Tag: policy argumentation

How to argue badly: assume that need = plan

Two bunnies
Image from here: https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/mammals/understand-mammal-behaviour-rabbits

Imagine this. You and I are house-mates having trouble making rent, and I say, “We should get a bunch of bunnies.” You say, “I think getting bunnies would be spending more money, when our whole problem is that we don’t have enough money.” And I say, “You just think we should get evicted?” And then I go on about how disastrous it would be to get evicted. I accuse you of not caring about whether we get evicted.[1]

You’d recognize my response as unreasonable. Because it is.

Yet, that is exactly the pattern of our public discourse about politics. Too often, we assume that there is only one “plan” (solution, policy, approach), so if someone rejects our preferred plan, it’s because they don’t acknowledge the need. Therefore, our political discourse is all about need, and how horrible (irrational, corrupt, stupid) everyone is who disagrees with our plan. I’ll come back to that, but let’s start with what a good disagreement looks like.

And here’s where some concepts shared by folks in conflict resolution, policy argumentation, and a bunch of other fields come in. It’s useful to think about a problem in terms of seven questions:
1) What is the problem?
2) How bad is this problem? (What are the consequences of not solving it? Will it go away on its own?)
3) What caused this problem? How did this problem arise?
4) What are our options for solving this problem? (What are the various plans we might adopt?)
5) Which plans solve the problem we’ve identified?
6) What is the likelihood of success, ads/disads, costs/benefits for the most plausible plans? How do they compare to one another?
7) What are the likely consequences of the various plans? Is there a possibility of unintended consequences worse than the problem we’re trying to solve?

1) For you and me, the problem is that we can’t make rent, and 2) that’s a bad problem, since if we can’t solve it, we’ll get evicted.

3) So, what caused it? Our problem might be that the rent has gone up astronomically, or that I lost my job and haven’t tried to get another one, or that I’ve been spending money recklessly.

Here’s why the narrative as to how we got here matters: each of those causes implies a different kind of solution.

4) If the only reason is that the rent has gone up astronomically, then one approach might be to see if that was legal—did the landlord violate the lease? Laws regarding rent? If the only reason is that I lost my job and haven’t tried to find another, then it would make sense for me to try to find another job, or it might make sense for you to evict me, and get a new house-mate. If I’ve been spending recklessly, then I should stop doing that, and you might have some trouble figuring out how to get that to happen.

It’s possible that there are several contributing factors, in which case the approaches most likely to be successful might be combinations—I try to get a job and get my spending under control; you give me a deadline by which I’ve gotten a job or you’ll evict me; I try to get a job and we get a third room-mate.

One option is for us to get bunnies; it isn’t necessarily a good option, but it’s an option. And so the question is: why do I think that would solve the problem? How is that related to how we got here? If I am unable to pay rent because I keep getting involved in MLM, and I’ve become enamored of a bunny MLM, it would be reasonable for you to point out that I’m repeating exactly the behavior that caused the problem.

I might argue that I’ve always wanted bunnies, or that getting evicted is making me sad and bunnies will cheer me up—getting bunnies might solve some problem (my desire, my sadness), but not this problem: our facing eviction. In fact, since there would be added expenses, it might make the problem worse.

It’s also possible that there is no solution—that I can’t get a job that would enable us to afford the astronomical rent. In that case, it might make sense to try to find a way to break the lease that doesn’t involve eviction (so we don’t have an eviction on our financial record).

6) Winning the lottery would solve the problem, but that doesn’t mean that spending all our money on lottery tickets is a good plan; the likelihood of success is small. Advocating that we spend all our money on lottery tickets presumes that it’s a successful plan—people sometimes advocate a plan on the grounds that it would work, when in fact it might not. Seeing if the landlord has violated the lease (or the law) might work, but adopting that plan would mean getting expert advice (which might cost). Getting a job might also require expenditures, or be difficult in various ways. Every possible plan has advantages and disadvantages, and some plans are incompatible. We can’t spend all our money on lottery tickets and spend money to get expert advice on the lease. If I’m spending all my time job hunting, I wouldn’t have time to talk with experts about the lease.

7) Talking about unintended consequences is that hardest, I think. It’s basically worst case scenario thinking (how might this go wrong), and many people are superstitious about worst case scenario thinking. But thinking about it ahead of adopting a plan can mean that we put things in place to prevent the worst case from happening (e.g., have a backup plan), or that will let us know things are going south. Hiring an attorney to fight the rent increase might cost a lot of money and simply enrage the landlord, guaranteeing our eviction. Getting bunnies might be a violation of the lease, another way of guaranteeing our eviction.

My basic point is that acknowledging that there is a need is not necessarily associated with one solution. Similarly, disagreeing about what we should do (the plan) doesn’t mean disagreeing that there is a need. You might believe that we should have a lemonade stand, or cut back on what we’re spending in various areas, or get a loan—we have a lot of policy options, and we need to talk about them.

What happens in too much political discourse, though, is the bunny move. We have a problem, and disagree about the plan, and then instead of going through the various questions, we stay on the first. We either accuse the opponent of not really caring about the problem. Or, if we don’t like what we think are the only possible plans, or have no idea what to do, we deny that there is a problem. Neither tactic gets us reasonable disagreement or effective policies.


[1] For added unreasonable points, I might accuse you of being a bunny hater, communist, fascist, or some other group I hate.

That there is a legitimate need doesn’t mean your policy is right

I’m a scholar of train wrecks in public deliberation—times that communities came to bad decisions, although they had all the time, information, and counter-arguments necessary to come to better ones.

And, although they smear across eras, cultures, and particular situations (but all more or less within what is considered the “Western Tradition”), they share the same characteristic: the communities abandoned policy argumentation in favor of thinking of the variegated, nuanced spectrum of policy options actually open to them as a binary between right (loyal, ethical, in-group) and wrong (treacherous, unethical, out-group). That is, demagoguery.

There was, often, a legitimate need, a serious problem. There was also a situation in which the community had multiple—not just two—policy options available to them. But, when people tried to argue about multiple plans, the response was for people to argue that the need was great, and that we must do this thing. And they treated people who wanted to argue about the plan as people who wanted to do nothing.

That was Cleon’s argument. His opponent wanted retribution (severe, in fact) against the rebellious Mytileneans. Cleon wanted genocide, and he framed his opponents’ argument as doing nothing. Cleon briefly argued solvency (being brutal would terrify other “allied” states into submission) and the feasibility argument was pretty clear (I mean, they could kill all the Mytileneans whom they didn’t sell into slavery and raze the city—as the Athenians would in regard to Milos), but he didn’t even acknowledge the potential unintended consequences. His argument was, in an enthymeme, “We should kill all male Mytileneans and sell everyone else into slavery because the rebellion endangered the empire.” In other words, “My policy is good because the need is real.” That enthymeme has an appalling major premise: that Athenians should commit genocide against any city-state that has people whose actions endanger the Athenian empire.

Nor did he engage the arguments his opponents actually made. Diodotus, who argued against Cleon, didn’t disagree about the need–he, too, was outraged about the Mytileneans revolt; he had a different plan. He certainly didn’t advocate doing nothing.

This might all seem very weird, and very distant, but it isn’t. We are always in the world of Cleon and Diodotus–a world in which we can decide that our policies should be about exterminating anyone we think dangerous, and in which we declare any dissidents from that policy to be corrupt on the grounds that, if they disagree with our policy, they don’t care about the need (Cleon’s position); or a world in which we argue the advantages and disadvantages of our various policy options (Diodotus’ position).

After 9/11, I found myself arguing with many people about the proposed invasion of Afghanistan. 9/11 was appalling, and terrifying. It was an extraordinary act of violence against the US, but I didn’t think that invading Afghanistan would solve the problem of anti-US terrorism. I didn’t see why that was the right plan. Clearly, something had to be done, but it seemed to me that solving the problem of terrorism couldn’t be solved by invading one country, especially when it wasn’t even the country from whom the terrorists had come. I was asking for good old affirmative case construction, in which people argue on the stases of feasibility, solvency, and unintended consequences of their plan.

And, over and over, the people with whom I was arguing emphasized the need (as though I disagreed about that) and then said something like, “We must do something” and sometimes went on to argue that doing nothing was a terrible plan. I agreed with the need, and I never advocated doing nothing—I didn’t like their plan. Our situation in regard to Afghanistan was never invade Afghanistan or do nothing. It was never invade Iraq or do nothing.

In the train wrecks I study, that false frame of “do this thing or do nothing” won the rhetorical contest. Arguments about policy were thoroughly evaded in favor of rhetoric that associated one group (the real Athenians, Christians, Southerners, Germans, Americans, progressives, Democrats, Republicans, animal lovers, dog lovers, Austinites) with one policy, ignoring that that group had a lot of policy options.

Being convinced that the need is real never means that you are necessarily committed to this policy. That’s demagoguery.

We are, as citizens in a democracy, never exempted from arguing policy. To say we are is to promote demagoguery.

In my train wrecks, and my own experience trying to argue with people about why we shouldn’t invade Afghanistan NOW, people who want to argue about our policy options (rather than believe that this need means there is only one possible policy option) are told, quite clearly, that they aren’t taking the issue seriously. That’s what I was told, over and over.  That’s what Cleon said to (and about) Diodotus: Cleon said that Diodotus didn’t think what the Mytileneans had done was bad. That’s what the pro-invasion media said—any dissent from this policy was only on the part of people who didn’t take the need seriously, who didn’t care about terrorism, or who actively helped it.

You either supported Bush’s very odd and problematic policy, or you supported terrorism. And that was, and always is, a false binary. A demagogic binary.

When I tried to argue that invading Afghanistan wasn’t necessarily a good policy, I was lectured about the need. Over and over and fucking over. That there is a legitimate, pressing, and even urgent need doesn’t mean this policy is right. This policy has to be defended on its merits, as opposed to other policy options—not as against doing nothing.

Diodotus wasn’t arguing for doing nothing; I wasn’t arguing for doing nothing in regard to 9/11.

At one point in time, my husband and I lived in a part of Kansas City with problematic water. A guy selling water filters came out and talked to us about how terrible the water was. He could never explain why his company’s filter was any better than our other options. The water really was bad, but that doesn’t mean his company’s filter was right. Our choice was not his policy or doing nothing.

A few years ago, a Texas state legislator argued that teen pregnancy is bad, and therefore we should ban suggestive cheerleading. Teen pregnancy should be reduced, but that doesn’t mean that banning suggestive cheerleading is a good policy. He was never able to argue that his plan solved the problem, was feasible, or didn’t have consequences worse than the problem he was trying to solve. What he could argue was that teen pregnancy was bad, and thereby frame anyone who wanted to point out how bad his policy was as a person who didn’t care about teen pregnancy (or liked suggestive cheerleading).

Anti-abortion rhetoric works by advertising the number of abortions and insisting that the only possible solution is banning abortion and restricting information about effective birth control. The number of abortions really is troubling; there is a need. But banning abortion and demonizing birth control (their plan) doesn’t solve that need. It worsens it.

Were people really concerned about reducing abortion, and were they people who considered reducing abortion the most important value, they would model policies on places that have reduced abortions. They don’t. They insist that if you don’t want to ban abortion, you don’t care about the number of abortions (when, in fact, there are better policies for reducing abortion). We don’t have a world in which we either have our current number of abortions or we ban it, but that is the world they promote. It’s a world of the false dilemma—either you agree with my policy or you want to do nothing. That was Cleon’s argument; that was the argument for invading Iraq.

I think impeaching Trump immediately is not the best policy. That doesn’t mean I misunderstand the need to impeach Trump. Showing that Trump needs to be impeached immediately is not the same as showing that Trump needs to be impeached. People who are arguing for Trump immediately aren’t supporting their case by showing that Trump should be impeached.  They need to engage in the policy stases.

My belief that we shouldn’t impeach Trump for a while (perhaps as late as March) doesn’t mean I think people who believe we should impeach him immediately are bad, stupid, or irrational. That guy in Kansas City really might have had the best water filter. But his arguing need over and over didn’t show that his plan was the best. It really might be the best policy to impeach Trump immediately, and that case is made through engaging, reasonably and fairly, the arguments for engaging him later. It is not made by reasserting the need.

That Trump should be impeached is not actually proof that he should be impeached immediately. That there is a need doesn’t mean that this policy is right. And, really, that’s the larger point I’m trying to make continually: our culture needs to engage in policy argumentation. Instead, we have a demagogic world in which people argue need, and then say, if you acknowledge this need, you must support this policy. If you reject the policy, you must be a person who fails to recognize the need.

People arguing for delaying impeachment aren’t arguing for doing nothing. We aren’t arguing about whether to impeach Trump; we’re arguing about when. That’s a good argument to have. Because arguing policy is always a good policy.

Trump will get impeached, and then this argument will appear to be over. But it won’t really. The argument about argument will be with us: arguing need doesn’t exempt you from arguing plan. That there is a need doesn’t mean only one plan has merit.

[image from here: https://www.blackcarnews.com/article/train-wreck]

Two ways of thinking about politics

I have a visceral aversion to binaries, and therefore to any argument that claims something can be divided into two. Yet, the more that I study train wrecks in public deliberation, the more that I think there really might be a binary.

It isn’t, though, that there are two kinds of people, or our political options are usefully divided into two (or a continuum of the two), but that it might be that the ways that people assess claims can be (more or less) divided into two.

Imagine that I say that Chester Burnette is the right candidate for President. That’s a claim.

We can assess  that claim through the filter of  assuming that the in-group is the only group with legitimate claims, objective views, good evidence. So, we look at a claim and accept it (as “objective” or “true”) or reject it (as “biased” or “false”) purely on the basis of whether it supports/contradicts what we already believe, and/or is from a source we consider loyal to the in-group.

We stride through our vexed, complicated, nuanced world confident that we, only we, are people who see things clearly. And we see things so clearly that we refuse to see things that might suggest we aren’t seeing things clearly.

Most of us spend most of our time striding through social media this way.

We assess arguments and claims on the basis of whether the people making them are in-group or out-group, they support in-group v. out-group beliefs.

Or, we can assess every political argument on the grounds of the stases of policy argumentation, which means that we apply standards of rational argumentation equally across groups.

If you look at our political landscape through the lens of proto-demagoguery, then you spend your political life drinking deep from the genetic fallacy (any information that complicates or contradicts the in-group talking points or that criticizes an in-group political figure can be dismissed because it comes from a non-in-group source).

I think there are times that the source of information is relevant to assessing the information, but it’s always a secondary consideration. The first consideration is what their evidence is.

Imagine that you have a cousin who always has a new get-rich-quick scheme. After two or three of those schemes have blown up and lost him a lot of money, you can conclude he has bad judgment and ignore him. It’s the genetic fallacy if you refuse to consider his evidence because he supports Trump; it isn’t the genetic fallacy if he’s consistently been wrong, repeatedly shared false memes and debunked claims, and often misrepresents things he’s read. It’s rational to abandon a source, not because it’s out-group, but because it’s consistently irrational.

After you’ve been burned a few times by a source, you can conclude you won’t rely on it anymore (for me, that would be RawStory, The Drudge Report, PETA, Mother Jones, The Blaze, Rush Limbaugh, and various other sources). I still read them, but I never believe anything I say without checking their sources (which is complicated if they don’t give their sources, and some of them don’t).

I think it’s valid to conclude that PETA is just completely unreliable as a source. But, concluding that PETA is completely unreliable (and, honestly, I think it is) doesn’t mean that criticisms of animal testing, Big Agra, or our reliance on beef are invalid.

To argue that all criticisms of animal testing are invalid because those criticisms are made by PETA and PETA can’t make a rational argument to save its life is an irrational argument. And yet that’s how far too much of our political world works. And, just to be clear, PETA cannot make an irrational argument to save its life. It’s kind of a bad car crash for me–if I want to find an example of a fallacy, and I’m teaching, I just go to PETA. I know I’ll find it there.

And I say this as someone committed to animal rescue, opposed to (almost all) animal testing, vegetarianism.

Our world is not PETA or no restrictions on animal experimentation. Our world is not the NRA or Obama personally kicking down your doors to take your guns. Our political world is not a world of binaries and identities. You don’t have to choose between PETA and all animal experimentation all the time; you don’t have to choose between the NRA and Obama personally kicking down your door to take your guns.

I don’t believe we are in a political world of left v. right. I think that model is not only false, but toxically so. I think it’s like saying that all colors are either yellow or blue. You could organize all colors that way, just as you could organize all the things in your house as square or round, or all animals as bunnies or ants. You could do it, and that binary would be self-fulfilling, but the important questions would be: why that binary? Is that a useful binary? If it’s useful, to whom?

The binary is self-fulfilling insofar as, were we in a world in which all animals were categorized as bunnies or ants, then that would seem natural.

Our political world is no more “left” v. “right” than the animal world is bunnies v. ants.

And here is the important point: so what? Even were our world actually bunnies v. ants that wouldn’t mean we should argue about policies in terms of a zero-sum between bunnies and ants.

I shouldn’t assess the claim that Chester Burnette would be a great President purely on the basis of whether in-group media supports him, nor whether he feels in-group to me. I should consider his policies, whether his voting record suggests he really supports those policies, and what various media say about him. And I shouldn’t decide to dismiss any criticism of him on the basis that only bad people criticize him.

It’s perfectly fair to decide that some sources are engaged in bad faith argumentation, but that they are critical of the in-group or an in-group candidate is not adequate evidence. If I firmly, thoroughly, and completely believe that squirrels are evil because they are trying to get to the red ball (the basic belief of my favorite dog) that doesn’t actually mean that it is rational for me to frame my entire world in terms of pro- or anti-squirrel.

It’s fine for me to be passionate about squirrels; it’s fine for me to ask every political figure about his stance on squirrels. I have that right. But having that right and having a rational argument aren’t the same thing.

If you dismiss every source (or rhetor) who disagrees with what you think is true without considering their arguments, then you are not engaged in rational argumentation. (It’s fine to dismiss some sources and rhetors, either because they’re consistently wrong and you’re done with them –me and PETA–or because they never engage in argumentation to support their point. Oh, wait, that was PETA again.)

All sources should be held to the same standards. If a source consistently fails to represent the opposition(s) fairly, engage in internally consistent arguments, make falsifiable claims, you can decide it’s an unreliable source, not engaged in good faith argumentation. But you’re making that assessment on the basis of how they argue, not what they argue or who they are.

If you read something that says your admired political figure has done something wrong, and you dismiss it as “biased,” since it was critical of your admired political figure, you’re the one who is biased. If you aren’t willing to listen to the most fierce criticism of your political group and figure, then your political position is not a rational position about policies. You’re just a person screaming in the bleachers for your team.

Why I think impeaching Trump now is not a good choice

I think Trump should be impeached. I’d think a Dem who had a similar history of violations of emoluments, security, dishonesty, relations with foreign entities should be impeached. (I’d want a Dem with this history of emoluments violations alone impeached.) Supporters of Trump would want a Dem impeached for far less than what Trump has done.

But the GOP is the party of Trump, and there is no reason to think that the GOP Senators will assess the evidence rationally or non-factionally. I see no reason to think the Senate will impeach Trump because, as many Senators and many Trump supporters say, there is literally no evidence that would cause them to support an impeachment conviction because he (and his supporting media) has persuaded many people they are at war, and so we are in a state of exception.

There are enough Senators who have made it clear that they would not support an impeachment conviction regardless of what comes to light that impeachment cannot win with this Senate.

Impeachment hearings could bring enough evidence forward to put pressure on Senators in purple states, but that pressure is most likely to work if the hearings are happening close to the election—before the GOP Propaganda Machine has time to spin the information. If the hearings end with a Senate that votes against impeachment, and the evidence is good enough, it might mean that people will vote out Senators who voted not to impeach Trump, but, again, that’s most likely to be effective if it’s just before the election.

As much research shows (much of it summarized in Democracy for Realists) a large number of people vote purely on the basis of in-group identification, and another large group votes purely on the basis of what happens just before the election. Thus, if we want the Senate’s impeachment vote to be representative of what Americans want, then we want it to happen close to the election when voters will hold the Senate accountable about impeachment.

If impeachment happens long before the election, then other issues will intervene.

I might be wrong on this, but I think I’m right.

I think people who are arguing for impeachment now are wrong, but their disagreeing with me doesn’t mean they must be irrational or have bad motives; I disagree with them, but I recognize it’s because of how they weigh various factors. I disagree thoroughly, deeply, and completely with people who think we shouldn’t impeach Trump at all, but there are versions of that argument that I think are legitimate and sincere—even if I think wrong. Democracy requires that we do that hard and unpleasant work of distinguishing between arguments that we think are entirely wrong, awful, offensive, even unethical and yet within the realm of arguments we need to consider, and arguments we think are entirely wrong, awful, offensive, and entirely in bad faith.

Being very clear that you’re right doesn’t require believing that no one else could possibly have good reasons or good motives. Believing that democracy requires deep and unpleasant disagreement doesn’t require that we abandon all standards of what arguments we consider.

We are, I believe, at an important point for democracy, but the urgency of our situation does not mean are exempt from the responsibilities of democratic deliberation regarding our policy options. We are not suddenly in a world with only one reasonable option.

This is policy argumentation 101: we might agree on the need, but that doesn’t mean there is only one possible plan.

Defenders of Trump’s China policies are avoiding rational policy argumentation, and his critics aren’t doing much better

I study train wrecks in public deliberation, and they’re all times when the people making decisions lived and breathed a world of demagoguery.  In that world, the media says, “This policy is right because there is a legitimate need, and if you disagree with this policy then you don’t acknowledge the severity of the need.”

At one point in time, my husband and I lived in a part of Kansas City we knew had issues with the water supply. We asked a water filter salesperson to come out and talk to us about their filter. The salesman went on and on about how bad the water was, but was struck dumb when we asked about how and whether his filter would solve the problem better than other filters available to us.

That the water was bad doesn’t mean his company’s product was the right solution.

And, really, that’s what people need to understand about decision making. That there is a legitimate need doesn’t mean that this policy is the solution.

In a culture of demagoguery, we argue about only two points: whether there is a need, and the moral quality of the two groups. So, there is the bizarre (and disastrous) assumption that, once you’ve identified the need, then you decide to hand the problem over to the people who seem trustworthy–in other words, appearing to be authentically in-group.

What I’ve come to believe is that, when you put together those two ways of thinking about political deliberation—we only argue need; we dismiss any criticisms of the in-group policy as “biased—you get train wrecks.

I think Trump’s stance regarding China is just such a train wreck. There is a legitimate need, but neither Trump nor his supporters have put together a good argument as to how his plan solves the problem, is feasible, and doesn’t have unintended consequences worse than the problem he’s solving (which is the major critique of his flopping around), and even his critics aren’t arguing policy.

Trump doesn’t have a coherent plan, so it’s hard to argue why it’s a good one, and it’s hard to argue against it, but his critics could point that out. Instead, most anti-Trump media seem engaged in two-minutes hate about Trump, Republicans, and conservatives.

And that is a culture of demagoguery.

But, it’s important to note that people all over the political spectrum (there aren’t two sides) agree that the need argument is strong. It’s an observable fact China engages in and allows intellectual property theft , and that’s what this trade war is about . The arguments for being tougher with China involve violations of copyright —things that have nothing to do with working class people. There are reasonable arguments that the US needs a different set of policies regarding China.

The water in our part of Kansas City really was bad. That didn’t mean this product was good.

What China is doing is bad, but that doesn’t mean Trump’s policy is right. So, what are the arguments for how what he is doing will solve the problem?

I’ve really tried to find arguments defending his policies, and they’re all need arguments—that what he’s doing is right because China is bad. That is, his policy is right because the need is real.

That’s an irrational argument, and an evasion of policy deliberation.

I’m finding a strong consensus that he’s handling foreign affairs, especially economic, badly, even among normally GOP- standard bearing sites. Here’s Foreign Affairs.  Here’s the Cato Institute. And even American Enterprise, which supports a “tough” stance, says Trump’s policy goals are unclear, and advocates other policies (click on the links). The Wall Street Journal says Trump is losing the trade war with China, partially because it’s working from a “shopping list.”

The very conservative organization Heritage says Trump’s policies are bad. What’s odd is that while many pro-Trump media are arguing Trump’s policies are correct because the need is real (an evasion of rational policy argumentation) many reactionary, free-market, and self-identified conservative sites are the ones engaged in policy argumentation, arguing that Trump’s policies are the wrong strategies–they’re engaged in policy argumentation.

And even media that defend getting “tough” on China aren’t defending his current strategies.

The only defenses I’ve found are along these lines—that his policy must be right because it’s punitive.  That’s interesting since George Lakoff long ago argued that “conservatives” (I would say “reactionaries”) always assume that the correct policy solution to every political problem is to identify and then punish the people who are behaving badly. That is a worldview operating in realm free of falsification, relevant evidence, and rational policy argumentation.

As far as I can tell, no one is engaged in rational policy argumentation defending Trump’s policies regarding China, and that’s important.

And, equally important, the anti-Trump public sphere is not engaged in policy argumentation attacking his policies. This is an exception.

I’ve prowled around various anti-Trump sites and found all sorts of arguments about how Trump’s tariffs are bad because is bad, his policies are grifting since he’s protected his daughter, and other evasions of policy argumentation.

What’s wrong with our political situation is not that GOPpers, who are evil, are in control, nor that Liberals, who are evil, are in control. Nor is our political situation bad because “both sides are just as bad.”

There is, of course, the “horse race” coverage, that reframes policy issues as a race between the two side, and engages in motivism—thereby accepting the demagogic premise that politics is a zero-sum battle between two sides.

There aren’t two sides. Our world is not one in which there is a side that says that China is just fine so we need to do nothing and another side that says China is bad so we need to support Trump’s actions.

The world of politics is a world of uncertainty, nuance, and luck that says we should engage in rational policy argumentation about our various policy options regarding China and not reduce every political issue to “liberals” v. “conservatives”—aka, “us v. them.”

As citizens in a democracy we are not faced with the issue of whether Trump is a good or bad person, whether Democrats are better or worse people than Republicans. We are faced with the issue of how to deliberate effectively about issues that aren’t usefully reduced to us v. them.

What matters about Trump’s policies is that they are policies. Let’s argue about them.

Does Trump have a coherent policy agenda? Or is it really just a very long two-minutes hate?

One argument is that Trump doesn’t have a coherent policy agenda—he never intended to be President, and he was always out for himself, and he is now just engaged in doing whatever the people who fawn on him say is the right policy, as well as whatever benefits him or his family.

The second argument is that Trump represents a new kind of conservatism. According to John Burtka, this national conservatism has these policy goals:

In economics, it would aim to strengthen the middle class, reduce income inequality and develop an industrial policy to ensure economic independence from China for essential military supplies.

Policy proposals could include incentivizing investment in capital equipment and research and development; ending tax advantages for shareholder buybacks; federal spending on infrastructure; promoting skilled trades and vocational programs; busting up inefficient monopolies through antitrust enforcement; slowing immigration rates to tighten labor markets and raise wages for the working class; holding universities liable for student loan debt in cases of bankruptcy; and raising tariffs across the board while slashing taxes on the middle class.

As relates to culture, national conservatives would aim to support families by being pro-life for the whole life. Policy ideas might include paid family leave, increasing the child tax credit, federally funded prenatal and maternal care, reducing or eliminating income tax on families with three or more children, and working toward a society in which a mother or father can support a family on a single income. America’s Judeo-Christian roots would be celebrated, and churches and charitable organizations would be given preference in caring for the poor.

In foreign affairs, national conservatives’ goal is to protect the safety, sovereignty and independence of the American people. America’s regime-change wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen would be recognized as imperial hubris, and anyone involved in their promotion exiled from future positions in Republican administrations. Presidents who ignore congressional authorization for war would be impeached, and members of Congress who eschew their constitutional duties would be stripped of committee assignments and “primaried” in the next election. We would command the seas and space, bring the remaining troops home, secure our own borders and rebuild America.

The third argument is that the pro-Trump media is scrambling to defend the deeply incoherent GOP policy agenda, one that can’t be defended rationally because it isn’t rational, and so they’re deliberately deflecting from affirmative policy arguments to “virtue signaling” and fear-mongering about the Other.

The fourth argument is that ideology doesn’t matter, just outcome. It doesn’t matter if Trump is personally racist, corrupt, senile, as long as he is getting a good outcome for the US. I’m going to leave this one aside, since it’s an actively dangerous argument—it is how democracies die. (Also businesses, but that’s a different post.)

Let’s focus on the second, since it’s the only one that claims that Trump’s actions aren’t either coming from his personal sense of perpetual injury/need for reassurance/greed or from his having done whatever the last person who flattered him said he should do.

And I think it’s helpful to spend a moment to notice that even his defenders rarely try to defend his actions as rationally grounded in a coherent policy agenda that is logically connected to defensible goals. Most pro-Trump rhetoric is that what he is doing is good because it hurts libs, the economy is good, and his demagoguery is great because he’s stigginit to the libs by not being politically correct. In other words, most pro-Trump rhetoric is openly irrational and “HAHAHA WE’RE WINNING.”

That’s interesting.

That’s interesting because the argument of many scholars of rhetoric and political science is that support for Trump is not a rational commitment to an affirmative set of political goals connected to set of policies that can be rationally defended as achieving those goals as much as an affective and tribal framing of politics as whether “we” are better than “them.”

Thus, Trump defenders responding to this criticism by saying, “Democrats do it too” supports that interpretation of Trump supporters: that they can’t defend their policy case(s) affirmatively, but think entirely in terms of a zero-sum between their reductive notion of our political options.

That’s why the second argument matters so much: this is claiming to be a coherent statement of principle on the part of Trump conservatism.

So, let’s take it seriously.

How many of those things has Trump actually done?

In other words, the strongest argument for Trump having a coherent political ideology fails on its face.

That’s interesting.

Our crisis of reasoning

We don’t have a constitutional crisis, or a crisis of civility. We have a crisis of motivated reasoning.

I am a scholar of train wrecks in public deliberation—times when communities decided, after much deliberation, and with many policy opportunities, to pursue a course of action they had plenty of evidence was a bad one. And then, usually, when they got evidence that it was a bad course of action, they recommitted to the clearly bad policy, but with more will—such as the Athenians’ decisions about whether and how to invade Sicily, the US commitment to slavery and then segregation, Hitler’s decisions regarding Stalingrad (and lots of others).

These aren’t just decisions I think are bad, but ones that the communities themselves regretted (sometimes, as with the commitment to slavery, by pretending they never made that decision).

It’s conventional for academics to say, “It’s more complicated than that,” but in this case it really isn’t complicated at all, and the ways people reason badly are well known.

Communities talk themselves into disastrous decisions, while ignoring all the reasonable criticisms of their position, when one position gets associated with loyalty to “us” (the in-group). When we are presented with complicated situations, and especially uncertainty (and, let’s be clear, every important political decision has a lot of uncertainty) we all have a tendency to manage our anxiety about the uncertainty by relying more on reasoning from in-group, and to be more defensive about our in-group. We are motivated to reason in a way that confirms our in-group is good, and all of our problems are caused by the out-group.

Imagine that you are watching your favorite team play, and there is an ambiguous situation, and the ref calls against your team, you will feel outrage on behalf of your team. The rational response (that is, one grounded in a sense that the data about the decision should be the same regardless of in- or out-group) would be to think, “Well, maybe that’s right.” But, if you are motivated to reason about the evidence on the basis of your in-group loyalties, then you’ll be outraged.

And, and this is important, your expressing outrage is also a way of performing in-group loyalty. Having a rational response (that is, one that assesses the call regardless of in- or out-group affiliation) would, especially in the case of a disputed call, show you to be not loyal to the in-group.

We are in a world of evading policy argumentation in favor of framing all policy issues as opportunities of performing in-group loyalty, which means that any argument or policy that makes Them mad is good for us. Political theorists talk about the fallacy of the “fixed pie” model—it’s the sense that the “goods” of our political world (police protection, health care, educational opportunities, infrastructure ranging from clean water to reliable bridges, being able to get political figures to take our concerns seriously) are a fixed amount, so anyone not like you getting a good must hurt you somehow. And, if you can’t get the good, then keeping them from getting a good is a kind of win.

The fixed pie model is part of making every issue an issue of in- or out-group identity. Democrats are framed as pro-immigrant and pro-government, and Republicans as anti-immigrant and anti-government, so, oddly enough, many people will vote Republican because they’re mad about a policy that Republicans enacted.

And that way of thinking about politics hurts everyone. Take, for instance, the issue of immigrants taking the jobs of “Americans” because they’re willing to work for less. The mainstream media (by which I mean Fox, which is the major source of information for a plurality of Americans) is used as an argument for being restrictive at our borders, in a way that means most of us could never have come to the US (and, no, not all the people who show up at our borders are illegal).

If the problem is that employers hire “illegal immigrants” rather than Americans, then a stricter policy at the border is not the sensible solution. If the problem is that Americans can’t get decent wages because “illegals” take the jobs, then the most obvious solution is to have high penalties for employers who hire “illegals.”

But, Trump, who hires a lot of “illegals,” isn’t arguing this point. He isn’t advocating a policy that would solve the problem he claims to care about (he never does). That’s because we aren’t in the realm of rational policy argumentation. We’re in the realm of politics as really about whether good or bad people will get their way, and simply making Them unhappy is as good as getting our way.

Middle income people caring that open borders will hurt their ability to earn a living wage is a legitimate concern. That concern is not solved by separating children at the borders. It’s better solved through various policies, including making it unprofitable for employers to exploit undocumented workers. Why aren’t we arguing about that?

There aren’t two sides on political issues

There aren’t two sides on abortion. There aren’t two sides on gun control. There aren’t two sides on immigration. There are far more than two. But reducing a complicated issue to two sides is politically useful—as Hitler noted, it’s easier to persuade people if you make issues very simple, and as people have noted about Hitler’s rhetoric, that’s most effectively done by reframing the policy issue as simply one instance of the war between Us and a common enemy (Them). That reduction of complicated issues to “us v. them” is appealing to people and therefore profitable for media.

I’m not saying that everyone who uses that method is Hitler, since we all do that when it comes to issues that trigger what is often called “hot cognition”—that is, trying to make a decision about an issue that pushes a lot of your buttons, that gets you hot under the collar. It isn’t just that these issues set off all sorts of passions (fear, anger, desire for revenge, outrage) but that they are issues (or settings) that suggest connections between this argument and beliefs central to your sense of self. In conditions of hot cognition, we tend to think in binaries.

For instance, if your being a dog owner is important to your sense of self—you often describe yourself that way to others, you post a lot about your dogs on social media, you see yourself as someone who loves dogs–, and you read an article about an abusive dog owner, you’re almost certainly in the realm of hot cognition because a dog being abused is very upsetting, and another dog owner (an in-group member) has behaved badly. You’re triggered in three ways: your feelings about dogs, your in-group membership, your need to condemn bad behavior in public (virtue signaling).

People trying to think in the midst of hot cognition tend to rely on binaries, and the binary in this case is likely to be the defensiveness/outrage one. If you take the defensiveness track, you might respond with #notalldogowners (as though that needs to be said), that person was not A Real Dog Owner (the no true Scotsman fallacy), or that person didn’t really abuse the dogs (which, by the way, might be true—this is the person who will go into deep research to find out what really happened, and they might then find that the media coverage is false, or they might end up in embarrassing pedantry).

If you take the outrage track, it might be outrage that an in-group member behaved badly, a need to vent, a need to show that not all dog owners behave that way (so #notalldogowners has two options).

If you aren’t a dog owner, you aren’t necessarily responding differently. If, for instance, dog owners are an out-group for you, then you’re also in a world of hot cognition—this story triggers your sense of yourself as good because not a dog owner. So, you are likely to take this story as an example of how all dog owners are bad without any consideration of whether the report is valid, credible, internally consistent.

If you are a dog owner but that isn’t important to your identity, or you aren’t a dog owner but don’t see dog owners as an out-group, you don’t care. You didn’t click on the link.

Also, if, in fact, it was a really complicated situation, and it’s hard to tell whether this is really is a case of abuse, and media reported it that way, then only that third person—willing to try to figure out what really happened—is going to click on the links.

In other words, topics that trigger hot cognition simultaneously get our attention more effectively than ones that don’t and they trigger binary thinking.

And here is how I’m not sure how to describe it: it isn’t actually the topics; it’s how those topics are presented and interpreted. In a for-profit media, the best way to get the most readers (and therefore, have the best advertising revenue) is to present issues in ways that trigger hot cognition in as many ways as possible.

For instance, imagine that Millard Filmore has been accused of abusing his dogs. An article about Millard might note that he is Irish, Libertarian, left-handed, a member of Toastmasters. Or, it might note that the person accusing him of abusing his dogs is Irish, Libertarian, left-handed, a member of Toastmasters.

If you are running a media outlet in a community (or world) in which pro- or anti-Toastmasters triggers hot cognition you will mention if anyone is in Toastmaters. (If you aren’t, you won’t.) In a community polarized by membership in Toastmasters, an article about a Toastmaster will get more clicks, even if Millard’s membership in Toastmasters is irrelevant to the question of his treatment of dogs (or the reliability of the critic) or transient (he was a member for a brief time years ago). An article about Millard Filmore that gives no information other than that he is accused of abusing dogs only gets those people for whom “dog owner” is in- or out-group.

The world is not actually divided into pro- or anti-Toastmaster, and Millard may or may not have abused his dogs, a question that has nothing to do with whether he is a member of Toastmasters.

But, and this is important, the media has no motivation to report what happened in a nuanced and non-Toastmaster way. That won’t get them clicks.

More important, why should we care about Millard? Does he represent some bigger issue about how dog abuse cases are handled? If the case of Millard exemplifies a common case, then let’s use it for the bigger policy issue. If not, let’s include Millard in our Two Minutes Hate (during which we emphasize his out-group membership) and go on. Or maybe we could skip the Two Minutes Hate, or at least recognize it for what it is.

There are two problems with Millard’s case: first, if we are in an informational enclave, we let our in-group media frame the question of Millard’s behavior as part of the zero-sum argument between pro- and anti- Toastmasters. Second, once that’s the issue, then anyone who does a little research and finds it’s more complicated than what our in-group media says gets condemned by the people in in-group enclaves as Them.

Talking about a complicated issue in terms of outrageous behavior on the part of Them (out-group) is more profitable for media because we don’t click on things that say, “Here is the complicated situation regarding dog abuse.” That doesn’t trigger hot cognition.

The issue of dog abuse isn’t us v. them. Almost no one is in favor of abusing dogs, but there are lots of complicated arguments about how to define it, write laws about it, enforce those laws, finance the enforcement of those laws, prevent it. That argument is boring. Who clicks on links that are nuanced explanations about the vexed situation of animal control?

Who clicks on links about how awful Millard Filmore is?

I’m not saying that being passionate about dog abuse—or politics in general—is bad. It’s great. What I’m saying is that being passionate about dog abuse should mean we know that we are prone to thinking about the issue as a binary, and we need to step back from that. We should care enough about dog abuse that we try to find a policy solution not grounded in hot cognition. We need to be so passionate about preventing dog abuse that we don’t think about it as a binary of two positions.

If, however, thinking about dog abuse effectively and politically (that is, in terms of our policy options) gets filtered by the demagogic assumption that all policy issues are really a zero-sum battle between us and them, then it all gets mixed up with virtue signaling or performances of in-group loyalty, and we’ve got a train wreck. We’ll only get information from in-group sources, we’ll make Millard out-group (and thereby not only condemn him pre-trial, but never have the more important argument about dog abuse—it isn’t and never has been an in- v. out-group issue).

My point is simply that political issues are complicated, and assuming that anyone who disagrees with you does so because they’re bad means that you lose, as a citizen, from understanding other points of view, and our community as a whole loses, because we all slouch into demagoguery. It’s fine if you have a short list of individuals (Uncle Fubar), contexts (Thanksgiving dinner), or positions (I never engage with 9/11 truthers—there’s no falsifiability), but, if you never have the confidence in your beliefs to expose them to argument with people who deeply disagree with you, and who show all the signs of being willing to engage in good faith argumentation, then even you are admitting that your beliefs are indefensible.

Policy argumentation

Image from here.

Policy argumentation involves several steps:

First, identifying the issue (the stasis). This is where so many arguments go wrong—our impulse is to make all issues personal, and either about whether we are being respected enough, or whether our in-group is being respected enough.

Shifting the issue to other stases thus helps us get out of who in the argument is the better person.

These are better stases:

Need:
• What, exactly, is the problem?
• Is it serious?
• Will it go away on its own?
• What caused it (what is the narrative of causality)?

Plan:
• What, exactly, is the plan?
• How will that specific plan solve the problems identified in the need (solvency)?
• Is the plan feasible?
• How does this plan compare to other possible solutions?
• Will there be unintended consequences worse than the need?

Most of our political discourse is about the need, and there isn’t even an attempt to connect the plan with the specific need.

One of my favorite examples of the ways that policy arguments go wrong is when a Texas state legislator proposed banning “suggestive cheer leading.” His need was that teen pregnancy is bad. And it is, and it’s persisted long enough that it will not go away on its own. But his narrative of causality made no sense—he couldn’t possibly claim that teens only had unprotected sex because they were driven wild by cheerleaders.

The plan of banning suggestive cheerleading had no real details; there’s no reason to think it’s feasible—how would the term “suggestive” be defined, how would it be enforced, who would enforce it? Cheerleading can lead to college scholarships, so if the standards hurt students’ abilities to compete effectively, it could have unintended consequences of hurting Texas cheerleaders’ chances of getting college scholarships.

Where the plan thoroughly fails is in terms of solvency. Texas cheerleaders could be required to lead cheers in personal tents, and it would have no impact on teen pregnancy. None.

There are other plans for reducing teen pregnancy, many, and many of them are much better in terms of all these stases.

So, his case completely fails as far as policy argumentation, but it has a certain cunning rhetorical power. It’s hard to point out that this is a stupid argument without sounding as though you’re a perv who wants to watch teenage girls dance suggestively and don’t care about teen pregnancy.

And that’s how most people hear policy arguments. We focus on need; we need to keep in mind all of those stases.

Trump supporters/critics and policy argumentation

I spend a lot of time in public and expert realms of political dispute. And, one thing I’ve noticed in the last two years is that, in the public areas, supporters of Trump have stopped engaging in rational argumentation about him, but they used to. They’re not even engaging in argumentation at all. They’ll sometimes do a kind of argumentative driveby, popping into a thread that’s critical of Trump in order to drop in some talking point about how he’s a great President, and then leaving. Sometimes they give a reason for refusing to engage in argumentation, and it’s an odd reason (critics of him are biased). This is worrisome.

We’re in such a demagogic culture—in which people assume that the world is divided into fanatics of left v. right—that I have to say what should be unnecessary: not everyone who supports Trump is just repeating talking points. In fact, I can imagine lots of arguments for Trump’s policies that follow the rules of rational argumentation (and I’ve seen them, but not in the public realm).  I think Trump’s policies can be defended rationally. Apparently, his supporters don’t.

And that is what worries me.

What I’m saying is that there are people who do just repeat talking points (all over the rich and varied place that is the public sphere) and the kind of people who have always just repeated pro-Trump talking points used to be  following advice on how to engage in argumentation, and now they’re not. That kind of Trump supporter has stopped engaging in argumentation at all.

Just to be clear: I mean something fairly specific by the term “rational argumentation” (not how “rational” is used in popular culture, and argumentation, not argument—this will be explained below). While I’m not a supporter of Trump, I do think his policies can be defended through rational argumentation—that is, a person could argue for them while remaining within the rules described below. That means, oddly enough, that I don’t think Trump’s policies are indefensible, but his followers seem to think they are.

That’s worrisome.

I’ve spent a lot of time wandering around the digital public sphere, and thinking a lot about politics. And I’ve come to think that we are in a culture of demagoguery, in which every policy question is reduced (or shifted) to a zero-sum battle between “us” and “them.” That reduction is false and damaging. There are not two sides to any policy issue—there are far more. And our political culture is not a binary.

Personally, I think a useful map of our political culture would be, at least, three-dimensional, and even then you’d have to have different maps for different issues. But that’s a different post.

In my wandering, I’ve noticed that you can see talking points created by a powerful medium that are then repeated by people for whom that medium is an in-group authority. This isn’t a left v. right thing. (No issue is.)  The talking points on “get rich fast” shifted when James Arthur Ray killed some people; the same thing happened on the “get laid quick” sites after the Elliot Rodger shooting. The talking points on dog sites changed after a study about taurine came out. I know what Rachel Maddow said on her show without watching her show; the same is true of Rush Limbaugh.

The pro-Trump (like the pro-HRC or pro-Sanders or pro-Stein) talking points used to be a mix of what amounted to tips on what to say if you’re engaged in policy argumentation and what amount to statements of personal loyalty (“s/he is a good person because s/he did this good thing”).

And you could tell what the talking points were by what your loyal pro-Trump or pro-Stein (or pro-raw dog food) Facebook friend (or Facebook group) asserted.

What worries me about the driveby dropping of a pro-Trump talking point and refusal to engage policy argumentation is that it suggests that the pro-Trump sources of argumentative points have abandoned policy argumentation. These people aren’t even trying. That’s puzzling.

What makes arguing in some digital spaces interesting is that people are now often arguing with known entities—I’m watching someone make arguments about Trump whom I watched make arguments about Clinton or Obama.

What I’m seeing, in places that used to have rational-critical argumentation in favor of Trump, is that people aren’t even trying. (So, just to be clear, anyone saying that my argument can be dismissed because I’m not pro-Trump is showing that I’m right.)

What I want to use as the standard for a “rational” argument is van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s ten rules for a rational-critical argument. They are:

    1. Freedom rule
      Parties must not prevent each other from advancing standpoints or from casting doubt on standpoints.
    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.
    3. Standpoint rule
      A party’s attack on a standpoint must relate to the standpoint that has indeed been advanced by the other party.
    4. Relevance rule
      A party may defend a standpoint only by advancing argumentation relating to that standpoint.
    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.
    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.
    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.
    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.
    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.
    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.
      These are rules for rational-critical argumentation, so these rules aren’t ways that people have to engage in every conversation.

For instance, I’m not saying that people involved in a discussion can never say that some arguments are off the table, or that people can never refuse to engage with another party (although both of those moves would be violations of Rule 1). I’m saying that, when that rule is violated, the person whose views were dismissed and the person doing the dismissing are not engaged in rational argumentation with each other. They might still have a really good and interesting conversation, or a really fun fight, but it isn’t rational argumentation.

And what I’m saying is that in various places I hang out, supporters of Trump used to engage in argumentation to support their claims, but they’re doing it much less—in fact, not very often. If they don’t do a driveby (one post and out), they say that they won’t argue with anyone who disagrees with them because that person is biased.

Both of those moves—one post and out, and refusing to engage with counter-arguments because the very fact of their being counter-arguments makes them “biased”—is a violation of Rule 1. While they assert that criticizing Trump means a person is so biased that their views can be dismissed, that’s a thoroughly entangled and irrational argument (it’s even weirder when the accusation is “Trump Derangement Syndrome”–it’s weird because many of the people who fling around the accusation of Trump Derangement syndrome still suffer from Obama Derangement Syndrome).

That’s a misunderstanding of what “bias” means and how it functions in argumentation. Of course people are biased—that’s how cognition works—but, if a person is so biased that it’s distorting their argument, then their arguments will violate one of the ten rules. Dismissing a position because the person is biased is a violation of Rule 1. It’s a refusal to engage in rational argumentation.

More important, this move is a rejection of argumentation, and democracy. Rejecting criticism of Trump on the grounds that criticizing Trump shows that the critic is biased is not just an amazingly good example of a circular argument, but a move that makes it clear that the person doesn’t want to listen to anyone who disagrees. Argumentation and democracy share the premise that we benefit from taking seriously the viewpoints of people with whom we disagree.

We are in a culture of demagoguery, in which far too much public discourse, all over the political spectrum, is about how you shouldn’t listen to that person because s/he is biased. And the proof that they’re biased? That they disagree.

If a person is biased, and we are all biased, but their arguments can be defended in rational-critical argumentation, then their arguments are worth taking seriously, regardless of the bias of the person making the argument.

Jeremy Bentham, in the 18th century, identified the problem with dismissing an argument because you don’t like the person making it. Sometimes it’s called the genetic fallacy, and sometimes it’s motivism.

In any case, any person who supports Trump refusing to engage anyone who criticizes Trump on the grounds that that person is “biased” is engaged in the fallacy of motivism (so a violation of Rule 8), and violating Rule 1. (And, so is anyone refusing to engage a Trump supporter if it’s purely on the grounds of their being a Trump supporter.)

Dismissing a person’s position as irrational because they do or don’t support Trump is the admission of an inability to have a rational argument with that person. If I refuse to engage in argumentation with any Trump supporter, purely on the grounds that they support Trump, then we have to start wondering about whether my criticism of Trump can be rationally defended. And, while I see many people who make exactly that move—dismiss the person, not the claims, from even the possibility of rational arguments, because the person supports Trump—I do often see people trying to engage in argumentation with Trump supporters.

I’m not seeing Trump supporters willing to engage in argumentation. I see them willing to make claims, but not engage their opposition rationally. And, as I said, that’s new.

One of the ways of not engaging the other side that I see a lot of people (all over the political spectrum) use is to violate the third rule. That is, imagine that Chester says he really likes Trump’s 2018 missile strikes against Syria, and thinks those were an appropriate response, it’s unhappily likely that Hubert will respond by saying, “Oh, so you think children should be thrown into concentration camps?” Chester didn’t say he liked all of Trump’s policies, let alone his policies regarding families trying to enter the US.

There are two very different arguments that Chester might be making: “Trump is a good President as is shown by his good judgment regarding the Syrian missile strikes” or “Trump’s missile strikes against Syria were wise policy.” Trump’s immigration policy might be relevant for the first argument, but not the second. An even more troubling way of violating the third rule is for Hubert to decide that all Trump supporters are the same, and, therefore, since some Trump supporters deny evolution, and Chester is supporting a particular policy of Trump’s, to attribute evolution denial to Chester. Interlocutors make that (fallacious) move because they believe that the world is divided into two groups, and that the opposition is a homogeneous group—you can condemn any individual out-group member by pointing out a bad argument made by any other out-group member.

[This is another move that people all over the political spectrum make, and it makes me want to scream.]

Right now, one of the pro-Trump talking points is that the economy is strong, and that shows Trump is a great President. People drop this into arguments about issues that have nothing to do with the economy. Even more troubling is that it seems to me that the people making the argument don’t defend it—it’s often one of the argumentative drivebys—but, more important, it’s often irrelevant.

Most recently, I saw it in a thread where someone had made a comparison between Hitler and Trump, about the comparable chaos in the two administrations. And dropping into that argument was a kind of horrible example of why that move—criticism of Trump on X point is false because the economy is good– was a perfect example of violating the fourth rule (about relevance). Whether Trump has improved the economy doesn’t invalidate the claims about how the chaotic administrations are comparable.

That argument also violated Rule 5, in that the unexpressed premise of that argument is that a political leader who improves the economy is good. And Hitler greatly improved Germany’s economy—for a while. So it was a particularly bungled attempt to disprove a point.

I’m seeing that talking point a lot, made by people who would not give Obama credit for improving the economy—saying that Obama simply benefitted from what the Bush Administration had done. So, when the economy is strong, and it’s a President they like, they attribute the economy to the President; when they don’t like the President, they don’t (this, too, is far from unique to Trump supporters).

That’s a violation of the eighth rule—the argument that “Trump is a good President because the economy is strong” has the unexpressed premise of a strong economy meaning that the current President is good. The people who make that argument for Trump but not Obama (or vice versa) reject the validity of their own premise.

For instance, I’m now seeing people who believed any horrible thing about Obama, who worked themselves into frenzies about Michelle Obama’s sleeveless dress, Obama’s golfing, his vacations, the cost to the US of his vacations, the Clinton’s possibly having financially benefitted from their time in the White House, Bill Clinton’s groping, HRC’s problematic security practices regarding classified information defend a President who has done worse on every single count.

They are not reasoning about what makes a good President grounded in claims that apply across all groups.

This is rabid factionalism. This is being foaming-at-the-mouth loyal to your in-group, and then finding reasons to support that loyalty (such as the one free grope argument).

People who are loyal to their in-group engage in motivated reasoning. And, let’s be honest, we all want to be loyal to our in-group. In motivated reasoning, there is a conclusion the person wants to protect, and they scramble around and find evidence to support it—they are motivated to use reason to support something they really want to believe. That isn’t rational, and it leads to arguments that can’t be rationally defended because a person trying to make a case that way has unexpressed premises in one set of claims that are contradicted by the unexpressed premises in another set of claims.

When it’s pointed out to someone that they can’t rationally defend their claims about Trump, I often see them respond, “Well, [example of a Democrat being irrational or having made an irrational argument].”

This is a fairly common kind of response, as though any bad behavior on the part of anyone on “the other side” cleans the slate of any in-group behavior. This fallacious move (a violation of Rule 7) relies on the false premise that any political issue is really a zero-sum contest of goodness between the “two sides.” Since it’s a zero-sum (as though there is a balloon of goodness, and if you squeeze one side, then there is more on the other), then any showing “badness” on the “other” side squeezes more air into yours.

A Trump critic making an irrational argument doesn’t magically transform an irrational pro-Trump argument into a rational one. Now they’re both irrational. It isn’t as though there is a zero-sum of rationality between the “two sides.” (For one thing, there aren’t two sides.)

This is really concerning in a democracy. Ideally, people should be arguing for policies rationally–which isn’t to say unemotionally—notice that none of these ten rules prohibits emotional appeals. The eighth rule, about logical validity, and fourth, about relevance, imply prohibition of argumentum ad misercordiam—which is not the fallacy of an emotional appeal, but the fallacy of irrelevant emotional appeal.

I’m not concerned that there are people who support Trump; I’m not concerned that there are Trump supporters who are clearly repeating talking points from their media; I’m concerned that those talking points are clearly not intended to be used in policy argumentation; I’m concerned that support of Trump is not even trying to fall within the realm of rational argumentation.
Unhappily, critics of Trump, it seems to me, are also arguing about his identity, and not the rationality of his policies.

Trump has policies. If they’re good policies, they can be defended through rational argumentation. If they can’t, they’re bad policies.

One of the most troubling aspects of the now dominant pro-Trump rhetoric is that it depends on an argument about his “success” as a businessman that is similar to the argument made about the “success” of his proposals. As it has come out that his businesses lost money hand over fist, people are arguing that he was a successful businessman because he personally succeeded financially. This isn’t an unusual argument—I was surprised when I saw it for a motivational speaker whose claims of personal wealth were exposed as completely false. The argument was, if you can rack up that much debt, that’s a kind of success. In other words, it’s saying that, as long as the method is working, it’s a good method.

That’s a little bit like describing falling out of a plane as successful flying—right up to the moment of contact with pavement.

That we are now getting a good outcome is not rational policy argumentation. Nor is that Trump is or is not a good person.

Trump shouldn’t be defended or attacked as a person, and his policies should be attacked or defended regardless of his person. Neither defending nor attacking his policies should be a reason to dismiss the argument being made. We need to argue policies.