say that this is not one of my ridiculous hypotheticals. [2] It’s all about paired terms, which is another post I need to write, although Perelman and Olbrechts-Tytecha already explained it very well.
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.
One of the reasons people often don’t try to talk about racism, especially persistent (but kind of low-key) racism, is that the conversations go so badly. And they go badly for two reasons I want to mention here (there are others).
First, it’s that the racism is low-key. By “low-key,” I don’t mean it’s innocuous, or not a big problem. I mean that the racist acts don’t necessarily fit conventional notions of what racists do: there might be a complete absence of racist epithets, an avoidance of even mentioning race, and the people engaged in racism might not be consciously trying to be what they think of as racist. Sometimes it’s done through unconscious passive-aggressive actions and comments, or even behavior that the person thinks is anti-racist (such as endorsing the deficit model of culture). There can be a conscious intent to be “fair,” “objective,” “have high standards” and so on, without the thought “Oh, boy oh boy, how can I make this decision in the most racist way possible?” And it’s persistent. It’s low-key like a low-key note that is playing constantly, that is part of every decision, and therefore tremendously harmful, but it is so constant that people don’t even notice it.
Because it’s constant, it seems normal, and so people can’t see it as racist. And, if you try to name it as racist, they’ll argue it isn’t because it isn’t the open hostility racist epithet kind of racism. Because they can imagine a worse racism, they deflect the criticism that what they’re doing (or enabling) is racist. It’s like saying that because I only robbed one bank, and I know of people who’ve robbed ten, I’m not really a bank robber.
That deflection of racism is the consequence of seeing racism as SO evil that normal people couldn’t possibly engage in it. There’s another odd quality that is the consequence of framing racism as something extreme—the assumption that it must always be at play (leading to the “some of my best friends are X” or “I get along great with this person who is X”). There are some interesting studies from years ago in which people watched videos of a doctor interacting with patients. If the doctor was ethnically out-group and the patient was ethnically in-group, and the interaction went well, then the test subjects (the ones watching the video) were unlikely to mention race. But, if things went badly, the watchers attributed the doctor’s bad behavior to race.
Racism isn’t a feeling; it’s an explanation.
And it’s almost always an explanation about motive. The reason that many white people on public assistance have no problem condemning POC on public assistance as “lazy” and advocating a reduction in the social safety net is that they don’t see themselves as scamming the system—they need the assistance but “those people” don’t. It’s the same behavior (being on public assistance) but judged differently because of the assumption of different motives—the in-group has good motives and the out-group has bad motives.
That’s typical of in-group/out-group explanations, but, when it comes to race, there are tragic consequences. White people on juries are likely to empathize with white defendants and be persuaded by arguments about extenuating circumstances, when they would assume bad motives on the part of POC defendants. And this is all unconscious.
How most people think about racism is so odd—in addition to assuming it has to be conscious, people often assume that it has some weird kind of monocausal quality. So, for instance, if your treatment of me can be shown to have been affected by anything other than racism, then it wasn’t racism. This is the “He isn’t racist, he’s just a jerk” argument. And he may be a jerk, but there’s nothing that keeps someone from being both a jerk and racist.
But, if a person is a jerk to a lot of people, and is a jerk to POC, many people are unlikely to call that bad behavior toward POC racist (“he’s just a jerk”). And they’ll argue it isn’t really racist without looking to see whether there is some kind of difference (it’s more frequent, harsher, has bigger consequences when POC are the object of jerk behavior). It’s a missing stair situation.
The Pervocracy describes a missing stair as:
Have you ever been in a house that had something just egregiously wrong with it? Something massively unsafe and uncomfortable and against code, but everyone in the house had been there a long time and was used to it? “Oh yeah, I almost forgot to tell you, there’s a missing step on the unlit staircase with no railings. But it’s okay because we all just remember to jump over it.”
Some people are like that missing stair. [….] Just about every workplace has that one person who doesn’t do their job, but everyone’s grown accustomed to picking up their slack. A lot of social groups and families have that one person. The person whose tip you quietly add a couple bucks to. (Maybe more than a couple, after how they talked to the server.) The person you don’t bother arguing with when they get off on one of their rants. The person you try really, really hard not to make angry, because they’re perfectly nice so long as no one makes them angry.
The problem is that vulnerable people are more likely to have trouble avoiding the missing stair, and are more likely to get injured. The missing stair affects POC disparately.
It doesn’t matter if the jerk means to treat POC differently; intent doesn’t matter. Even if the jerk was equally a jerk to everyone, if there are greater consequences, regardless of intent, for POC, then it’s disparate impact. And that’s discrimination.
And it’s racist. And it’s racist for someone not to try to stop the jerk from being a jerk if their jerkiness has a disparate impact on POC.
I’m white and argumentative af, privileged, and very hard to intimidate, and even I have given up trying to talk to some people about racism because they are so committed to deflecting the issue to anything other than racism, especially anything other than systemic racism. And if I find it exhausting, then how many other people who are less privileged, less argumentative, and more vulnerable have also given up?
I’m getting really tired of lefties slamming Pelosi for not insisting on impeaching Trump. A far too common argument is that impeaching Trump is the obvious thing to do, and she is too corrupt, craven, cowardly, or corporate to take the obviously correct line of action.
This is a standard—and profoundly anti-democratic—position that people all over the political spectrum take about all sorts of policy disagreements: that the correct course of action is obvious, and anyone who disagrees with that position does so out of bad motives. This position assumes that politics is simple, that there is not legitimate disagreement (at least on this issue), that the person making this argument has perfect perception and knows everything necessary, that, in other words, there are not other legitimate needs or perspectives. That’s in-group authoritarianism. Democracy presumes that we have to argue together because no single individual (or group) can see an issue from every possible perspective—we need input from multiple perspectives.
I have no problem with people believing that impeachment is the right course of action. I have no problem with people passionately believing that they are right, and arguing with vehemence about how right they are. I have no problem with people getting frustrated at not getting their way. I also have no problem with someone coming to the conclusion that an interlocutor is a bad actor, acting in bad faith. But I do have a problem if people are arguing irrationally . The rationality of an argument is determined by how the argument is made, not the emotional state of the people making the argument, nor even (in general) what the argument is.
There are irrational ways of framing a debate, such as beginning with a false binary. One of my least favorite false binaries is the “do this now or do nothing ever.” There are not two sides on whether to impeach Trump, even among people who believe he has committed acts that should cause any President to be impeached.
The Dems could impeach Trump now, begin impeachment hearings now (and impeach any time between now and his reelection), begin impeachment hearings in January 2020, not begin impeachment hearings at all unless he gets reelected. Any one of those positions can be defended through rational argumentation.
What can’t be defended through rational argumentation is the argument that impeaching right now is so much the obviously right thing to do that anyone who disagrees must be corrupt.
Impeachment cannot succeed with this Senate. There aren’t the votes in the Senate, and there is no reason to think—at this point—that that will change in the near future. Even if you think Trump should be impeached (and I do believe that the GOP would be screaming for impeachment had a Dem President done what Trump is doing), that doesn’t mean impeaching him now is right.
If impeaching Trump would be a futile effort because the Senate would never convict, but it starts a cultural conversation about demagoguery and political corruption, it could be the right thing to do.
But, if it doesn’t start that conversation, costs a lot of money, and enables Trump to get reelected, then it isn’t necessarily the right thing, even from within the set of premises in which preventing Trump’s reelection is right. When you passionately (and perhaps rationally) believe that an end is absolutely right, you can get suckered into skipping arguing about the means–it can seem that doing something is better than doing nothing. But it isn’t; doing nothing is better than doing the wrong thing. (There’s a wonderful part of The Phantom Tollbooth about exactly this.)
Doing something doesn’t mean doing this thing. That’s how Bush argued for invading Afghanistan and Iraq–we had to do something. We did the wrong thing. For people who believe that Trump needs to be removed, that our political world needs to acknowledge the depth and consequences of his corruption, impeachment now is not the only option. It might be the right option, but it isn’t the only one. We were not in a world of invading Afghanistan and Iraq or doing nothing about terrorism. We are not in a world of impeaching now or doing nothing about Trump.
There is something odd to me about people who have never managed to get themselves elected to Congress deciding that they know that Pelosi is making the wrong move. She has her flaws, but she is better at politics than many of her critics. Does that mean she’s right? Nope, but it does mean that argument from person conviction that Pelosi is wrong is just that and nothing else—it is not an argument from authority, nor rational support for a claim.
I’m not saying that people who disagree with Pelosi are irrational. I’m not saying that people appalled by Trump’s corruption are obviously wrong to argue for impeachment now. I’m saying that we are not in a binary of the obviously right position and all other obviously wrong positions–about Trump, about raw dog food, about bike lanes, about much of anything.
I’m saying that we are in a world in which being passionately and rationally committed to your position (and it’s possible to be both at the same time)—about impeaching Trump, immigration, raw dog food, abortion, Billy Joel, bike lanes—requires acknowledging that the situation is not obvious, that it is not a binary, and that no one died and made you God.
If you believe that our policy options about Trump are a binary of your position and everyone else, and you believe that only your position about Trump is legitimate, and that the people who disagree with you are irrational people with bad motives, then whatever your position is about Trump, it is not coming from a place of respecting or protecting democracy.
Russell Brand once said: “When I was poor and complained about inequality they said I was bitter; now that I’m rich and I complain about inequality they say I’m a hypocrite. I’m beginning to think they just don’t want to talk about inequality.”
In other words, people dismissed his arguments on the grounds that his arguments were coming from bad motives, simply because they didn’t want to think carefully about his argument.
It isn’t just about people who don’t want to talk about inequality. Just in the last month, I’ve seen people dismiss Pelosi’s reluctance to impeach Trump as motivated by nothing other than her ambition, Pence’s support of Trump as motivated by nothing other than his ambition, skepticism about anti-vax claims attributed to people being in the thrall of Big Pharma, my city’s bike plan for bike lanes as being in the thrall of Big Bikes (not really—I still can’t figure that one out), the scientific consensus about global warming as motivated by sheer greed, people putting plastic bags with dog poop in them into a trash can as being motivated by sheer selfishness. These are all ways of refusing to engage with people who disagree with you by believing, just on the basis that they disagree, that they must be bad people for disagreeing. It’s motivism.
Demagoguery is
a discourse that promises stability, certainty, and escape from the responsibilities of rhetoric through framing public policy in terms of the degree to which and means by which (not whether) the outgroup should be punished for the current problems of the ingroup. Public debate largely concerns three stases: group identity (who is in the ingroup, what signifies outgroup membership, and how loyal rhetors are to the ingroup); need (usually framed in terms of how evil the outgroup is); what level of punishment to enact against the outgroup (restriction of rights to extermination). (Demagoguery and Democracy)
Here’s another way to put that: democracy presumes (and requires) that citizens work to develop informed opinions about our shared policy options. Democracy requires imaginative and reasonable argumentation about policy. Democracy presumes that people really disagree, that no solution is perfect, and that we have to consider policy issues from various perspectives. Demagoguery says we don’t need all that work. It says that we should instead think about politics as a zero-sum battle between us and them. And it’s zero-sum in the sense that, any benefit is a loss for the other side, and any loss is a benefit for the other side. So, we can win just by making them lose.
Demagoguery relies on the belief that there is one right answer to every political issue, and it is obvious to every right-thinking person (sometimes it’s only obvious to the leader in whom we should put all our faith—that’s when it’s cult demagoguery). Demagoguery undermines democracy because it means that the appropriate response to disagreement in a culture is to silence the people who aren’t saying what every right-minded person believes. And they can and should be silenced because their argument has no merit—they aren’t engaged in “good faith argumentation” (explained below). They’re only disagreeing because they’re bad people with bad motives.
“Good faith argumentation” is the term that a lot of scholars use for when people are disagreeing with one another honestly, trying hard to make reasonable (and internally consistent) arguments, listening to one another and representing the others’ views fairly, and are genuinely open to having their minds changed on the issue.
This is a useful concept because it helps you make decisions about whether to argue with a family member over Thanksgiving dinner (is Uncle Fubar willing to engage in good faith argumentation? if not, just change the subject), some rando on the internet (who might be a bot, a hatebot, or a paid troll), your boss (who has weird ideas and might punish you for disagreeing), someone concern-trolling you, or various other people with whom it isn’t worth your time to argue.
So, there’s a difference between deciding that someone is not engaged in good faith argumentation and therefore not worth arguing with because you have clear evidence that they aren’t, and dismissing all significant opposition arguments on the grounds anyone who disagrees with you must have bad motives. That second move is motivism.
And motivism reinforces the way that people there is only one right and simple answer to every complicated issue, and it’s obvious to everyone, explain disagreement. If you believe that, then how do you explain disagreement?
There are two ways: one requires metacognition, and the other doesn’t.
One requires that you think to yourself that you might be wrong, that your position might be right from your perspective, but wrong from other perspectives (and, no, that isn’t relativism[1]), that what is best for you is not best for others—that requires that you think about whether how you’re thinking about this issue is a good way (metacognition). And so you would try to find ways of making and assessing argument to which you will hold all groups, and which you would think a good way of making and assessing argument if an opposition used it (so, if your way of assessing is, “Do I think it’s true,” then you’d have to say that’s a good way for your opposition to assess arguments, and now you’re the relativist).
This way involves perspective-shifting, and listening. It requires that you really try to understand the oppositions’ arguments and why they would seem to make sense to them. Sometimes you discover that their arguments don’t make sense, that you’d reject them if they were in-group arguments, or that they aren’t engaged in good faith argumentation, but you do that on the basis of engaging with the way they’re arguing and imagining them arguing that way for your position.
The other says that anyone who doesn’t see that you’re right (since you can keep looking at the situation and see that you are) must be rejecting the obvious good course of action because of bad motives.
That’s motivism. Motivism is when you refuse to treat opposition arguments as you want your arguments treated on the grounds that their disagreeing means they must have bad motives, and could not possibly be engaged in good faith argumentation.
It’s fine to decide you won’t argue reasonably with someone because you have determined they aren’t engaged in good faith argumentation. But you determine that by how they respond to disagreement. It’s pretty unusual that on the basis of their simply having made a claim you can decide they aren’t engaged in good faith argumentation. [2]
There is, of course, a really simple way to decide if they are: ask if they’re willing to change their mind. At that point, you can decide they aren’t able to engage in good faith argumentation, but they might still have good reasons for their position. You might be the one who is being unreasonable. You can only know if people who disagree with you have good reasons by paying attention to their reasons.
You can only know if a policy argument is terrible by trying to find the smartest arguments for it and seeing if they’re terrible.
But, assuming that simply because someone disagrees with you their position is the consequence of their bad motives means that we can’t argue together. Demagoguery says that the world really is us v. them and anyone who disagrees with you should be silenced, expelled, or exterminated.
And democracy requires that we argue together.
[1] Despite what common media say, there are many kinds of relativism, and the one attributed to “liberals”—that all views are equally valid—is not held by anyone over 14 who is not smoking very bad weed. I only know of two major philosophers who advocated that position (Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Paul Feyerabend), but, since they both argued that people are wrong not to be relativist, that would be the pragmatic fallacy. (That’s the same problem with people who say, “You should never judge anyone,” which is a pretty judgmental thing to say.) Saying that people have genuinely different understandings is not saying that positions are equally valid—it’s saying that many positions other than the one I have are worth being treated just as I want my opinion treated. It isn’t that all positions are equally valid, but that all positions should have the same validity tests applied.
The notion that there is no single position from which the absolute truth is obvious is not an endorsement of any of the kinds of relativism. It’s actually a kind of realism. It is really true that, if you’re a sheep rancher, then you have certain interests, and those interests aren’t the same as someone who wants to redirect your water supply for their cornfield. People really disagree.
[2] But it happens. It happens when you’ve looked at the best sources making that claim, tried to find the best arguments for it, and determined that this claim has never been defended through good faith argumentation.
