Tag: populism

Authoritarian Libertarianism and the Freedom to do what I say

face mask

[The third RSA paper]


It wasn’t particularly hard to predict that mask-wearing would become a point of contention—considering that our culture of demagoguery weaponizes choices as small as the color of a tie, and that Trump was insistent on associating mask-wearing with weakness. What was somewhat surprising was that the issue wasn’t completely factionalized—that is, mask-wearing became a controversy in communities we don’t necessarily associate with Trump or the Republican Party, such as the wellness community.

In the abstract for this talk, I said that mask wearing was politicized, but that’s wrong—it was depoliticized, in the sense that it was removed from the realm of policy deliberation, and became a performance of in-group identity. There were a lot of factors that contributed to that outcome, but one especially popular explanation is that too many people rejected the advice of experts, instead relying on media pundits, youtube celebrities, or their own strong convictions. I think that explanation is inaccurate and unhelpful; in fact, I’m going to argue that it’s grounded in a way of thinking about knowledge, discourse, and authority that is the source of the problem.

On the contrary, I think the problem was too many people—not necessarily from just one place on the political spectrum—approached the issue from the perspective of what I’ve awkwardly termed “authoritarian libertarianism.” I’m not wed to the term, but also not wild about some of the other available terms.

This paper has two parts—for most of it, I’ll explain what I mean by authoritarian libertarianism, and then I’ll explain why I don’t think it’s usefully characterized as either anti-intellectualism or a kind of populism.

Authoritarian libertarianism uses a rhetoric of freedom and liberty to advocate and enforce policies of control, forcing everyone to abide by what in-group authorities determine is correct behavior and belief. I don’t think the rhetoric is necessarily insincere. My favorite example of authoritarian libertarianism is how the Massachusetts Bay Colony defended its practice of punishing, expelling, and sometimes hanging dissenters as consistent with the “freedom of conscience” guaranteed in its charter. John Cotton’s 300-page The Bloudy Tenent, Washed and Made White in the Bloud of the Lambe (1647), for instance, argued that forcing a person to do what Cotton believed right was not a violation of their conscience, but was allowing them to follow their conscience.

The assumption that he and others made is that there is not really any disagreement about what is right or wrong—a person might be momentarily mistaken (“in error” he says) but will recognize their belief as wrong as soon as they are told so by an authority. If they “persist” in error, they are persisting in doing something even they know to be wrong. (1 Timothy 5:20 is usually the proof-text cited: “As for those who persist in sin, rebuke them in the presence of all, so that the rest may stand in fear.”) As long as someone persists in error, they can be forcibly silenced. Freedom of conscience, for Massachusetts Bay authorities like Cotton, was the freedom to submit to their authority.

This isn’t a disagreement about freedom, but about knowledge—authoritarian libertarianism presumes that determining what’s right is straightforward. And here we get entangled in popular understandings of authority and expertise. As Johanna Hartelius has shown, the expert/expertise connection is complicated and varied, and shouldn’t be seen as question of identity, but of relation. Expertise is not an object or epistemic quality experts autonomously posess, but, as she says, “a social and symbolic process, a relational logic at once real and imagined, theoretical and pragmatic” (164). If you accept her argument, and I think it’s a good one, then being an expert and being right are not synonymous—people, including experts, might be mistaken. If, however, you listen to a lot of popular discourse, the assumption for many—not everyone—is that an expert is right, and the right person is the expert. The term “expert” isn’t always used; sometime “authority” or “prophet” might be the preferred term.

Many people explain the controversy over masks in a simple binary of right and wrong—people refused to listen to what authorities said, and instead relied on amateurs. This explanation is often associated with the narrative of fall—there was a time when people listened to authorities and we no longer do. I think this is wrong on both counts. People who refused to wear masks did listen to authorities—they assessed authority differently. To give just one example: some people believe that God is a micromanager, and so that every thing that happens is because he is willing it in that moment. For them, covid is a religious—not medical—issue. So, for them, the relevant expertise is not epidemiology but prophecy.

I’m not saying looking at covid that way is just as valid as seeing it as a public health issue (it isn’t), but I am saying that telling them to listen to experts isn’t an effective rhetorical or deliberative strategy. They believe they are.

And, really, expert discourse doesn’t have an unblemished history when it comes to decision making. Eugenics was the mainstream discourse of experts who had all the right degrees, and it legitimated forced sterilization, segregation, racist immigration policies, criminalizing inter-racial marriage (Jackson). When I point that out to people who tell me that the problem is that people no longer defer to authorities, they say that the people advocating racialist science weren’t real authorities because they were wrong (i.e., no true Scotsman).

The notion that we should simply do what experts say—Cotton’s argument—denies that experts disagree, and that any major policy decision requires people with wildly different areas of expertise (in the case of masks, constitutional law specialists, epidemiologists, historians, communication scholars, public health scholars). It also denies that coming to the optimal policy doesn’t mean doing The Right Thing, but deliberating about options. And there were and are rarely two.

The fantasy that many people have is that reliable expertise is an identity issue—the “autonomous” model of authority (Hartelius). People believe that we can assess reliability instantly, or with some quick checks of credentials. The Stanford Project on “Evaluating Information” shows that students, even with good instructions to do otherwise, try to assess the credibility of an argument without going “beyond the site itself” (Wineburg et al. 5). Students believe they can assess the reliability of an argument on the basis of whether it looks true, is easy to understand, has statistics (McGrew et al. 4-5).

Checklists—much like the ones we give students in classes—may make the situation worse, because they encourage students to try to assess an argument autonomously. I don’t mean that in the way that Hartelius uses the term, but in the sense used by advocates of New Criticism; that is, treating a text as an autonomous mobile floating in space. McGrew et al. show that, not only is this how many students assess credibility, because it’s what checklists advocate, but so do many professors:
“College students and even professors approached websites using checklist-like behaviors: they scanned up and down pages, they commented on site design and fancy logos, they noted “.org” domain names, and they examined references at the bottom of a web article. They often spent a great deal of time reading the article, evaluating the information presented, checking its internal logic, or comparing what they read to what they already knew. But the “close reading” of a digital source, the slow, careful, methodical review of text online—when one doesn’t even know if the source can be trusted (or is what it says it is)—proves to be a colossal waste of time.” (8)
Achen and Bartels’ research similarly shows that beliefs are partisan, and that we tend to assess information through partisan lenses—regardless of how well-educated we are, or how much we think we are logical—in conditions when asked to treat an argument autonomously. The subjects for their studies included faculty—this is not something only They do. Ryan Skinnell, using a more nuanced reading of “logos” than is in many textbooks (it is not the same as what we call “logic”), points out that an argument can seem perfectly “logical” simply because we agree with the major and minor premises:
“If you accept the stated premise (children are being held as sex slaves in the basement of a pizza parlor), as well as an unstated premise (it is reasonable for an individual to take up arms to confront what they believe is injustice), then the logic of the argument is perfectly reasonable—even eminently moral.” (561)
Assessing arguments as though they were autonomous mobiles in space, and as though expertise is autonomously determined, keeps us free to believe what we already believe.

I’m not using the term “authoritarian” in the sense that Bob Altemyer or the Frankfurt School use it—as an ideology—nor to refer to a kind of regime (as political scientists sometimes use the term). I mean authoritarian as a model of public discourse. Experts—real experts—speak the truth; and normal people (those whose perception isn’t blinded by bias) recognize what they’re saying as true. Thus, credible authorities are always in-group, and always confirming and conforming to in-group beliefs. People who rejected the expertise of epidemiologists believed that scholars with degrees from impressive places who were repeating the major scholarly consenses were only really experts if they were in-group.

This way of thinking about truth, authority, and public discourse isn’t circular as much as a Mobius strip. We should do what authorities say because they speak the Truth; we know they’re speaking the Truth because they’re authorities, and we know they’re authorities because what they’re saying is True. True statements about the world are true on their face, and while the explanation for why they’re true might be complicated (as in some conspiracy theories) there is still the instant resonance that signals Truth. Thus, deliberation is not only unnecessary, but actively dangerous because it’s likely to confuse issues. The more voices there are in the argument, the more likely people will fall for false prophets.

Cotton exemplifies this authoritarian model of public discourse, but this view is not necessarily religious. Secular figures like Richard Dawkins or Donald Trump appeal to it; it’s popular in management literature obsessed with “decisiveness” and charismatic leadership; of course it’s part of cults, and cult-like organizations. Just as it isn’t necessarily religious, it isn’t necessarily political. At least as described in Bad Blood, Theranos was a highly authoritarian organization that described itself as a place of creativity and innovation—that is, freedom. To the extent that it’s a model of political authority and discourse, it isn’t restricted to one place on the political spectrum, nor is it evenly distributed.

But, there do tend to be political implications. Authoritarian libertarianism says that, because we can cite true authorities to support our position, we don’t have to engage in argumentation; we don’t have to deliberate with people who disagree. At its best, it says that we have moral license to disenfranchise some groups; at its worst, it says we have a moral obligation to silence them. So, as with the Massachusetts Bay Colony, communities in which authoritarian libertarianism is dominant often end up with frequent expulsions and witch hunts.

I’ve used the term “expert,” but that isn’t always the term that is used. In fact, many authoritarian libertarians believe that experts—that is, scholars whose expertise comes from deep learning and who present themselves as advocating a scholarly consensus—are blinded or confused by too much learning. For that reason, this way of thinking about discourse and decision-making is sometimes called anti-intellectualism. I’m dubious about that term, though, because many of the people who advocate authoritarian libertarianism present themselves as intellectual, and are proud of their learning. David Duke still brags about his PhD., and as Kiara Walker points out in her dissertation, Richard Spencer bragged during testimony in his recent civil trial that he’d read “quite a bit of Jacques Barzun” and “so much philosophy” (22).

This model is also sometimes called populism because the distinction between those who should be followed and those who should be rejected is so often associated with imagining that the world is broken into a hostile binary of authentic (i.e., directly connected to truth) and corrupt (both dishonest and misled). Cass Mudde defines populism as
“an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people” (Mudde 2004, 543, qtd. in Handbook 29).
In populism, the people v. elite is not necessarily a distinction of class or education. What distinguishes the two groups, according to Mudde, is morality. Someone might be tremendously wealthy or well-educated, and still be “of the people” because they are simply authentic people who got rich or went to school:
“The essence of the people is their purity, in the sense that they are ‘authentic,’ while the elite are corrupt, because they are not authentic. Purity and authenticity are not defined in (essentially) ethnic or racial terms, but in moral terms. It is about ‘doing the right thing,’ which means doing what is right for all the people.” (Handbook 31)
“All the people” is not an empirical claim, but a circular and essentialist one—“the people” being in-group (since they are the only people that really count).

Paul Johnson’s recent and wonderful book I the People makes an elegant case for what he calls “conservative populism,” an ideology that is similarly muckled in terms of domination, submission, and freedom. So, populism might be a better term than authoritarian libertarianism, but I’m not sure. Johnson’s book ties the authoritarianism he’s describing to conservative ideology, and what I’m awkwardly calling authoritarian libertarianism is all over the political spectrum, and often used in non-political situations.

In addition, some of the people who use this approach are openly elite, such as John Cotton or Richard Dawkins, who have fairly nasty things to say about the masses. Cults and authoritarian religions sometimes have a rhetoric of an elect, and various kinds of paternalistic organization or political structures assume an authoritarian system that frees others through control (I’m thinking of Erich Fromm’s argument in Escape from Freedom). I think we should be careful about overextending the concept of populism because it is such a useful one—if every movement is populism, then the term loses its explanatory force.

Although I think it matters what we call it, as I said, I’m not wed to the term. What seems important to me is that we recognize that there is an approach to authority and discourse that is damaging to deliberation, and to which we are all prone. (I cringe to think about how often I probably posted or shared something about what idiots people were for rejecting expertise.) Any term that invites us to see this as something They do is just repeating the same mistake.

I’m also not saying that all experts are equally reliable, and that everyone “has a right” to their own authorities. I mean we do have a right to our own authorities—what would it mean not to have a “right” to an authority?—I’m not talking about rights. I’m making a very pragmatic argument about rhetoric.

It doesn’t work to tell people that they’re wrong to ignore authorities when they think they’re paying attention to true authorities. If we describe the problem with any public policy as a binary of people who did or didn’t submitting to authority, we have a damaging model of authority. What I want to emphasize is that the whole issue of mask wearing got caught in machinery of a system that expels disagreement and deliberation in favor of a binary of us and them. And so we spent and spend a lot of time arguing about whose authorities were or are really authoritative, by which we mean who is in-group and who is out-group—to whom should we submit. And I think that was a mistake. I think that’s the wrong argument.


Achen, Christopher H. and Larry M. Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. Print.

Cotton, John, and Roger Williams. The Bloudy Tenent, Washed and Made White in the Bloud of the Lambe … Wherein the Great Questions of This Present Time Are Handled, Viz. How Farre Liberty of Conscience Ought to Be Given to Those That Truly Feare God? And How Farre Restrained to Turbulen by John Cotton … London: Printed by Matthew Symmons for Hannah Allen …, 1647. Web. Accessed May 16, 2022..

Hartelius, Johnann. Rhetoric of Expertise. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022, Print.

Jackson, John P. Science for Segregation : Race, Law, and the Case Against Brown V. Board of Education. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Print.

Johnson, Paul Elliott. I the People : The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States. 1st ed. University of Alabama Press, 2022. Print.

Mcgrew, Sarah et al. “The Challenge That’s Bigger Than Fake News: Civic Reasoning in a Social Media Environment.” American educator 41.3 (2017): 4–. Print.

Mudde, Cass. “Population: An Ideational Approach.” The Oxford Handbook of Populism / Edited by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo and Pierre Ostiguy. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2017. Print. 27-47.

Richard Spencer testimony. Sines, et al. v. Kessler, et al., 3:17CV72, 11/5/2021 https://files.integrityfirstforamerica.org/14228/1639753607-2021-nov-5-moon-sines-v-kessler-317cv72-cvl-jt-day10-final.pdf

Skinnell, Ryan. “Teaching Writing in the (New) Era of Fake News.” College composition and communication 72.4 (2021): 546–569. Print.

Wineburg, Sam, et al. Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Online Civic
Literacy: Executive Summary. Stanford History Education Group, 2016.

“Populism” is not restricted to the plebians; Or, don’t bathe in bagels

A doodle of someone bathing in bagels, and a maid offering more.

I talk a lot about models of democracy. In this post, I want to talk about a kind often called populism, largely because I’m worried about the implications of that term. I think it hinders our ability to think usefully about policy deliberation because it implies that a flawed model of deliberation is restricted to one group. Thus, once again, it makes inclusive democratic deliberation an issue of identity rather than approach.

Several models of democracy presumes that we really disagree, and there is no one viewpoint from which the best policy is obvious. We really disagree because we have different values, priorities, perceptions, interests, needs, experiences, and so on. There is no one right policy, but a large number of policies that are good enough in terms of appropriately sharing the burdens and benefits.

If we operate from within this sort of model, then, if people come to a decision that seems wrong to us, we try to figure out the perspective from which it makes sense, or the negotiations and compromises that might make this a “good enough” decision. Sometimes there is none, btw, and it really was a bad decision. Or it’s only good from some a narrow perspective that it’s really not good enough, if the goal is inclusion. There are lots of decisions that people later regretted that don’t look any better close up–refusing to change the “Jewish” immigration quota in the late 30s, eugenics, Jim Crow (I’ve picked examples that were bipartisan in their support, btw).

There are other models that presume that there is one perspective from which it is obvious what is the right thing to do, and I want to talk about one kind of that model–it’s the one to which we’re appealing when we decide that an entity has come to an obviously bad decision, and it’s obviously bad because it hurts or doesn’t help us. It assumes that there is no point of view with any validity other than our own. It assumes that the right course of action is obvious to a sensible person. There is a disengaged elite that has made a decision that ordinary people know is wrong.

This model is often called populism, but I’m not happy about that term, since it implies that the “populace” engages in this approach to politics and not elites.[1] The problem is that very few people think we’re in the elite, and yet, if you think about elite in terms of education or class, elites engage in that rhetoric just as much as any other group.

There is, for instance, the “makers v. takers” rhetoric, which is used to justify massive tax breaks to the very wealthiest, because they’re ordinary, in a way, and opposed to “the liberal elite” or “the Washington elite” who want intrusive government. Wealthy people complain about professors as an intellectual elite, as though wealthy people are oppressed by Ernesto Laclau.

I’ve talked about it before as “obvious politics,” which might be the right way—the right course of action is what looks obvious to MEEEEEE. It’s also called “stealth democracy” by some political scientists. In my grumpier moments, I think the right term might be something like narcissistic politics. Because of the rise of discussion about narcissism, we’ve lost the term “self-centered,” and that might be the right term.

In any case, to make the point that it isn’t about the unwashed, uneducated, and gullible masses being seduced into thinking badly about things, I want to talk about some academic conflicts in which I’ve seen super-smart people reason exactly this way—whatever we call it. It’s a way of approaching politics that assumes that there is one viewpoint (MINE) from which it’s obvious what should be done.

One example was when there was discussion at one of my universities of shifting the academic calendar in a particular way, and many faculty wanted the change enacted immediately. This came up at a Faculty Council meeting, of which I was a member since obviously I am paying for sins of a past life that must have been pretty fun. Most faculty talked purely in terms of how it would help them and their students. Several people from the College of Engineering said that enacting this change immediately would cause the University to lose its accreditation with important engineering entities. They agreed with the problem (classes on the day before Thanksgiving) but disagreed about the plan. The majority of faculty voted for the change happening immediately.

This was at a University at which the College of Engineering losing accreditation would severely damage the university as a whole. But, the faculty who voted for changing the calendar immediately didn’t listen or didn’t care. They just looked at it from their perspective.

So, anytime that people who pride themselves on their education are outraged that Those Idiots are voting for something or supporting a candidate or party who will hurt them in the long run, I think about that meeting. It isn’t just Them. That’s what’s the matter with, for instance, What’s the Matter with Kansas.

The second example is actually a lot of examples, and it has to do with the cost of academic conferences. They are expensive, and travel is expensive, and departments often don’t support faculty adequately for attendance, or graduate students at all. Faculty at less prestigious colleges and universities sometimes have neither the salary nor university support to attend. Yet, attending conferences is tremendously useful for teaching, research, job-hunting, networking. Thus, the cost of conferences reinforces all sorts of nasty hierarchies in academia. It is a really important problem about which a field that claims to be inclusive really needs to work. We’re agreed on the need.

The plan, however, is up for argument, and one recurrent plaint is that the conference hotel is expensive, and the organization is clearly out of touch, greedy, or in cahoots with the hotels, and so conferences should be hosted at less-expensive hotels. There are complaints that rooms at the conference hotel are expensive, for instance, or that hosting an event in the hotel is pricey, or that the conference registration is far above what so many people can easily afford. Sometimes the accusation is that the organization is clueless about the financial situation of most academics.

My favorite moment, by the way, is when someone complained that the bagels at the conference hotel were expensive, in a somewhat incoherent post but that seemed to suggest they thought the organizers were bathing in champagne on the basis of the profits of bagel sales.

And, just to be clear, I made all those complaints, and more, until I organized a conference. I looked at this issue through the model of narcissistic politics. I’d love to say that I reasoned my way out of it, but I didn’t. I experienced my way out of it.

I made those complaints (except the bagel one) because, from my perspective, it looked like an obviously stupid set of decisions.

In fact, the whole situation is much more complicated and boring than these fantasies of obviously stupid or nefarious conference organizers imply. (Although I’ll admit I kind of love the image of some conference organizer trying to bathe in as much champagne as they could buy with what they profit from the sale of bagels in the hotel lobby, or perhaps even in bagels, hence the doodle above.)

Before I was involved in hosting a conference I didn’t consider so many things, such as the cost of the rooms in which panels were held. Nor was I even remotely aware of the normal cost of the hotel rooms that attendees might get and thus how huge the discount often is, or how that discount is achieved. I’m not sure any academic organization profits from its annual conference; the registration fees barely cover the costs (and some lose money). Sometimes the host covers the losses. I’m not aware of any conference in my field that profits from the annual conference.

In my (limited) experience, the registration fee pays for the rooms in which the panels are held, and the organization has to guarantee a certain number of room rentals in order to get the substantial reduction on room rates (and it is a substantial reduction), and that room rental is connected to a lower price on the conference space. In other words, an organization can’t host the conference at cheaper hotels because those hotels don’t have the space for the panels, and it can only get that panel space by guaranteeing a certain number of room rentals. The more room rentals it can guarantee, the greater the room rental discount.

So, I was wrong to imagine that conference organizers were bathing in bagels, or in the profits from bagels.

I’ve come to think that the problem is big, and the solutions aren’t obvious, and that organizations are working on them–they involve things like funds for certain kinds of attendees, tiered registration rates, perhaps more virtual attendance options (which doesn’t help with networking), organizational support for regional conferences. What I do know is that leaders of academic organizations worry about this a lot.

There are, of course, people in power who are greedy, narrow-minded, malevolent, corrupt, stupid, and so on, and we need to condemn them. My point is simply that no one died and gave us omniscience. We see as through a glass darkly, and a glass that only shows part of the possible world. That tendency to assume that only people like us matter, and people like us see the world in an obvious and unbiased way, isn’t about education, in-group membership, or some universal genius. It’s about information. We can’t know whether a decision is bad without trying to hear why people have made the decision they have. That it looks bad to us doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad.

Unless they’re bathing in bagels. That’s a bad decision.

[1]Paul Johnson talks about “conservative populism,” meaning a specific rhetoric mobilized by groups that claim to be “conservative” (spoiler alert: they aren’t), and he uses the term precisely and usefully, but I think one still might infer that populism is unique to people who self-identify as “conservative” (which is very clearly not what he means). Chip Berlet and Mathew Lyons have a book I still like, in which they talk about “Right-Wing Populism” which has as examples more than one Democrat, or supporter of the Democratic Party. Like Johnson, the term “right-wing” is restrictive. An awful lot of really good and smart work talks about populism more generally, which appears all over the political spectrum. But, again, it seems to me that, while no one is claiming that only people on that point of the political spectrum appeals to populism, there does seem to be the implication that it’s a vice of “the populace.”

“Sign, sign, everywhere a sign:” The Trappings of Truthful Information

I mentioned to someone that I thought people often mistake signs for proof, when signs aren’t even evidence. And that person asked for clarification, so here is the clarification.

What I was trying to say is that some people support their point via signs rather than evidence. I’ve often made the mistake of thinking that the people who appeal to signs rather than evidence misunderstand how evidence is supposed to work, but I eventually figured out that they don’t care about evidence. They care about signs. Explaining that point means going back over some ground.

A lot of people are concerned about our polarized society, identifying as the problem the animosity that “both sides” feel toward each other, and so the solutions seems to be some version of civility—norms of decorum that emphasize tone and feeling. I have to point out that falling for the fallacy of “both sides” is itself part of the problem, so this way of thinking about our situation makes it worse. The tendency to reduce the complicated range of policy affiliations, ideologies, ways of thinking, ways of arguing, depth of commitment, open-ness to new ideas, and so many other important aspects of our involvement with our polis to a binary or continuum fuels demagoguery. It shifts the stasis from arguing about our policy options to the question of which group is the good one. That is the wrong question that can only be answered by authoritarianism.

I think we also disagree about ontology. I’ve come to think that a lot of people believe that the world is basically a stable place, made up of stable categories of people and things (Right Answer v. Wrong Answers, Us v. Them). It isn’t just that the Right Answer is out there that we might be able to find; it’s that there is one Right Answer about everything, and it is right here–the Right People have it or can get it easily. We just need to listen to what the Right People tell us to do. I want to emphasize that these stable categories apply to everything—physics, ethics, religion, politics, aesthetics, how you put the toilet paper on the roll or make chili, time management, childraising….

There are many consequences of imagining the world is a place of fake disagreement in which there is one Right Answer that we are kept from enacting, and I want to emphasize two of them. First, in this world, there is no such thing as legitimate disagreement about anything. If two people disagree, one of them is wrong, and needs to STFU. Second, the goal of thinking is to get one’s brain aligned with the categories that are in the structure of the world (to see the Right Answer), and people who think about the world this way generally believe there is some way to do that. In my experience, people who believe the world presents us with problems that have obvious solutions are some kind of naïve realist, but it’s important that there are various kinds of naive realist (with much overlap).

There are naïve realists all over the political spectrum. That doesn’t mean I’m saying all groups are equally bad–that’s an answer to the question we shouldn’t waste our time asking [which group is the good one]. Instead of arguing about which group is good, we should be arguing about which way of arguing is better. I don’t think that there is some necessary connection between political ideology and epistemology—there are very few relativists (it’s hard to say that it’s wrong to judge other beliefs without making all the nearby cats laugh), but realists of various stripes I’ve read or argued with have been self-identified anarchist, apolitical, conservative, fascist, leftist, Leninist, liberal, Libertarian, Maoist, Nazi or neo-Nazi (aka, Nazi), neoconservative, neoliberal, objectivist, progressive, reactionary, socialist, and I’ve lost interest in continuing this list.[1] I’ve also argued with people from those various positions who are not realists (which is a weird moment when I’m arguing with objectivists), and it’s often the people who insist on the binary of realist v. relativist who actually appeal to various forms of social constructivism (Mathew McManus makes this point quite neatly).[2]

I’ve talked a lot about naïve realism in various writings, but I’ve relatively recently come to realize that there are a lot of kinds of naïve realism, and there are important differences among them. They aren’t discrete categories, in that there is some overlap as mentioned above, but you can point to differences (there are shades of purple that become arguably red, but also ones that are very much not red–naïve realism is like that). For instance, some people believe that the Truth is obvious, and everyone really knows what’s true, but some people are being deliberately lazy or dumb. These people believe you can simply see the Truth by asking yourself if what you’re seeing is true. I’ve tended to focus on that kind of naïve realism, and that was a mistake on my part because not all naïve realists think that way.

Many kinds of naïve realists believe that the Truth isn’t always immediately obvious to everyone, because it is sometimes mediated by a malevolent force: political correctness, ideology, Satan, chemtrails, corrupt self-interest, unclean engrams, or the various other things to which people attribute the inability of Others to see the obvious Truth.[3] These people still believe it’s straightforward to get to the Truth. It might be through sheer will (just willing yourself to see what’s true), some method (prayer, econometrics, reading entrails, obeying some authority), being part of the elect, identifying a person who has unmediated access to the Truth and giving them all your support, or through paying attention to signs, and that last one is the group I want to talk about in this post.

Belief in signs is still naïve realism—the Truth (who/what is Right and who/what is Wrong) can be perceived in an unmediated way, but not always; the Truth is often obscured, but also often directly accessible. These people believe that there are malevolent forces that have put a veil over the Truth, but that the Truth is strong enough that it sometimes breaks through. The Truth leaves signs.

It is extremely confusing to argue with these people because they’ll claim that one study is “proof” of their position (they generally use the word “proof” rather than evidence, and that’s interesting), openly admitting that the one study they’re citing is a debunked outlier. They’ll use a kind of data or argument that they would never admit valid in other circumstances—that some authors say there is systemic racism is a sign that those authors are Marxists, since that’s also what Marxists say. But, that the GOP says that capitalism tends toward monopoly doesn’t mean the GOP is Marxist, although that’s also what Marxists say. That one Black man, scientist, “liberal,” expert says something is proof that it’s true, but that another Black man, scientist, and so on say it isn’t true doesn’t matter. That a hundred Black men, scientists, and so on say it’s wrong doesn’t matter. Or, what I eventually realized is that it does sort of matter—it’s further proof that the outlier claim is True. That knowledge is stigmatized is proof that it is not part of the cloud malevolent forces place over the Truth—it’s one of the moments of Truth shining through. If you’ve argued with people like this, then you know that pointing out that relying on a photo, quote, or study that appears nowhere outside their in-group doesn’t suggest to them that there are problems with that datum; on the contrary, they take it as a sign that it’s proof.

Because they believe that the Truth shines through a cloud of darkness, or leaves clues scattered in the midst of obscurity, they prefer auto-didacts to experts, an unsourced heavily-shared photo to a nuanced explanation, someone whose expertise is irrelevant to the question at hand, polymaths, and people who speak with conviction and broad assertion over someone who talks in terms of probabilities.

Fields that use evidence such as law spend quite a bit of time thinking about the relative validity of kinds of evidence. Standards of good evidence are supposed to be content-free, so that there are standards of expertise that are applied across disciplines. We can argue about the relative strength of evidence, and whether it’s a kind of evidence we would think valid if it proved us wrong, but neither of those conversations have any point for someone who believes in signs rather than evidence. They’ll just keep repeating that there are signs that prove their point.

People who believe in degrees and kinds of evidence are likely to value cross-cutting research methods, disagreement, and diversity. People who believe that the Truth is generally hidden but shines out in signs at moments are prone, it seems to me, to see cross-cutting research methods and diversity as a waste of time, if not actively dangerous. They don’t see a problem with getting all their information from sources that confirm their beliefs; they think that’s what they should do. Yes, it’s one-sided, they’ll say—the side of Truth.

It’s because of that deep divide about perception that I often say that we have a polarized public not because we need more civility, as though we need to be nicer in our disagreements, but because we disagree about the nature of disagreement.




[1] Yes, I’ll argue with a parking brake, if it seems like an interesting one.
[2] I really object to the term “populist,” since it implies that the “elite” never engage in this way of thinking. That’s a different post.
[3] As an aside, I’ll mention that these people often believe that you either believe that there is a Truth, and good people perceive it with little or no difficulty or you believe that all beliefs are equally valid (a belief that pro-GOP media attribute, bizarrely enough, to “Marxism”—Marxists hate relativism). Acknowledging uncertainty doesn’t make one a relativist, let alone a Marxist. If it does, then Paul was both a relativist and a Marxist. He did, after all, say that “we see as through a glass darkly.” If you’d like to argue that Paul was a relativist and Marxist, I’m happy to listen.






Everyone wants to ban books

various books that are often challenged

I used to teach a class on the rhetoric of free speech, since what you would think would be very different issues (would the ideal city-state allow citizens to watch dramas, should Milton be allowed to advocate divorce, should people be allowed to criticize a war, should we ban video games) end up argued using the same rhetoric. Everyone is in favor of banning something, and everyone is prone to moral outrage that others want to ban something. The Right Wing Outrage Media went into a frenzy about people trying to pull To Kill a Mockingbird from K-12 curricula, and “cancel culture” as though they were, on principle, opposed to censorship. Those same pundits are now engaged in a disinformation campaign about CRT, which they are trying to ban (or, in other words, “cancel”), as well as books that teach students their rights, mention LGBTQ, talk about systemic racism. And the biggest call for pulling books from curriculum, school, and public libraries is on the part of the GOP, which continues to fling itself around about cancel culture. Of course, those examples could be flipped: people who defended removing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird are now outraged at Maus being removed.

They aren’t the first or only group to claim to be outraged, on principle, about “censorship” at the same moment they’re advancing exactly the policy they’re claiming they are, on principle, outraged that others advocate. Everyone wants some book removed from K-12 curricula, school libraries, public libraries. We are all in favor of banning books.

I’m not saying that everyone is a hypocrite, that there’s not really a controversy, we’re all equally bad, or it’s all about who has the power. I’m saying that this disagreement too often falls into the rhetorical trap that so much public discourse does. We talk as though our actions are grounded in a principle to which we are completely and purely committed when, in fact, we violate it on a regular and strategic basis. It would be useful if we stopped doing that. We should argue about whether these books should be banned, and not about banning books in the abstract.

There are several problems with how we argue about “censorship.” One is that we often conflate boycotting and banning, and they’re different. If you choose not to listen to music that offends you, give money to businesses or individuals who promote values or advocate actions that you believe endanger others, refuse to spend Thanksgiving dinner with a relative who is abusive, that isn’t “cancel culture.” It’s making choices about what you hear, read, or give your money to. Let’s call that boycotting. This post is not about boycotting, but about banning, about restricting what others can hear, read, watch, or learn. For sake of ease, I’ll call that “banning books.”

We’re shouting slogans at one another because we aren’t arguing on the stasis (that is, place) of disagreement. It’s as though we were room-mates and you wanted me to do my dishes immediately, and I wanted to do them once a day, and we tried to settle that disagreement by arguing about whether Kant or Burke had a better understanding of the sublime. We’ll never settle the disagreement if we stay on that stasis. We’ll never settle the issue about whether Ta-Nehisi Coates’ books should be banned from high school libraries if we’re pretending that this is an issue about whether book banning is right or wrong on principle.

The issue of banning books that we’re talking about right now actually has a lot of places of agreement. Everyone agrees that it is appropriate to limit what is taught in K-12, and what public and school libraries make available (especially to children). Everyone agrees that the public should have input on those limits and that availability. Everyone also agrees that it’s appropriate to limit access to material that is likely to mislead children, especially if it is in such a way that they might harm themselves or others. We also agree that mandatory schooling is necessary for a well-functioning democracy.

We disagree about when, how, and why to ban books because we really disagree about deeper issues regarding how democracy functions, what reading does, what constitutes truth, and how people perceive truth. We are not having a political crisis, as much as rhetorical one that is the consequence of an epistemic one.

It makes sense to start my argument with our disagreements about democracy, although the disagreements about democracy aren’t really separable from the disagreements about truth. Briefly, there are many different views as to democracy is supposed to function. I’ll mention only five of the many views: “stealth democracy” (see especially page two; this model is extremely close to what is called “populism” in political science), technocracy, neo-Hobbesianism, relativism, pluralism. And here is my most important point: none of these is peculiar to any place on the political spectrum. Our world is demagogically described as left v. right, just because that sells papers, gets clicks, and mobilizes voters. Our political world is, in fact, much more complicated, and the competing models of democracy exemplify how we aren’t in some false binary of left v. right. Every one of these models has its advocates everywhere on the political spectrum–not evenly distributed, I’ll grant, but they’re there. As long as we try to think about our political issues in terms of whether “the left” or “the right” has it right, we’ll never have useful disagreements on issues like book banning. So, back to the models.

“Stealth democracy” presumes that “the people” really consists of a group with homogeneous views, values, needs, and policy preferences. There isn’t really any disagreement among them as to what should be done; common sense is all one needs to recognize what the right decisions are in any situation, whether judicial, domestic or foreign policy, economic, military, and so on. Expert advice is reliable to the extent that it confirms or helps the perceptions of these “real” people, who rely on “common sense.” This kind of common sense privileges “direct” experience, claiming that “you can just see” what’s true, and what should be done. Experts, in this view, have a tendency to complicate issues unnecessarily and introduce ambiguity and uncertainty to a clear and certain situation.

So, how do advocates of stealth democracy explain disagreement, compromise, bargaining, and the slow processes of policy change? They believe that politicians delay and dither and avoid the obviously correct courses of action in order to protect their jobs, because they’re getting paid by “special interests,” and/or because they’ve spent too much time away from “real” people. They deflect that other citizens disagree with them by characterizing those others as not “real” people, dupes of the politicians, or part of the “special interests.”

In short, there are people who are truly people (us) who have unmediated perception of Truth and whose policies are truly right. We rely on facts, not opinions. In this world, there is no point in listening to other points of view, since those are just opinions, if not outright lies. Just repeat the FACTS (using all caps if necessary) spoken by the pundits who are speaking the truth (and you know it’s the truth without checking their sources, not because you’re gullible, but because true statements fit with other things you believe). Bargaining or negotiating means weakening, corrupting, or damaging the truly right course of action. What we should do is put real people in office who will simply get things done without all the bullshit created by dithering and corrupt others. Dissent from the in-group is not just disloyalty, but dangerous. Stealth democracy valorizes leaders who are “decisive,” confident, anti-intellectual, successful, not particularly well-spoken, impulsive, and passionately (even fanatically) loyal to real people.

People who believe in stealth democracy believe that educating citizens to be good citizens means teaching them to believe that the in-group (the real people) is entirely good, whose judgment is to be trusted.

Technocracy is exactly the same, but with a different sense of who are the people with access to the Truth—in this case, it’s “experts” who have unmediated perception, know the “facts,” whereas everyone else is relying on muddled and biased “opinion.” Believers in technocracy valorize leaders who can speak the specialized language (which might be eugenics, bizspeak, Aristotelian physics, econometrics, neo-realism, Marxism, or so many other discourses), are decisive, and certain of themselves. And technocracy has, oddly enough, exactly the same consequences for thinking about disagreement, public discourse, dissent, and school that stealth democracy does.

In both cases, there is some group that has the truth, and truth can simply be poured into the brains of others—if they haven’t been muddled or corrupted by “special interests.” They agree that taking into consideration various points of view weakens deliberation and taints policies—the right policy is the one that the right group advocates, and it should be enacted in its purest form. They just disagree about what group is right. (In one survey, about the same number of people thought that decisions should be left up to experts as thought decisions should be left up to business leaders, and I think that’s interesting.)

Both models agree that school can make people good citizens by instilling in students the Truths that group knows, while also teaching them either to become members of that group, or to defer to it. Because students should learn to admire, trust, and aspire to be a member of that group, there is no reason to teach students multiple points of view (since all but one would be “opinion” rather than “fact”), skills of argumentation (although teaching students how to shout down wrong-headed people is useful), or any information that makes the right group look bad (such as history about times that group had been wrong, mistaken, unjust, unsuccessful). Education is indoctrination, in an almost literal sense—putting correct doctrine into the students.

I have to repeat that there are advocates of these models all over the political spectrum (although there are very few technocrats these days, they seem to me evenly distributed, and there are many followers of stealth democracy everywhere). In addition, it’s interesting that both of these approaches are, ultimately, authoritarian, although advocates of them don’t see them that way—they think authoritarianism is a system that forces people to do what is not the obviously correct course of action. They both think authoritarianism is when they don’t get their way.

Hobbesianism comes and goes in various forms (Social Darwinism, might makes right, objectivism, “neo-realism,” some forms of Calvinism, what’s often called Machiavellianism). It posits that the world is an amoral place of struggle, and winning is all that matters. If you can break the law and get away with it, good for you. Everyone is trying to screw everyone else over, so the best approach is to get them first—it is a world of struggle, conflict, warfare, and domination. Democracy is just another form of war, in which we can and should use any strategies to enable our faction to win, and, when we win, we should grab all the spoils possible, and use our power to exterminate all other factions. Schooling is, therefore, training for this kind of dog-eat-dog world, either by training students to be fighters for one faction, or by allowing and encouraging bullying and domination among students. The curriculum and so on are designed to promote the power and prestige of whatever faction has the political control to force their views on others. There is no Truth other than what power enables a group to insist is true. As with the other models, taking other points of view seriously just muddies the water, weakens the will, and, with various other metaphors, worsens the outcome. People who ascribe to this model like to quote Goering: “History is written by the victors.”

I’m including relativism simply because it’s a hobgoblin. I’ve known about five actual relativists in my life, or maybe zero, depending on how you define it. “Relativist” is the term people commonly use for others (only one of the people I knew called themselves relativists) who say that there is no truth, all positions are equally valid, and we should never judge others. In fact, relativists are very judgmental about people who are not relativist (I have more than once heard some version of, “Being judgmental is WRONG!”), and they generally stop being relativist very fast when confronted with someone who believes that people like them should be exterminated or harmed.

Stealth democrats and Hobbesians are often effectively sloppy moral relativists, in that they believe that the morality of an action depends on whether it’s done by an in-group member (stealth democracy) or is successful (Hobbesians). But they also, in my experience, both condemn relativism, because they don’t see themselves as relativists, as much as people who are so good in one way that they have moral license to behave in ways that they fling themselves around like a bad ballet dancer if engaged in by an out-group. On Moral Grounds.

Pluralism assumes that any nation is constituted by people with genuinely different needs, values, priorities, policy preferences, experiences. Therefore, there is no one obviously correct policy, about which all sensible people agree. Since sensible and informed people disagree, we should look for an optimal policy, a goal that will involve deliberation and negotiation. The optimal policy isn’t one that everyone likes—in fact, it’s probably no one’s preferred policy—but neither is it an amalgamation of what every individual wanted. It’s a good enough policy. Considering various points of view improves policy deliberation, but not because all points of view are equally valid, or there is no truth, or we are hopelessly lost in a world of opinion. Some advocates of pluralism believe that there is a truth, but that compromise is part of being an adult; some believe in a long arc of justice, and that compromises are necessary; some believe that truth is not something any one human or group has a monopoly on; some believe that the truth is that we disagree; some people believe that, for now, we see as through a glass darkly, but we can still strive to see as much and as clearly as possible, and that requires including others who, because they’re different, are part of a larger us. The foot is not a hand, the eye is not an ear, but they are all equally important parts of the body. We thrive as a body because the parts are different.

So, how does pluralism keep from slipping into relativism? It doesn’t say that all beliefs are equally valid, but that all people, actions, and policies are held to the same standards of validity—the ones to which we hold ourselves. We treat others as we want to be treated. We don’t give ourselves moral license.

And, now, finally, back to the question of book banning.

We all want to restrict books from schools and libraries. We disagree about which books because we disagree about which democracy we want to have. Do we believe that giving students accurate information about slavery, segregation, the GI Bill, housing practices and laws will make them better citizens, or do we believe that patriotism requires lying to them about those facts? Or, at least, pretending they didn’t happen? Do we imagine that a book transmits its message to readers, so that a het student reading a book that describes a gay relationship in a positive way might be turned gay?[1] Do we believe that citizens should be trained to believe that only one point of view is correct, to manage disagreement productively, to listen to others, to refuse to judge, to value triumph over everything, or any of the many other options? When we say books will harm students, what harm are we imagining? Are we worried about normalizing racism because that violates the pluralist model, normalizing queer sexualities because that violates the stealth democracy model, having students hear about events like the Ludlow Massacre since that troubles the Hobbesian model?

We don’t have a disagreement about books. We have a disagreement about democracy.



[1] One of the contributing factors to my being denied tenure was that I taught a book that enraged someone on the tenure and promotion committee. I didn’t actually like the book, and was using it to show how a bad argument works. He assumed you only taught books that had arguments you wanted your students to adopt. In other words, he and I were operating from different models of reading. One topic I haven’t been able to cover in this already too long post is about lay theories of reading in book banning. My colleague Paul Corrigan is working on this issue, and I hope he publishes something soon.
 











I was an idiot at 18 (aka, compromise and incrementalism and progressivism can work together)

gaetz shouting
Image from: https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/10/politics/donald-trump-impeachment/index.html



When I moved to Berkeley at the age of 18, I was frustrated by various lefties who had, I thought, “given up” on their convictions. They were working for short-term gains and willing to compromise. I believed that they had been worn down by years of political activism, and that their mistake was having abandoned their pure faith in the right policies—they should have continued to insist on settling for nothing short of what is right.

I believed that political change happens because there are people who are so purely committed to the right thing that evil capitulates to the people who refuse to compromise. I wasn’t entirely wrong. And yet I was.

There were four errors in how I thought. First, and most important, I thought that my perspective on what was “the right” thing to do was correct. I began from the premise that someone died and made me Kant. I believed that there is a perfect policy on every issue because people don’t really disagree, and/or that the people who disagree don’t count or don’t understand their own real interests. I was a toxic populist.

Toxic populism is profoundly anti-democratic and implicitly authoritarian, since it denies the value of inclusive democratic deliberation by saying that only one perspective is right. It isn’t necessarily “left” or “right” or even “political.” As Jan-Werner Muller says,

But above all, [populists] tend to say that they — and only they — represent what they often call the real people or also, typically, the silent majority. Populists will deny the legitimacy of all other contenders for power. This is never merely about policy disagreements or even disagreements about values which, of course, are normal and ideally productive in a democracy. Populists always immediately make it personal and moral. They also suggest that citizens who do not share their understanding of the supposedly real people do not really belong to the people at all. So populists always morally exclude others at two levels: party politics, but also among the people themselves, where those who do not take their side politically are automatically deemed un-American, un-Polish, un-Turkish, etc.

Second, I believed in hope. I remember that I decided that I must like George Berkeley’s philosophy because I was told he was an idealist. I had no clue what that meant in philosophical terms, and I’m not sure I understood what little of him I tried to read, but I had some vague sense that it meant something like holding onto your dreams even when things are bad. I believed that ignoring your past in favor of what you hoped might happen in the future was positive, and, to be blunt, it was very positive in my life. My high school life had not been good, and I needed to believe that that past life was not a prediction of my future life. It wasn’t. And it can be literally life-saving to believe in hope. Believing in hope is good.

But, third, for reasons I still don’t understand, I came to believe that believing in hope is enough to make things happen. What I didn’t understand is that hope is necessary but not sufficient for good things to happen when they haven’t been happening. Hoping is good, and having hope makes it more likely that you’ll take advantages of opportunity; it’s necessary for change and achievement. But success is not guaranteed to people who hope, no matter how much you hope. We have to be hopeful enough to look at the past honestly.

I was engaged in magical thinking about politics. There are lots of kinds of magical thinking when it comes to politics—the just world model, prosperity “gospel,” Social Darwinism, politics as eschatology. [1] What they all have in common is the notion that we shouldn’t learn from the past—we should reject it in favor of what we hope for the future, as though hope is all we need.

I also saw compromise as in an inverse relationship to hope I thought that, if people refused to compromise, and hoped more, something would magically happen. I believed that the universe rewarded uncompromised hope. [2]

And all of these errors are included in the fourth, which was that I thought there was one way that people should try to enact political change, and that we should find that one way. I thought that political change had happened because of one person or one group and their one policy to which they were unanimously and completely committed. (Granted, that’s how US history is taught, so my idiocy wasn’t venal.)

In other words, I was unidimensional in my thinking about politics—I thought there was one perspective that correctly saw the policy that was right for everyone, and to which every reasonable person would assent. I thought disagreement was failure to have the right perspective. I thought that’s what history showed to be true.

For instance, I thought abolition happened because abolitionists refused to compromise, segregation ended because Civil Rights workers refused to compromise, women got the vote because suffragettes refused to compromise, but that isn’t what happened at all. All the abolitionists made compromises of various kinds, MLK was condemned for making too many compromises, and the suffragettes rhetorical compromises in terms of racism are just unbearable.

There are so many things I didn’t understand. Among them is no major change happens because of one individual or one group. Political change happens because there are lots of groups working toward the same end and using lots of different methods. I didn’t know that because we don’t like history to be that way—we like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or David v. Goliath; we like stories in which individuals, by standing up for their beliefs, changed everything. There are admirable individuals who made big changes in our world, but they were always part of a group, and that group was part of a coalition of groups, and they never got all that they wanted.

No one person, and no one group, makes significant change happen. Political change happens because there are people who are willing to compromise, and people who think that compromise is the first step in more changes. Incremental change works to move a big community toward major changes when the people who want more work with those who negotiate incremental changes and vice versa. It doesn’t work if we see politics as bargaining, in which we reach an agreement and we’re done. It does work if we see each compromise as incremental movement toward a goal—if it becomes the place from which we climb higher.

What I didn’t see (but what’s pretty clear in much history) is that people who demand more need to be part of the conversation, and need to make their demands clear, and need to agitate for those demands aggressively, and they need to push hard on the people who want incremental change without making incrementalists the enemy. Those people are absolutely crucial in political change. And incrementalists need to think of what changes they’ve achieved as not nearly enough. When incrementalists get an incremental achievement, those people who dislike the compromise need to push for more.

DADT—which was incrementalist–turned out to be a good move. At the time, I didn’t think it was. LBJ’s very incrementalist Medicare was a good move. So was the Voting Rights Act, insofar as it stayed in place for a while, but it wasn’t the basis of even better incremental changes. The Civil Rights Act was the basis for more changes. I still think Obamacare was good incrementalism, but I worry that it’s in the Voting Rights Act category.

In any case, our world is a little better for those compromises, so incremental can make things a little better. Our world is much worse, however, because of the incrementalist compromises in the GI Bill, the 1876 resolution of the disputed election, the Missouri Compromise, compromises about Workfare and “tough on crime” initiatives of the 90s, and so many compromises that FDR made with racists. Incrementalism isn’t always good, and it isn’t always bad, but even when it’s good it’s good only if it’s seen as a step from which we will move. Because we hope for more.

I was right to think that hope is good; I was wrong to think hoping means you never compromise. In fact, useful compromises require tremendous compromise.



[1] I have to point out the heartlessness of any of these ways of magical thinking. They’re all versions of the “bad things only happen to people who deserve them” lie, as though slaves just had to hope more and…what…slavery would have evaporated? Slavers would have said, “Oh, shit, what we’re doing is unjust!”? People who get cancer didn’t hope enough? Sometimes our desire to erase uncertainty from our loves is the basis for extraordinary cruelty.

[2] Refusing to compromise is a great and effective strategy under certain circumstances–it’s useful for someone who has all the power, or who has enough power to stop anything from happening if they don’t get their way, someone who wants to burn down the system, someone who is fine with how the system is working, and spoiled children.

Authoritarian populist demagoguery is never a controlled burn

wildfire
Photo from here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/severe-wildfires-raise-the-chance-for-future-monstrous-blazes/

As I’ve said so often that I’m certain the four people who read my blog regularly are really tired of reading, there aren’t two sides on any issue. The moment we frame an issue as a question of two choices, we have started clearing our political throat for demagoguery.

The reason I’m committed to what might be a crank theory about how to represent political commitments is that, if we realize those commitments are very specific when it comes to policy, then we have a world in which coalitions are possible. For instance, people all over the political spectrum support reform of the criminal justice system, especially bail reform. Some, but not all, conservatives support it. If we think of the issue of bail reform as a partisan issue, then, instead of being able to argue the policy merits of the policy of bail reform, voting about bail reform becomes performance of in-group loyalty.

One of many reasons I like the metaphor of political affiliation being a color spectrum (rather than, for instance, a continuum or matrix) is that it raises the possibility of talking about intensity. One of many fallacies of the left/right continuum model is that it suggests that centrists aren’t irrationally passionate—only the people at the extremes are. I’ve known some people who are extremist about the need for everyone to have “centrist” policies, and people who are mildly committed to policies labelled “far left” or “far right.” And the “extremes” get muddled—where on that continuum do we put people who are extremely committed to libertarianism, pacifism, whatever the GOP or Dems are promoting now, a strong safety net and humanitarian intervention, a strong social safety net and homophobic legislation, a strong social safety net but only for white people?

I think, from the perspective of rhetoric and persuasion, that the degree of commitment is among the most important variables. It’s far more important than where a person fits on some false continuum.

And I say this because of years of arguing with people all over the political spectrum, and also the non-political spectrum, and finding people who, whether it’s about raw dog food, immigration, if something can’t be called hummus if it has sugar, Santana’s guitar playing, Trump, whether Tolkien is racist, single-payer healthcare, and, basically, every issue:

1) insist that their advocated course of action is so right that anyone who disagrees with them is corrupt, stupid, or evil;
2) and they therefore frame the issue as a binary between their specific policy agenda (right) and anyone else (wrong);
3) since everyone who disagrees with them is wrong for disagreeing, they refuse to look at any sources, sites, or data that say they might be wrong, and they only rely on in-group representations of that evil group
4) and they have a monocausal narrative about the problem they are solving.

In my experience, there is no position on any issue–“political” or not–that doesn’t have someone who argues this way. So, this isn’t about political affiliation (left or right)–it’s about how people think about beliefs. I think that people who fit the criteria above are extremists, whether the argument is about the virtues of Ezra Pound’s poetry or the Kyoto Protocols.

Using terms like “evil” doesn’t necessarily mean that one is making an extreme argument. Condemning slavery as an evil and condemning anyone who advocates slavery as evil isn’t necessarily an extremist position. Condemning Nazism as evil isn’t an extremist position.

But saying that the only way to end slavery or Nazism is [X], and that anyone who doesn’t support [X] is just as bad as slavers or Nazis, that’s extremism.

And here’s the point I really wanted to get to: in my experience, people drawn to extremism propose monocausal narratives. I don’t know why, and I have no studies to support my claim. This is just my experience.

It doesn’t matter if they’re talking about dog training methods, immigration, hummus, riots, World War I, the Paleo diet, or whatever. Extremists say that immigration causes all problems, only the presence of tahini causes something to be hummus, since the British failure to signal clearly that they would go to war made the Germans feel confident in their war plans then the British caused the war, and so on.

But nothing is monocausal.

Kristallnacht was signalled and spontaneous at the same time. Goebbels announced that “the Führer has decided that … demonstrations should not be prepared or organized by the Party, but insofar as they erupt spontaneously, they are not to be hampered.” Thus, Hitler didn’t specifically call for that action at that moment, but his years of rhetoric of Jews as an existential threat made people feel that he wanted the violence to happen, that he approved of it. And he did. People were, in Ian Kershaw’s words, “working toward the Fuhrer” by making it happen. And, of course, there were people involved in it who were formally Nazis. So, is Hitler responsible for Kristallnacht? Yes. No historian doubts it. No Hitler, no Kristallnacht. But, can historians find a direct order from him? No.

Imagine that Y happened (a driver hit a cyclist), and we all agree it was a bad thing. What caused it to happen? Imagine that the driver was speeding, texting, and drifted into the bike lane, and the cyclist was listening to a podcast and so didn’t notice the car coming into the bike lane. Extremists, in my experience, find ways to make the in-group not responsible because there were other contributing factors. So, anti-cyclists extremists (and there a lot of them) will say that, since the cyclist could have prevented the accident by seeing that the driver was in the bike lane, the driver wasn’t at fault. The driver wasn’t the only cause of the accident, and therefore not the cause at all.

That’s the argument extremist Trump supporters are making about the attempted insurrection.

Trump extremists are trying to claim that since his January 6 speech wasn’t the only cause of the riots, he didn’t incite them. But, as even the Wall Street Journal says, the problem is his and his supporters’ “war rhetoric.” And that is the most important cause of the attempted insurrection—you can’t keep using war rhetoric, that liberals are out to destroy us and everything we value that there has never been a worse situation, and then not expect them to get violent. Either Trump has been deliberately inciting violence or he’s an irresponsible idiot.

Hitler set the stage for Kristallnacht, and he left himself plausible deniability if public reaction was bad. When it didn’t get the reaction he wanted, the official Nazi line was that it had been spontaneous. So, someone saying that there is no monocausal narrative of Trump having incited the January 6th failed insurrection is someone who would hold Hitler faultless for Kristallnacht.

They are reasoning badly.

Trump has been supporting the notion of violent insurrection for along time. If what happened wasn’t what he wanted to happen, he would have instantly condemned it and stopped it, and he didn’t. Because it was the desired end of his rhetoric.[1]

Trump could have stopped the attempted insurrection that he inspired and incited through his speeches (and he even named the date that he wanted it to happen), but he didn’t, and he didn’t do what a responsible person would have done to make it stop, such as answering Pence’s calls and sending in the National Guard. He didn’t.

Either he’s irresponsibly incompetent, or he didn’t have a problem with what was happening.

By his defenders’ argument, Trump engaged in rhetoric that—as experts on rhetoric said it would–persuaded people that he wanted a violent incursion and insurrection on January 6, and he didn’t stop it once it started, and only denounced it when he was facing impeachment. Thus, by his defenders’ case, Trump either wanted that insurrection, or he’s so irresponsible and incompetent that he unintentionally caused an insurrection he didn’t know how to stop.

Either option is impeachable.

But, more important, Trump really wasn’t the only cause of the attempted insurrection. He’s responsible, and he should be held responsible, and he isn’t the only one that should be held responsible.

People who tried to storm the capital in order to stop the Constitution from being enacted as it is supposed to weren’t people who, until 2016, had accurate and informed understandings of politics, who appreciated democracy as a pluralistic governmental system, and who saw difference of opinion as legitimate. They were authoritarian populists, and that’s why they supported Trump. Trump didn’t cause authoritarian populism—he just rode the wave that others’ rhetoric had created.

For years, talk radio and Fox have been promoting authoritarian populist demagoguery. It’s demagoguery in that they reduce every issue to us v. them, with “us” very narrowly defined, and “them” being everyone else who are lumped into the most extreme “them.” So, if you didn’t (don’t) support the political figure or agenda that they supported at that moment, you were (are) a communist or socialist. Limbaugh, Fox, etc., advocate populism in that what they say perfectly fits what Jan-Werner Muller defines as what populists do:

[T]hey tend to say that they — and only they — represent what they often call the real people or also, typically, the silent majority. Populists will deny the legitimacy of all other contenders for power. This is never merely about policy disagreements or even disagreements about values which, of course, are normal and ideally productive in a democracy. Populists always immediately make it personal and moral. They also suggest that citizens who do not share their understanding of the supposedly real people do not really belong to the people at all. So populists always morally exclude others at two levels: party politics, but also among the people themselves, where those who do not take their side politically are automatically deemed un-American, un-Polish, un-Turkish, etc.

Work like Muller’s shows why the left/right binary (or continuum) is proto-demagogic at least and irrelevant at best. If we’re going to try to shove figures into the left/right binary (which makes as much sense as shoving all religions into Catholic or Protestant), then there are “left-wing” populists like Chavez and “right-wing” populists like Trump, who have the same rhetoric. Whether they’re claiming to be conservative or socialist doesn’t matter—they’re neither. What matters is that they’re populist in a very damaging way.

They’re authoritarian in that they’re saying that the real people are so threatened with extinction by a system run by elites (Them—the elite is entirely composed of out-group members, which is kind of hilarious if you think about it) that we cannot hold ourselves to normal standards. This is war.

Authoritarian populist demagoguery is profitable for a media outlet. It’s stimulating, like a Two-Minutes Hate, but more like the 24/7 Hate. It is guaranteed to generate an audience who will refuse to look at other information (which advertisers love); since it is all about generating in-group loyalty, then advertisers also benefit simply from having ads in that outlet—they look like they’re supporting the in-group.

Authoritarian populist demagoguery is a powerful fuel for setting an audience on fire.

And it’s never a controlled burn.

[1] One of many things incredibly creepy for me is how defenses of Trump are exactly the same arguments that Nazis make to defend Hitler.




The weird place of expertise in our culture of demagoguery

image of batboy


While I was working on demagoguery, I was continually puzzled by the problem of anti-intellectualism. The problem matters because, too often, we characterize demagoguery in ways that we would never recognize if we’re getting suckered by it. We tell ourselves that demagogues are frauds, dishonest, and manipulative, but our leaders and pundits are sincere, truthful, and authentic. Sure they have to lie sometimes, but they aren’t lying out of a place of dishonesty–it’s out of sincere concern, it’s necessary, and they’re basically truthful. Supporters of even the most notorious demagogues believed that they weren’t supporting demagoguery because they believed that Hitler, Theodore Bilbo, Fidel Castro, Joseph McCarthy, Cleon were sincere, truthful, and authentic.

In general, I think it makes more sense to emphasize the culture of demagoguery, since the people we identify as demagogues were only able to come to power because the culture rewards demagoguery.

Demagoguery says that we don’t really face complicated issues of policy deliberation in a community of divergent and conflicting values, goals, and needs about issues that don’t have perfect answers. It says that things just look complicated—they’re actually very simple. We just have to commit to the obvious solution; that is, the solution that is obvious to our side.

That insistence on the solution being obvious, on disagreement and deliberation as unmanly dithering, can look like anti-intellectualism since it means the rejection of the kind of nuance and uncertainty generally considered central to science or research. But I’m not sure it’s useful to call it anti-intellectualism, since people rarely think of themselves as anti-intellectual. Like emphasizing the honesty/dishonesty of demagogues, talking about the anti-intellectualism of demagoguery means we won’t identify our own demagoguery.

It’s true that demagoguery often relies on rejecting experts as “eggheads” or, in Limbaugh’s phrase, “the liberal elite.” That quality of anti-elitism often means that scholars characterize demagoguery as a kind of populism (e.g., Reinhard Luthin). But lots of populism isn’t demagogic, and rhetoric in a democracy is of course going to attack some elite group–the super-rich, the military-industrial complex, Fat Cat Bankers. After all, major changes will be to disadvantage of someone.

In addition, we don’t like to see ourselves as crushing some weak group; we like the David and Goliath narrative. The narrative of the spunky underdog fighting a massive power is so mobilizing that it’s often used under ridiculous circumstances. To condemn populism, therefore, just condemns rhetoric.[1]

As Aristotle pointed out, the elite can engage in demagoguery. Earl Warren’s demagoguery regarding “the Japanese” was directed toward Congressional representatives, and he was presenting himself as an expert summarizing the expert judgment of others. Harry Laughlin’s demagogic testimony before Congress regarding the supposed criminality and mental incapacity of various “races” was expert testimony–experts can be full of shit, as he was.[2] I think there is a different way of estimating expertise, but I’ll get to that in a bit.

At one point, I started to think that demagoguery simplifies complicated situations, and I still think that’s more or less true, but in a deceptively complicated way. Demagoguery can have very complicated narratives behind them, so complicated that they’re impossible to follow (because they don’t actually make sense). QAnon, 9/11 conspiracies, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, conspiracy theories about Sandy Hook–they’re the narrative equivalent of an Escher drawing (conclusions are used as evidence for conclusions that are used as evidence for the first conclusions).

They’re often complicated narratives, in that they might have a lot of details and data, but they’re in service of a simple point about which one is supposed to feel certain: the out-group is bad, we are threatened with extermination[3], and any action we take against them is justified because they’re already doing worse or they intend to. So, the overall narrative is simple: we are good; they are evil.

Or, perhaps more accurately, the overall narrative is clear and provides us with certainty. Demagoguery equates certainty with expertise. Experts are certain; demagoguery doesn’t reject expertise, then, let alone precision, but it does reject any “expert” opinion that talks in terms of likelihood. Demagoguery relies on the binary of certain/clueless.

Thus, in a demagogic culture, certainty (sometimes framed as “decisiveness”) is seen as real expertise, the kind of expertise that matters.

Demagoguery tends to favor the notion of “universal genius”–the idea that judgment is a skill that applies across disciplines. So, someone with “good judgment” can see the truth in a situation even if they aren’t very knowledgeable. “Good judgment” is (in this model) not discipline specific (so someone with a PhD in mechanical engineering might be cited as an expert about evolution because he’s a “scientist”).

What I’m saying is that there are five qualities that contribute to demagoguery that we’re tempted to call “anti-intellectualism:” 1) the rejection of uncertainty; 2) the related rejection of deliberation; 3) the emphasis on narratives that are, in their end result, simple (we’re good and they’re bad); 4) faith in “universal genius;” 5) the equation of expertise with decisiveness.

Our impulse when arguing with someone who is promoting a debunked set of claims is to say “It’s been debunked by experts.” But that doesn’t work because it hasn’t been debunked by the people they consider experts. Similarly, it doesn’t help to say that they “reject facts.” They think they don’t–they think we do. (And we do, in a way–we reject data, some of which might be true.) I’m not sure how to persuade someone promoting false information that it’s false, but I’m increasingly coming to think that we’ll be running in place as long as we’re in a culture of demagoguery.

We need a conversation about certainty.



[1] I think there is a kind of populism that is toxic, and it’s the kind that Muller and Weyland each call “populism.” I think it’s more useful to call that kind of populism “populist demagoguery” or, as do Berlet and Lyons, “toxic populism.”

[2] I talk about these cases a lot more here.

[3] When I say this, many people focus on the “extermination” part, as though I’m casting doubt on whether groups sometimes face extermination. I’m not. As a side note, I’ll say that I’ve long noticed that people who live and breathe demagoguery have trouble noticing restrictive modifiers, especially if they’re left-branching or the modifier isn’t immediately obviously meaningful to them. That’s a different post, but the short version is that a person who thinks demagogically will read “Zionist Christianity is not necessarily a friend to Israel” as a claim about Christians, not a very specific kind of Christian.

Yes, unhappily, many groups face(d) extermination, but the situation isn’t zero-sum between only two groups. Something that hurt the Nazis didn’t necessarily help the Jews; Jews had potential allies among groups that were neither Jewish nor Nazi; there were, and had long been, disagreements within the Jewish communities in Europe as to how to respond to anti-semitism. Even now, it’s hard to say what would have been “the” right response because there probably wasn’t only one right response.

[2] People not engaged in demagoguery aren’t obligated to argue with every person who disagrees with them, but if we reject every opposition argument on the grounds that simply disagreeing means someone is bad, then it’s demagoguery.

I am, on principle, opposed to corruption–except in-group corruption. That’s okay.

[Image from here.]

My father used to tell a story about when he met my mother’s grandmother–an Irish Democrat who loved Jimmy Walker. He asked how she could support him considering how corrupt he was. And her answer was that he couldn’t be corrupt because he was so nice, and he gave so much money to the church.

I’ve been recommending Jan-Werner Müller’s What is Populism since I read it recently—everyone should read it. Here I want to talk about what he says about corruption. His basic argument, as mentioned in a previous post, is one endorsed by many people—that far too many people are willing to be persuaded that only people like them really count when it comes to issues of public policy, laws, and rights. [1]

Unhappily, as Rogers Smith showed, we have always lived within a world of two notions of nationality: one based in in-group/out-group thinking (this group can be trusted in democratic deliberation), and an inclusive one based in the trusting democratic deliberation (which supports birth-right citizenship). The first is racist; the second understands that ideology is socially constructed.

Müller calls the first way of thinking about national identity “populism” (I’d quibble with that term, and call it toxic populism). As he says, that this notion of a real group that counts (Americans/Germans/Lutherans) versus people who don’t count (people with American/German citizenship or church membership who disagree with me) isn’t particular to any one place (or area) on the political spectrum—think Chavez (Bolivarian Marxist), Berlusconi (liberal-conservative), Lenin (Marxist-Leninist), or Trump (who is now being defended as a nationalist conservative). They, and many others, argue(d) that there isn’t a complicated world in which we need to find political solutions that are good enough for everyone and perfect for no one—the correct answer to any policy question is obvious to Us (real), and anyone who disagrees is Them (whose views can be dismissed). [2]

One of many brilliant things that Müller does is to connect that insight about people who think in terms of real v. unreal group members with the always puzzling aspect of so much demagoguery: that people condemn something, like corruption, as though they are on principle opposed to corruption, but, when an in-group member is engaged in exactly the same behavior, they dismiss, deflect, or praise that same behavior. They aren’t opposed to corruption on principle, but only rigidly opposed to out-group corruption.

Had Obama behaved exactly as Trump is—had as many family members on the White House staff, had those staff members go on a trip pushing their products, gone on far more vacations than other Presidents, and in a way that meant government funds went into his pockets, put in place tariffs that helped his daughter’s business—Trump’s supporters would have burst their own spines with rage. They would have called for impeachment.

But they aren’t calling for impeachment of Trump, or even calling what he does corruption, and why not? Müller argues that it’s because of populism’s reliance on “clientelism.” He says that “populists tend to engage in mass clientelism: the exchange of material and immaterial favors by elites for mass support. [….] What makes populists distinctive, once more, is that they can engage in such practices openly and with public moral justifications, since for them only some people are really the people and hence deserving of the support by what is rightfully their state.
“Similarly, only some of the people should get to enjoy the full protection of the laws; those who do not belong to the people or, for that matter, who might be suspected of actively working against the people, should be treated harshly.” (46)

Müller notes “the curious phenomenon that revelations about what can only be called corruption simply do not seem to damage the reputation of populist leaders as much as one would expect” (47). And he explains it: “Clearly, the perception among supporters of populists is that corruption and cronyism are not genuine problems as long as they look like measures pursued for the same of a moral, hardworking ‘us’ and not for the immoral or even foreign ‘them.’” (48)

They don’t see behavior that would have them foaming in the mouth on the part of opposition politicians (payoffs; nepotism; using the power of the government to settle personal scores, throwing business to cronies, coercing people to support dodgy foundations or stay at one’s hotel properties) as “corruption” on the part of leader they think really gets them—what Müller calls the populist.

Müller explains one reason that talking about Trump’s corruption (which is what his supporters would call it if Obama had done the same things) won’t work:

“It is a pious hope for liberals to think that all they have to do is expose corruption to discredit populists. They also have to show that for the vast majority, populist corruption yields no benefits, and that a lack of democratic accountability, a dysfunctional bureaucracy, and a decline in the rule of law will in the long run hurt the people—all of them.” (48)

While I completely agree about the pious hope, and I agree that the topoi [3] that Müller suggests are good ways to argue about our current situation, I think they won’t work with a lot of people. Müller is suggesting that we point out to people that the person and policy agenda they are supporting will hurt them in the long run because it sets into place a process that can be used against them.

That isn’t an argument on the stases of particular policies, parties, or political figures (which is where most current political discourse is); it’s an argument on the stasis of how we deliberate. And Müller is proposing three topoi not currently in play (which haven’t been for years): 1) we should think about current decisions in terms of what processes they put in place rather than what we get now (we should reject outcomes-based ethics); 2) we should make decisions about politics in terms of the long-term rather than short-term; 3) we should care about fairness across groups.

And I completely agree that we need to shift the stasis from whether this leader is demonstrably loyal to the in-group to whether our way of thinking about politics is a good way (which is what Müller is saying we should do), but I think it’s pretty hard.

One of the reasons it’s hard is that we don’t just have a large number of people who choose to consume only media that tells them their in-group is good and the out-group is bad (again, this happens all over the spectrum, so that Republicans who don’t support Trump are essentially socialists, there is no difference between Trump and Hillary Clinton, all Christians are Trumpagelicals, all critics of Trump are atheists, and so on), but that the self-identified “right wing” media has renarrated the ideal outcome of policy argumentation: as long as something Trump says or does angers (or “triggers”) “libs,” it’s a win for “conservatives.”

This is openly a shifting of public discourse being policy argumentation to being a bad version of a WWE performance—as long as you’ve hurt the other side, or made them unhappy, you’ve won. I’m starting to see the same argument being made about stigginit to “conservatives,” and that isn’t good.

This is wrong on so many levels. In the first place, that media isn’t “conservative” in any consistent ideological way—the current “conservative” talking points aren’t about policy but identity (we are good because we aren’t them). But, in this world, as long as the outcome of a policy or statement is “stigginit to the libs,” then many people think it’s good. The outcome is good. But that outcome is just making the other unhappy.

There are many other groups that define success in zero-sum terms—hurting them is a kind of winning, even if we’re hurt too—so this isn’t unique to people devoted to Trump, and so I think that Müller’s rhetorical project is really complicated. It’s right, but it’s complicated.

[1] A lot of people make that argument or a similar one. Berger talks about this as a characteristic of “extremism;” I’ve talked about it as a quality of the nastiest kinds of demagoguery; Jeremy Engels, Catherine Kramer, and other scholars of resentment talk about it; it shows up in discussions of polarization, such as Lilliana Mason’s work; scholars of racism, ranging from Zitkala Sa to James Cone, identify it as a crucial aspect of racism, and cultural critics like Ijeoma Oluo and Ta-Nehisi Coates write about it persistently. Policy argumentation is short-circuited by shifting the stasis to whether real Americans, Christians, composition scholars, dog lovers (“us”) are getting what they/we deserve.

[2] Just to reiterate: our policy options are not usefully reduced to political group identities, and those groups are not usefully reduced to a binary or continuum. The world is not a binary of people who agree with us and those who should be cast into outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

[3] Topoi is a rhetorical concept that everyone should know. Topoi are kind of best thought of as rhetorical cliché—sometimes not usefully called a meme. A topos is the recurrent (disputable) claims within an argument—there are Muslim prayer rugs found in the Texas desert, the Democratic primaries were rigged, abolitionists inspire rebellion, the Bush family supported Nazis, these policies are unfair, these policies will have bad consequences.