Trump Archives - Patricia Roberts-Miller

Critics of Trump need to stop saying he’s unprecedented

Tl;dr the people who support a political figure who says, “I am so committed to the Real People that I will violate all legal and moral norms to enact my policies” always end up regretting it. Trump is very precedented, and it’s never worked out well.

I once had an unfortunate disagreement with a colleague whose work I so very, very much admire and have always supported. It came about because they kept saying that Trump and his actions are “unprecedented.” They were saying this for good reasons—wanting to mobilize outrage about Trump—but it is a historical claim, and, as such, it’s false. More important, it’s rhetorically (but understandably) misguided.

I think I came across as a pedant, crank, or someone who disliked their work. In reverse order, I love their work, and I am a crank and pedant, but, as it happens, when it comes to my insisting we not talk about Trump as unprecedented, I am neither.

His supporters believe he is unprecedented, and that’s one of the main reasons they support him. And they deflect any consideration of the precedents, as well as any criticism of him.

A lot of criticism of Trump has to do with who he is, and that kind of criticism helps him. All the evidence is that he is a corrupt, dishonest, racist, fiscally incompetent, and dishonest man who regularly sexually assaulted women, and who advocated insurrection. But there’s no point in emphasizing any of that when talking to his base because they agree that he is that person and did those things. They support him because he is a racist, corrupt, dishonest, rich person who gropes women. Most of them like that he is that person. They want to be him.

People who aren’t his base support him because they believe that they will benefit from the policies he’ll enact, especially “freeing” business owners and rich people from rules, restrictions, and taxes.

And there are people who will vote for him just because they have been trained to hate the hobgoblin of “liberals” by years of demagoguery. Some of them aren’t wild about Trump, and some have become wild about him because of the criticism. That kind of support is strengthened by the way that media and some scholars frame our vexed and complicated world of policy commitments as actually a third-rate reality show of a fight between “liberals” and “conservatives.” The single-axis model of policy affiliation depoliticizes policy argument, but that’s a book (which may come out fairly soon, fingers crossed).

Here’s the important point: just because that’s how the media frames something, and it’s possible to find supporting data, that doesn’t mean the frame is either accurate or useful. The media frames questions about birth control in terms of pro- or anti-abortion. It framed questions about the Iraq invasion as pro- or anti-war. Both of those policy disagreements are and were better served by acknowledging a a spectrum, rather than a single-axis continuum or binary.

The media frames all questions in terms of two identities at war (“left v. right”). To the extent to which media–even if they identify as “left”–frame issues in terms of identity, they help Trump.

There are a lot of reasons that people support Trump. People who rely on Fox News, the manosphere, Newsmax, for their information would vote for a cold turd as long as they were told voting for that turd would piss off “the woke mob.” Second, chiliastic fundagelicals love his aggressive actions in regard to Israel because they want nuclear war there–they believe it will reduce the number of Jews to 40k who will be converted, and thereby bring about Jesus’ reign on earth. That many Jews are choosing to support Trump because of his advocating policies that increase the likelihood of nuclear war in that region is just really frustrating. Third, descendants of immigrants pull up the ladder behind them. Unhappily, this has always been the case—the people most hostile to a new group of immigrants is the most recent group of immigrants. Fourth, toxic populism.

I think the first three are fairly clear, so I’ll emphasize the last.

Populism says that our world is not complicated, but actually a zero-sum battle between an elite and the real people. It says that we don’t have reasonable and legitimate disagreements about policies. It says that the correct course of action is obvious to all real Americans/Christians/workers/conservatives/whatevs. [1]

Commitment to a populist leader is generally irrational. Populist leaders say there is a real us, and that all our problems are caused by Them. They say that we can solve all our problems by fanatical commitment to the in-group, and refusing to listen to any criticisms of the in-group. The first move of toxic populists is to ensure their base dismisses as “biased” any criticism of them. They do so by demonizing (they’re evil), irrationalizing (they’re motivated by feelings, but we’re motivated by reason), and pathologizing (they’re lazy, criminal, corrupt) any source that is not fanatically committed to the leader/group.

Trump is a toxic populist.

The proof is that, if you say this to any of his supporters, and give the definition of a toxic populist, they won’t engage your argument.

Their first move will be whaddaboutism, their second will be deflecting the definition on the grounds that, since it applies to Trump, it must be “biased” (they’ll probably say “bias”), their third will either be harassing you (they like signing you up for Ashley Madison) or blocking you.

Claiming that Trump is unprecedented confirms his supporters’ belief that there is no already existing evidence that what he wants to do is politically, ethically, and economically disastrous. It enables them to deflect comparison to Castro, Chavez, Erdogan, Franco, Hitler, Jackson, Mussolini, Putin. Claiming that Trump is unprecedented saves them from the rhetorical responsibility of showing that supporting someone like Trump has worked out well. (Narrator: it hasn’t, especially for the working class, but even for plutocrats.)

Not all Trump supporters are the same, but the narrative that he is unprecedented enables every one of them to keep from thinking about the long-term consequences of their support. But, as I said, he’s following a playbook. It isn’t restricted to “right-wing” (I hate that term) leaders. What’s wrong with Trump isn’t about left v. right. It’s about whether a political leader values and honors democratic and legal norms or argues that he (almost always he) shouldn’t be held to them because reasons. And a leader who has made that argument has never worked out well.

Many of his supporters, like people who have supported authoritarian governments in Central Europe, are wealthy people who believe that they will profit from an authoritarian anti-socialist government. In Russia, they supported Putin, and they were wrong, as shown by what Putin did to the economy, and by the number of plutocrats who fell out of windows and landed on bullets. Paradoxically, capitalism requires innovation, and there isn’t much of that in an authoritarian culture. Authoritarian cultures/governments that have been profitable have done so by stealing ideas and innovations from democratic ones (e.g., printing or weaving).

But, and this is the important point, there are other examples of times when the people with a lot of monetary power backed a charismatic leader who was openly advocating an authoritarian government, and it didn’t work out well for them. There are precedents, and they show that charismatic leadership is actually a really bad way to run an organization, let alone a country.

The question Trump supporters should be asked is: when has support of this kind of political figure worked out well?

And that is the only aspect of Trump that is unprecedented.

[1] For a long time, I was averse to calling this “us v. them” false way of thinking about politics “populism.” I thought it should be called “toxic populism.” But, that train has left the station. Still and all, I’d argue that there is a difference between “our current political situation hurts these groups that don’t have a lot of political power” [what I think of a kind of populism—trying to worry about the ramifications of our policies on people not in power] and the binary thinking of toxic populism (our complicated political situation is actually a simple binary between people who are good/honest/real/authentic and Them). The best short book on populism is Jan-Werner Müller’s What is Populism. The best thorough work is the Oxford Handbook on Populism.

Trump supporters’ bad faith appeal to “the law”

(Jose Luis Magana / Associated Press) https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-01-07/capitol-violence-dc-riots-how-to-explain-to-kids

Many years ago, I was in a conversation with someone who was defending the police violence against Rodney King. He said, “After all, King had broken the law, so he was guilty.” I pointed out that, in the first place, by US conceptions of law he was innocent until he’d been through a trial, and second, that, even were he guilty, the punishment for what he’d done was not being physically beaten. He wasn’t bothered by the first one at all, and only a little bothered by the second.

He was a self-identified Libertarian. A “Libertarian” who believed that a police officer could not only determine guilt or innocence on the stop, but enact whatever levels of punishment felt right. That is very much not what a “Libertarian” should not believe. It’s authoritarianism. It’s believing that judgment should be giving to authorities.

That conversation was another datapoint that led to my belief that it’s really, really important that we stop thinking our political world in terms of a binary or continuum of “left v. right.” The data for the left/right continuum is from polls about self-identification, or a circular argument about support for X policy meaning that you have Y identity.

What matters for a thriving democracy isn’t who people are, nor where people are on some fantastical binary or continuum. Among the thing that do matter is that we believe that “the law”—whatever it is—applies equally to in- and out-group. The Libertarian didn’t believe that; he wanted complete liberty for his in-group, but didn’t mind if the police violated the supposed principle of Libertarianism, since it was against an out-group member.

Briefly, what I’ve come to understand—by spending a lot of time arguing with people all over the political spectrum—is that there are several ways of thinking about what “the law” is supposed to do.

In this post, I want to mention two that have a shared premise: that “the law” is supposed to enable communities to get along in a reasonably ordered way.

One way that people imagine the law doing that is to see law as a series of compromises and conventions that are, at best, striving to help everyone get along while holding everyone to the same standards. Some of them are purely arbitrary, and yet necessary–we all have to agree as to whether we’ll drive on the left or right side of the road (and the fact that right side is more common probably should figure into our deliberations), but there’s nothing inherently better about one or the other. If most of the world drove on the left side, after all, then that should figure in our deliberations.

And the law can change. For instance, there was in the 19th century a general sense that the law shouldn’t interfere in private contracts. But, after a while, people started to think that child labor was appalling, but passing laws about it would violate that principle about contracts, so they decided they had to reconsider that principle. So, “the law” works as a series of decisions and arguments in which we’re trying to get a community of diverse people to function effectively within the constraints of principles about rights.

The second way of thinking about the law, an authoritarian one, assumes that the law should maintain order by holding in- and out-group to different standards—it should maintain order by letting good people (the in-group) do pretty much whatever they want, and controlling bad people (the out-group) through punishment.[1] Ann Coulter, ends her book Treason with this argument:

“Liberals promote the rights of Islamic fanatics for the same reason they promote the rights of adulterers, pornographers, abortionists, criminals, and communists. They instinctively root for anarchy and against civilization. The inevitable logic of the liberal position to to be for treason.” (202)

It’s an astonishing argument, even for Coulter. That rights are human rights–that is, granted to all people simply by virtue of their being human–is a principle of American law. So, yes, pornographers have rights; that isn’t treason–that’s how the law is supposed to work. But, for Coulter, bad people shouldn’t have rights.

In my experience, people who imagine the law functioning this way are also prone to claiming that their condemnation of out-group figures is grounded in principle, but it isn’t.

I recently had an argument with someone who claimed that he was opposed to Biden because Biden lies. He supports Trump. That Biden lies is, unfortunately, a fact, and I will be angry af if he’s the Dem candidate for President in 2024. But Trump also lies, and he lies even more than Biden, yet that Trump lies was not a reason for that person to oppose Trump. That person was engaged in strategic appeals to principle. His opposition to Biden wasn’t grounded in some principle about lying—his support of Trump showed that he doesn’t care about lying on principle. He was engaged in cultish levels of support for Trump, while pretending to himself that his opposition to Biden was principled.

Trump supporters are authoritarian to the extent that they refuse to hold him (or themselves) to the standards they hold others.

For instance, Trump supporters frequently condemn BLM protests, many of which got violent. If those protests should be condemned, then so should January 6. That is, a person who was, on principle, opposed to violent protests would condemn both. Like the Trump cultist member who only objected to Biden’s lies but justified or refused to consider Trump’s lies, Trump supporters who defend January 6 and condemn BLM protests are not, actually, reasoning from a principle they value. They’re just people who hold their in-group to lower standards (or no standards at all).

And yet they do believe in “the law.”

MLK argued that there is a higher law than the laws supporting segregation, and he appealed to the higher law of people being treated equally regardless of in- or out-group. He advocated that everyone be held to the same standards. I’ll say he had Jesus on his side.

Trump appeals to a different understanding of a “higher law.” His supporters don’t hold in- and out-groups to the same standards. They believe that order is about domination and submission.

They believe that they are justified in violence if they don’t get their way. That is, if they can’t dominate. And Trump believes the same. And that is not democracy. And it isn’t Christian.

[1] There’s a quote going around describing this principle as being the central tenet of “conservativism,” and, while I think it’s true that a lot of people who self-identify as conservative do believe this, I’ve also heard the same principle expressed by self-identified leftists. I think authoritarianism is more usefully seen as another axis in a political map rather than a point on a single-axis continuum of political affiliation.

How to respond the GOP’s plan for another civil war

I’ve been worried about another civil war since 2003. I now believe that the GOP is dominated by people who actively want one, because they think they’ll win.

That probably sounds hyperbolic to people, so I’ll go through the longer version of how I got here.

The process of publishing a scholarly book in the humanities is (unnecessarily) slow. In 2003, I finished the book that would be published as Deliberate Conflict. It took another two years for the book to come out because of how slow academic publishing is, and it sat, finished, for quite a while. That book argues for the value of agonism, and I implicitly endorsed the narrative that the teaching of rhetoric made a bad shift when it went from being about debate to belletristic appreciation and/or expressive writing. Like a lot of others, I believed it led to problems in public discourse. In 2003 or so, iirc, a graduate student in a seminar asked, “Well, if things were so much better when the teaching of rhetoric was about debate, what about the controversy over slavery?”

So, I started looking into it. At that time, I had a smart, accomplished, rhetoric friend who got all their information from Rush Limbaugh, and it was odd to me that this really smart and very good person could be so wrong about basic facts. One of our first interactions was his claiming as a fact something about power plants in California that was simply wrong; since The Economist had recently had an article about the issue, I pointed out that he was wrong. He said, “Where did you get that? From [some lefty demagogue]?” I said, “The Economist.” He said, “The London Economist?” emphasizing London. He was shocked that I would read something non-lefty. (It’s liberal in the British sense, not American.) Clearly, he couldn’t imagine that anyone would read things with which they disgreed. He just relied on Limbaugh.

We had a lot of interactions like that. He’d repeat as a fact something he’d heard from Limbaugh that was completely false. I’d email him the actual clip from a speech, or studies from “conservative” sites, showing he was wrong. He’d admit he was wrong on that point, sometimes, but never stop relying on Limbaugh. The most striking was when he said that Obama claimed to have solved global warming, and I sent him the clip showing that Obama hadn’t said that at all. He emailed back, “Well, he’s still arrogant.”

This is a man who voted for George Bush, probably the most arrogant President until Trump.

This colleague was (and is) a good and smart person. He really tried to be fair in his dealings with colleagues and with the department; he worked to make the faculty more diverse; he gave good grades to students with whom he disagreed politically. But, when it came to his thinking about politics, it’s as though a switch flipped, and he became a person who was more engaged in believing than thinking. He believed what Limbaugh told him no matter how many times people like me (and I know there were several) pointed out to him that Limbaugh was lying.

2003 was a moment when the most arrogant President until Trump was deliberately lying to the US about Iraq. Even The Economist (which supported invasion of Iraq) said that the best case the Bush Administration could make—Powell’s speech to the UN—had some weak points. In fact, it was a very weak case, as could be seen at the time. But media, including mainstream media, presented Powell’s speech as though he had made his case. Instead of saying “Powell said” or “Powell claimed,” they’d say, “Powell showed.” Verbs matter.

More important, the Bush Administration was smearing its critics, and steadfastly, deliberately, and strategically deflecting any calls to deliberate about whether the policy of invading Iraq was reasonable. If you pointed out, as a general did, that their plan violated every principle of what it would take to occupy another country, you would be treated as hating America (smears which continued for over ten years). The Bush Administration, and its supportive pundits and media did everything they could destroy the credibility of critics of the proposed invasion without ever engaging their criticisms.

There were so many problems with the case for invasion, but advocates of invasion didn’t see them because people lived in informational enclaves. People who relied on Fox, Limbaugh, and various other sources literally never saw anything that even mentioned the weaknesses in the Bush Administration case. Many people lived in a world of shared emails that referred authoritatively to events that never happened, and urban legends about events that were about to happen that never did. They thought they were getting “objective” information, but they were in a partisan bubble. I found it impossible to argue with them because their whole case was grounded in claims and data they thought were true only because they’d been repeated so much. So, their beliefs weren’t grounded in anything open to disagreement.

Around that same time, I had to come up with a lower-division seminar writing course, and, given how things were, I decided to teach a course on demagoguery.

Back to the graduate student’s question. Because of that question, I had begun reading about the slavery debate, and pretty quickly what I found was that the dominant narrative—the Civil War happened because of fanaticism on both sides—was indefensible.

In fact, what happened was that, as early as the late 1820s, ambitious political figures in the slaver states figured out that demagoguery about slavery was a great way to mobilize support. Perhaps they really believed that slavery must be defended at all costs; perhaps not. The most effective Machiavellians lie to themselves first. But, what they did was make fanatical commitment to slavery the sign of white southern identity, especially white southern manhood. They moved the many issues related to slaver states’ commitment to slavery out of the realm of pragmatic deliberation into a question of loyalty to southern identity. Like the pro-invasion rhetors.

And they were able to do so because various shifts meant that people were living in partisan informational enclaves (specifically cheap printing and improved mail service). Media repeated and promoted reports of events that never actually happened—the AAS pamphlet mailing, the Murrell plot, poisonings, abolitionist conspiracies, and so many other urban legends.

Since I was teaching a course on demagoguery, and I was drifting around the internet (as I intermittently have for years), as well as reading pro-GOP sources, I got worried.[1] Our current media culture looked a lot like the antebellum media culture—one in which deliberation was actively dismissed as unnecessary and often actively demonized. People could inhabit a media enclave and never see any of the information that might complicate what they were being told.

In the 1830s, the slaver states and politicians declared that the situation was one of existential threat—the vast conspiracy of abolitionists were determined to destroy Southern (aka, slaver) civilization. The demagoguery of pro-slavery media insisted that, if any President were elected who was not actively pro-slavery, the Federal Government would abolish slavery. Pro-slavery political figures enacted a gag rule in Congress–silencing any criticism of slavery–and many started advocating secession. Like the Iraq invasion, this was was advocated as preemptive when it was actually preventive (that matters, and I’ll come back to it). When Lincoln was elected, the demagoguery was comparable to what happened when Obama was elected. The difference was that, when Lincoln was elected, slaver states began seceding.

Buchanan tried to negotiate with them, as did Lincoln. But the slaver states wanted war, and nothing could have stopped them from getting their war. That’s important. You can’t appease people who are determined on war.

From the 1830s on, there were a lot of people in and out of the slaver states that were engaged in what scholars in International Relations call “defensive avoidance“–they didn’t like any of their options, so they did nothing, and hoped it would solve itself. There were people who didn’t own slaves, objected to slavery in their area (often for racist reasons), but who didn’t really care about what “the South” did, since they thought it didn’t affect them, and so didn’t want to do anything to “provoke” slavers. Some people really objected to slavery, and especially the “Slave Power”—the way that slavers, although a numerical minority, could silence criticism of slavery, force “free” states to institute proslavery “black codes,” and enable the enslavement of free people through the Fugitive Slave Law. But even some of people who resented the Slave Power were hesitant to “provoke” slavers.

And that’s interesting. There were violent anti-slavery actions, ranging from Bloody Kansas to John Brown’s raid, but there was no public discussion about the need to keep from provoking abolitionists. And, really, that’s how concern about “provoking” violence works–people worry about “provoking” authoritarians, but no one worries about policies that might “provoke” other groups. Violent protests help authoritarians, whether the protests are pro- or anti-authoritarian.

Another form of defensive avoidance was to declare that “both sides are just as bad.” People who just wanted to avoid war thereby enabled and ensured one. Again: it is pointless to try to placate people who are determined to use violence to get what they want. You aren’t preventing violence, but just delaying it.

The slaver states always had the pretense of being democratic, as did the segregationist states (which weren’t just in the “South”), but it was a democracy of the faithful. Like the USSR or GDR, which also claimed to be democracies, it was a democracy of people who remained within a limited realm of disagreement. It was “law and order” only insofar as the law wasn’t applied equally. It was the notion of justice that Plato famously criticized: justice is helping my friends and hurting my enemies. Jesus also criticized that notion of justice, but neither slavers nor segregationists cared very much about Jesus.

Nor does the current GOP. The GOP has gone full authoritarian and anti-democratic; “law and order” doesn’t mean holding everyone equally to the law (why did Clinton have to testify before Congress, but not any of Trump’s appointees?), but of using the power of the law to protect the in-group and punish everyone else. And they’re justifying their exempting themselves from following democratic norms and the law on the grounds that this is war–so, like Bush, and like the slavers, they’re engaged in preventive war (trying to keep Democrats from gaining power) while claiming it’s a preemptive (Democrats are about to kick down your doors and take your guns).

Slaver states were determined to get a war in order to have a nation purely and completely committed to slavery. After about 1850, there was probably no way to stop them from starting that war. What could have been different, and what might have prevented a Civil War was if the various people who didn’t support slavery, and didn’t want a war for it, had been more openly committed in their opposition to slavery. There was no way to placate slavers. In the antebellum period, there were a lot of political figures whom the proslavery media and rhetors called “doughfaces.” They were political figures whom the proslavery media and rhetors could force to say anything they wanted.

The doughfaces were mostly out for their own political careers, but, like all careerists, they might have told themselves it was for the greater good. They could have prevented the war. They didn’t. The current doughfaces, who are going along with what they know to be lies about the 2020 election, need to stop thinking about their careers and think about democracy.

We are in a situation in which Trump has already once tried to incite his base to violence in order to force a coup. He almost succeeded. The GOP has decided to back his play, but in ways that aren’t quite as crude—they’re moving to allow state legislatures to assign electoral candidates different from how the popular vote would suggest, for instance, or find ways to inhibit or disempower non-GOP voters. People who care about democracy need to stop that–regardless of your political party.

Here’s Trump’s plan. The 2022 elections will be all about getting a GOP majority in Congress and control of enough state legislatures to shift the US to “competitive authoritarianism” (when there are elections, but it’s systematically impossible for any but one party to win most or all of them). First, there will be a constitutional convention (so much for originalism). Second, SCOTUS will rule that state legislatures can override the popular vote. Third, state legislatures will override the popular vote. If, for some reason, there is resistance to his election, or resistance to any part of his plan, he will sic his storm troopers (and I mean that) on anyone who disagrees.

There is nothing that will stop Trump or his supporters from violence. Nothing. That’s their plan. So, there is no reason to keep from doing the right thing because it might provoke them.

As I hope is clear from this post, I’m interested in how various rhetorical practices have worked out historically[2]. And I can say that reasoning deductively (this practice will work because it should work) is exactly the wrong choice. We need to look at what has worked in the past.

There are actions that might alienate the hand-wringing people engaged in deflective avoidance. There are people who don’t like Trump, but don’t like the Dems, or who don’t like Trump but like tax breaks, or who think politics doesn’t matter. Violent protest alienate them. And, to be honest, violent protest helps the “law and order” crowd. It shouldn’t but it does. It doesn’t mobilize allies, and it alienates potential allies. (That’s a historical claim—if anyone wants to show times that, in the US, violent protests have helped non-authoritarian policies, I’m open to it.)

We can’t find a rhetoric that will persuade his fanatical supporters that they’re wrong. There is none. They’re in a cult. But, there are actions that have worked in the past to topple dictators, and that’s what we should be engaged in now: holding him and his supporters (whether our state rep or our drunk uncle) accountable, non-violent protesting, making common cause with other opponents, voting, giving money and time to his opponents, boycotting his supporters, being willing to violate norms of politeness with his supporters, telling stories that complicate what he’s saying.

Trump and the GOP fully intend to use the police, mobs, a GOP Congress, and GOP-dominated state legislatures to force him into the Presidency. We need to stop that.

[1] In 2003, I started writing a book about demagoguery; since the proslavery book was my first concern, the ms. wasn’t done until 2013. It was rejected by the press. (One reviewer said it was a dead issue.) But, Martin Medhurst had published an article of mine about demagoguery, although the readers were unanimous it should not be published. He published it, and their responses in 2004 or so.

In 2016, when people were interested in demagoguery, that article was one of few things out there, and so I was asked to write a short book about it. I did. That generated interest, and so the rejected ms. was accepted by SIUP and published in 2017.

I mention all this simply because I think it’s a cautionary tale about how the unnecessary delays in scholarly publishing virtually ensure the irrelevance of our work. We should be faster. No one actually takes six months to read an ms.

[2] Every once in a while, I run across someone who says I can’t be an authority on history because I don’t have a degree in history. Meanwhile, they make claims about rhetoric, without any degrees in rhetoric. As it happens, I took two classes as an undergrad and two as a graduate student on the rhetoric of history (not offered by the history department at Berkeley). Two of my committee members had degrees in history, another had a degree in American Studies (from Yale), and my director was a student of Kuhn’s. The other member was a Romanticist, which mattered since I was writing about John Muir.

Trump, Toxic Populism, and Authoritarianism

It’s common for people to talk about how, in our polarized world, everything gets politicized—whether you wear a mask, a red hat, if you have “impossible” burgers in your buffet. But that’s actually wrong. What’s wrong with our world right now is that everything gets depoliticized.

Instead of deliberating, arguing, negotiating, and so on about what policies we should adopt, in a culture of demagoguery, everything is about being loyal to Us and hating on Them. Demagoguery looks like political discourse—it’s about “political parties” and their candidates, after all—but it isn’t. The wide array of policy options is reduced to what the demagogue advocates and the stupid shit The Other proposes (or is doing). And the demagogue’s proposal isn’t argued at any length; it’s hyperbolically asserted to be obviously right, just as the demagogue’s own personal history is hyperbolically asserted as a long string of almost magically effective and decisive actions. The hyperbole is rhetorically important, since it gives the demagogue and their supporters the ability to deflect criticism.

When a rhetor speaks hyperbolically, they are shifting away from the issue to the rhetor’s own passionate commitment. The “issue” is no longer about the policies that might solve the problem, but the conviction of the rhetor, their complete (even irrational) loyalty to the in-group. Hyperbole is about belief, not facts. Thus, hyperbole enables the deflection of policy discourse practices—it depoliticizes political issues.

Demagoguery is all about deflection. It’s especially about deflecting rhetorical responsibilities (especially of accuracy, consistency, and fairness), and accountability (for past and future errors, failures, lies, incompetence, corruption). Hyperbole enables deflection because it is a figure of speech, much like metaphor or simile. If I say, “He got so mad he just charged in there like a tiger,” it would be weird for you to say, “He isn’t a tiger; he’s human.” You would be showing that you don’t understand how simile works.

Hyperbole enables the demagogue to make outrageous and mobilizing claims without having to provide evidence for them—in fact, if someone asks for evidence, or points out that the claims are false, that person looks petty. Hyperbole enables someone to lie without being seen as a liar. It also enables a rhetor to announce or advance extraordinary policies that are beyond criticism, because criticizing the policies would require taking them literally, and that would come across as a kind of humorless nitpicking. The demagogue offers a world of passionate commitment, clarity, triumph, and the pleasures of membership in a unified group.

To criticize the rhetor who has created that sense of immersion is to try to pull the discourse back to the uncertainty and frustration of policy argumentation, and so it’s enraging to people who enjoy the depoliticized world of politics as pep rallies.

And so that brings me to Trump’s July 26, 2022 speech at the America First Agenda Summit.

The speech is a great example of toxic populism, appealing to what the scholar of populism Paul Taggart calls “unpolitics,” and the political scientists John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse call “stealth democracy.” Taggart defines “unpolitics” as “the repudiation of politics as the process for resolving conflict” (81). Like Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, Taggart points out that many people believe that politics—that is, arguing and bargaining with people who disagree—is unnecessary. Those people (call them toxic populists) believe that there is no such thing as legitimate disagreement; for every problem there is a straightforward solution obvious to regular people. We are prevented from enacting that obvious solution by an “elite” who deliberately slow things down and obstruct problem solving in order to protect their own jobs, line their pockets, follow pointless rules, and get lost in overthinking and details. Toxic populists can be all over the political spectrum, and people can be toxic populists about non “political” problems (health, business, personal finance, institutional practices)—what’s shared is their perception that we should just stop arguing and act. We should put in place someone who will cut through the crap and get ‘er done.

In other words, we should put in place someone who will violate all the norms, the checks and balances, the restrictions; we need someone who will not listen to what anyone else has to say.

And people think that will work out well. It never has. The checks and balances are there for a reason.

But, back to the speech. Trump lies a lot in it, as he generally does, but they’re the kind of lies that his base likes. He says, for instance, that in 2020,
“we had a booming economic recovery like nobody’s seen before, the strongest and most secure border in US’s history, energy independence, and even energy dominance, historically low gas prices, as you know, no inflation, a fully rebuilt military and a country that was highly respected all over the world by other leaders, by other countries, highly respected.”
He doesn’t even try to give the numbers that would support any of his claims, probably because there aren’t any. Every single claim is untrue. But it would look like humorless nitpicking to point out what’s wrong with each one, and involve explanations and require thinking. I’ll point out just one. In 2020, the pro-Trump media was engaging in alarmism about the southern border of the US, using “invasion” rhetoric (they’ve been doing this every election year for some time). Here’s one example. So, either Trump was lying in 2022, or he and supporting media were lying in 2020.

When it’s pointed out to Trump supporters that he lies, they tend to respond in one of two ways. The most common is, “All politicians lie; I just care about whether they get things done.” The second most common, in my experience, is, “Well, here’s a lie that Biden said.” The second is just deflection, but the first is more interesting. It looks pragmatic and reasonable, but it’s neither. If Trump lies about everything, and his media repeats his lies, how do you know whether he’s really getting things done? The only way to know is to step out of the pro-Trump bubble, and check the numbers, but I have yet to meet a Trump supporter who will even look at any information from sources anything less than fanatically supportive of him.

So, what they’re actually saying is, “I like Trump lies.” As I said, that’s neither pragmatic nor reasonable.

The most concerning aspect of toxic populism—regardless of where on the political spectrum it is—is the always implicit and sometimes explicit authoritarianism. “Authoritarian” is one of those words that people use to mean nothing more than “someone who is trying to make me do something I don’t want to do.” It’s always solipsistic; there are no in-group authoritarians—our leaders are decisive, but theirs are authoritarian. That’s a useless way to think about authoritarianism.

Authoritarian regimes are ones in which “no channels exist for opposition to contest legally for executive power” (Levitsky et al. 7); and there’s reason to believe that Trump is openly advocating a version of it: “competitive authoritarianism.” But I’m more interested in authoritarianism as an ideology. Authoritarian ideology is best understood as at one end of a continuum with pluralism on the other side. Imagine a person who is a dog lover—the more authoritarian they are, the more they will believe that everyone should be forced to love dogs, and that people who don’t love dogs should be exterminated or at least expelled. The more pluralist they are, the more they will believe that not loving dogs is also a legitimate position, and that it’s actively good to have people who disagree about dogs.

The more authoritarian someone is, the harder it is for them to understand what it means not to be authoritarian. They can’t imagine having a belief or behaving a particular way without forcing others to share that belief and behave that way—they think that’s how everyone thinks. For instance, authoritarian “complementarians” understand allowing “gay marriage” to be forcing people into such marriages—that they don’t want such a marriage must mean not letting anyone have it. A pluralist complementarian would believe that their marriage is complementary, but not everyone wants that kind of marriage or should be forced into it.

Authoritarians never see themselves as authoritarian, because they think they’re forcing people to do what’s right, and authoritarianism is forcing people to do what’s wrong. So, when it comes to political authoritarianism, they think that bypassing all the constitutional checks and balances in favor of an authority forcing his (it’s almost always “his”) will on everyone is a great idea.

And that’s what Trump is advocating—no constraints, on police officers (13-19), prosecutors, and, most of all, on himself:
“To drain the swamp and root out the deep state, we need to make it much easier to fire rogue bureaucrats who are deliberately undermining democracy, or at a minimum just want to keep their jobs. They want to hold onto their jobs. (01:09:28)
Congress should pass historic reforms, empowering the president to ensure that any bureaucrat who is corrupt, incompetent, or unnecessary for the job can be told, did you ever hear this? You’re fired? Get out. You’re fired. Have to do it. [inaudible 01:09:49]. Washington will be an entirely different place.“
What he wants, and what a GOP Congress will give him, is the power to fire any person in government who tries to hold him accountable.

That’s authoritarianism. That’s dangerous.

On Republicans saying Trump went too far

Scene from Casablanca in which Renault pretends he didn’t know there was gambling

There are a lot of editorials from conservative sites admitting that Trump deliberately incited violence in the hopes that Pence would do something unconstitutional. And that is what Trump did. And it’s what Trump critics have been warning he would do since he was elected.

Even the Wall Street Journal has, in both its news and editorial positions, said that Trump instigated the violence at the capital on January 6, and did so deliberately. Since last spring, people had been saying that Trump would dispute the legitimacy of the election if he lost (and both he and the GOP thought he’d lose—that’s why they rushed through the appointment of Barrett, thereby violating the principles they said had made them refuse to certify Garland). Anyone who was paying even a little bit of attention to Trump’s tweets or his supporters knew that they were planning violence on January 6 (and they are for January 20—I’m seeing some stuff about January 17 and I don’t know why).

Various pro-Trump media are expressing shock at what he did on January 6—that is, incite violence. They’re either idiots, in which case, they should resign, or they knew he would. I think it was the second. I think everyone at Wall Street Journal now busy clutching their pearls, every GOP politico now saying he went too far, every FB friend saying it was antifa–they all knew that Trump would do exactly what he did and what he’s still doing. He’s trying to violate the Constitution in order to stay in power. It’s perfectly in line with what he’s always done. He doesn’t think it’s right for him to be constrained or accountable in anyway—by laws, morals, or conventions.

That’s who he is, and who he has always been, and anyone who knows anything about his time in New York knows that. His tax returns show that he was never successful at anything other than Celebrity Apprentice. Otherwise he had terrible judgment.

I’m working on a chapter about the appeasement of Hitler, specifically about why major political figures (like Chamberlain and Baldwin) kept giving Hitler what he wanted, as though that would avert war, and as though he wasn’t someone who had always said that he intended to engage in a war of conquest and extermination. There are lots of arguments as to why Chamberlain’s government engaged in appeasement, but I think it’s pretty clear: they did so because anything other than appeasement was rhetorically impossible given the beliefs of their base.

Once Trump became the GOP nominee, then criticizing him was rhetorically impossible because of the beliefs of their base—the beliefs the GOP had been drumming for years. Specifically, the pro-GOP media for years had been saying that only the GOP was right because Dems were so awful. Because Dems were/are so awful because SOCIALISM and ABORTION (and on neither point does the pro-GOP media have a rational argument), then the GOP is justified in anything it does.

For instance, the claim that there was massive voter fraud is not only irrational, but a great example of how people can mistakenly think that “I have seen the evidence for myself” is a rational way to assess an argument. Whether you can find data to support your claim doesn’t make your argument rational. There are three tests for a rational argument:

Can you identify the evidence that would cause you to admit that you’re wrong? In other words, is your argument falsifiable?
Do your arguments consistently appeal to the same major premises? This one is complicated, and I really wish that people taught syllogisms in argumentation classes. The short version is that if you say, “There was voter fraud because there were bunnies near the polling places” and “There was voter fraud because there were no bunnies near the polling places” then you don’t have a rational argument.
Would you consider the way you are arguing a good argument if made in support of positions with which you disagree? Again, complicated because of how badly we teach argumentation, but a rational argument has a form that we would consider a good form regardless of the content.

No argument for massive voter fraud can withstand that test. As an aside, I have to say that I’d love were the results in Texas subjected to the level of scrutiny that Republicans want for Pennsylvania. Were the GOP pearl-clutching about Pennsylvania sincerely about the principle of voter fraud and not just another instance of not believing that people who vote against them should have their votes count, then the pearl-clutchers would welcome scrutiny about Texas.

Yeah, that won’t happen.

We are in a cultural moment that, for various reasons, assesses things (a CEO, product, political figure, athlete, diet, policy, movie) in terms of immediate outcome. If the CEO is getting great press, then they must be good, so we give them more good press, which proves they’re good. Since great press increases the stock value, then the great press is seen as great judgment.

It’s as though someone jumped off a cliff, and all the press was about how great they were for flying. They’re a great success, and should be admired. And then the hitting the ground is treated as an unfortunate outcome, as opposed to what was always going to happen.

That’s the issue with pro-GOP media that advocated a scorched earth demagoguery regarding Dems long before Trump started running for President. Rhetoric isn’t mere rhetoric. It has consequences. The pro-GOP media persuaded people to jump off the cliff.

What happened on January 6^th (and what Trump was still hoping for on January 16th and 17th and maybe the 20^th) was just one more instance of how Trump has always been. Trump has always lied. About everything.

Take, for instance, the argument that you have to be GOP if you think abortion is wrong. The Dems aren’t pro-abortion (no one is) but want to reduce abortion through the policies that are demonstrably effective at reducing abortion. The GOP has no response to that argument.

Instead, it falsely presents the Dems as pro-abortion. And here I’ll just say that, if you have to lie about what your opponent believes, then maybe you aren’t promoting democracy? But anyway, even assuming that the Dem plan for reducing abortion is bad, it doesn’t mean that the GOP is right. Both parties might be wrong. The GOP rhetoric about abortion is just demagoguery. It’s a false reduction of a complicated issue to us v. them, necessitating straw man representations of the opposition.

Trump engages in race-based demagoguery, and he always has, as far back as his advocating killing innocent men because they were Black. Trump’s rhetoric is:

he is entitled to everything because he is a person above accountability, above rules, above norms;
therefore, he is entitled to use any and all means to enhance his power, financially profit, and triumph over people who don’t support him;
he will reward people who support him by enabling them to stand above accountability, rules, and norms;
and he will punish anyone who doesn’t support him in every way he can.

That’s his rhetoric. That’s what his rhetoric has always been. It’s also what his policies have been since he’s been in office. These aren’t just rhetorical topoi he’s used, but the arguments he’s used for policies grounded in those beliefs.

That’s also the rhetoric of pro-GOP pundits, and has been ever since Rush Limbaugh started broadcasting. The only difference is that they begin with a different premise from Trump. Trump says (and probably believes) that he is entitled to those things and practices because of who he is, whereas pro-GOP rhetoric, since the 1990s, has been that the GOP (and whatever policies its advocating at this moment regardless of what it previously advocated) are entitled to those things because of how evil the Dems are.

So, just to be clear, pro-GOP rhetoric has, since the 1990s, been that we should abandon the rhetoric and practices inherent to democracy—that is, we should abandon democracy—because of how evil the Dems are. What we saw on January 6^th was not just the consequence of Trump’s rhetoric, but the consequence of what Rush Limbaugh has been saying his entire career, what pro-GOP pundits have been saying for thirty years: that Dems are so bad that there are no restraints or constraints on what the GOP should do to win.

So, to those people who are now outraged about what happened on January 6^th, I’d love to see them explain how what he did is not just one more instance of those four topoi, and how those topoi are not the logical consequence what pro-GOP media has been saying for over twenty years.

What we saw on January 6^th was the direct consequence of what Trump said, and Trump is the direct consequence of what pro-GOP media has been saying for over twenty years.

Rejecting Trump, without rejecting that anti-democratic rhetoric and policy agenda, is just wishing the coup had been better managed.

Trump’s tax returns and his quiet supporters

Trump with bad spray tan — Photo from here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-unhappy-returns-11601333853

I wrote a bunch of posts called “Arguing with Trump supporters,” and decided to use the term “Trump supporters,” but “arguing” was really the distinguishing term. I was talking about the group of people who still try to defend Trump, either in person or on the internet. They’re mostly repeating pro-Trump media talking points, and they don’t even try to defend him through rational argumentation. I’m not sure they ever had reasons to support him, as much as passionate beliefs about him and government.

When James Arthur Ray—a self-help bozo who made his money telling people how to make money (when he made his money telling people how to make money)–was exposed as not only murderously irresponsible, but a person telling people how to be successful when he was underwater in terms of debt, there were blog posts (which have since disappeared) saying that the fact that he had more debts that profit wasn’t evidence that his advice was bad. It was, they said, a kind of success.

In other words, for them, that you have a lot of money to spend means that you’re successful, even if you have that money because you have unmanageable loans, fraudulent claims about your wealth, and skeezy ways of getting the money. They were admiring a con artist.

Trump’s base—his cult [1]—will love that he screwed over the government through fraud. They’re beyond reasoning with, since they have no reasons to support him, and they like that he’s a con artist. (It’s interesting that they don’t realize he’s conning them.) This post is about a different set of people.

That other set of people voted for Trump did give reasons, and did (in 2016 anyway) often engage in rational argumentation to advocate for voting for him.[2] These are the people who in 2016 expressed some ambivalence about voting for him, but who gave reasons for their voting that way, and almost none of those reasons now apply. I wonder about them.

Here were the reasons I heard:

1) they hated HRC;
2) he has no relevant experience, but he’d hire the best people (I heard this a lot);
3) he’s a buffoon, but the GOP will keep him in line;
4) he’d appoint justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade;
5) he’s a good business man, and we need a businessman’s perspective on how to run government;
6) they think Democrats will raise taxes on businesses and the very wealthy, either force businesses to fund ethical health benefits for workers or have substantial government-subsidized healthcare, enforce environmental regulations, promote non-partisan redistricting policies.

So, here’s their situation now.

1) HRC isn’t running.

2) He never hired the best people. As early as 2017 it became clear that the best people won’t work with him because he’s unpredictable, unreliable, and disloyal. (I assume that his inability to hire good lawyers is why Barr is trying to get the DOJ to take over Trump’s worst case.) His personal lawyer is Giuliani, whom no sensible person would hire to fight a parking ticket. In fact, like many narcissists, Trump deliberately hires underqualified people so that they are completely beholden to him. I can’t imagine any of the people who said in 2016 “He’ll hire the best people” looking at whom Trump has hired (and fired) and thinking those are people whom they would hire for anything that requires more intelligence than being a crash test dummy.

3) When people argued in 2016 that the GOP would keep him in line, others said (correctly), that’s exactly what the conservatives said about Hitler. Since, clearly (or not), Trump wasn’t Hitler, his supporters ignored that argument. It wasn’t a claim that Trump would kill all the Jews, but that narcissistic people on the edge of sociopathy can’t be controlled. The better argument (and the one I wish I’d made when arguing with people) was: when has that worked? When has someone as difficult to work with, as narcissistic, as mercurial as Trump ever been controlled by a political party? (The answer is: never.) He isn’t controlled. It’s important to note that people who worked with him have described him as a threat to the country.

4). If your only reason to vote for Trump was that he would appoint enough justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, that’s a done deal. So there’s no longer any reason to vote for him. (I wonder about this one a lot—I think it’s really a moment of truth for whether the people who made this argument actually were all that ambivalent about Trump’s racism, reckless rhetoric, and appalling character.)

5a) This argument–he’s a good businessman–is the only one that the taxes affect. Even his defenders aren’t disputing that Trump lost a lot of money, or that he owes a lot of money–their argument, as far as I can tell, is that The New York Times hasn’t proven fraud (see, for instance, this WSJ editorial— talk about a low bar). If they’re saying his taxes aren’t fraudulent, then they’re saying it’s clear that he made no money from his businesses; he’s wealthy because of his TV show. That’s the reasonable inference.

I have to point out that lots of people in 2016 said that Trump was not a business success, because a reasonable assessment of his assets (even with all his lying and evasion) would lead to that conclusion. In my experience, the people who defended him as a successful businessman when presented with that information had the same argument that defenders of James Arthur Ray had–so what if it was a con and he’s underwater in terms of debt? He’s got money to spend, and that’s success.

5b) It’s interesting that this was exactly the argument made for Bush Jr., which people conveniently forgot when Trump was running. There’s no evidence that businessmen (it’s always men) who go into government make government more efficient. And I always think that’s a weird argument because there are a lot of things one can say about massive corporations, but being efficient with their use of resources isn’t a claim that withstands any scrutiny. So, the notion that a successful businessman would be a great President is one of those things that some people believe but can’t defend rationally.

6) Don’t I wish.

Democrats don’t have a recent history of passing that level of social safety net—the last time was under LBJ. And, even if they did, those policies don’t lead to Stalinist socialism. That’s an empirical claim subject to disproof. Were that narrative right, then there would be countries where people slid slowly—through one democratic socialist policy after another—into Stalinism.

And that country would be?….

In fact, although countries have slid into increasingly authoritarian governments (such as Russia now), no government slid into communist socialism. Israel has been socialist for a long time, after all. So, just to be clear, the fear-mongering about what happens if we adopt universal health care, for instance, has literally no evidence to support the claim that we’ll end up as the USSR.

So, I’m curious what those people will do—will they vote for Trump again?

[1] That is, his base that neither wants nor admires democracy but openly wants an authoritarian government in which someone they feel represents them has unlimited powers. That’s called fascism, in case you’re wondering.

[2] Being able to engage in rational argumentation to support your position doesn’t mean your argument is true or right or ethical, let alone that I agree with it. It’s actually a fairly low bar, so it’s interesting that Trump supporters can’t meet it.

When every political issue is a war, shooting first seems like self-defense

train wreck — image from https://middleburgeccentric.com/2016/10/editorial-the-train-wreck-red/

For some time, we’ve been in a world in which far too much media (and far too many political figures) defenestrate public deliberation in favor of treating every policy decision as a war of extermination between two identities.[1] When a culture moves there, it’s inevitable that some group engages in what might be called “pre-emptive self-defense.” We’re there. It’s a weird argument, and profoundly damaging, but hard to explain.

The first time I ran across the proslavery argument, “We must keep African Americans enslaved and oppressed, because, if they had power, they would treat us as badly as we are treating them,” I thought it was really weird. I’ve since come to understand that it isn’t weird in the sense of being unusual. But it’s weird in the sense of being uncanny—it’s in the uncanny valley of argumentation in two ways. First, it’s turning the Christian value of doing unto as others as you would have them do unto you into a justification of vengeance: do unto them as they have done unto you, (which is a pretty clear perversion of what Jesus meant). Except, just to make it weirder, it isn’t what they have done unto you, but what they might do in an alternate reality. And that alternate reality requires that they are as violent and vindictive as you.

The argument is something like, “Yes, I am treating other people as I would not want to be treated, and as they have not treated me, but it’s justified because it’s how I imagine they would treat me in a narrative that also is purely imagined.”

This weird line of argument turns up a lot in arguments for starting wars. Obviously, wars start because some group attacks another; someone is the aggressor. So, when you think about pro-war rhetoric, you’d imagine that the side that is the aggressor would justify that aggression. They don’t. Instead, they present themselves as engaging in self-defense. They claim that their aggression isn’t really aggression, but self-defense because the other nation(s) will inevitably attack them. It’s self-defense against something that hasn’t happened (and might never). Pre-emptive self-defense.

For instance, Hitler invaded Poland because he intended to exterminate it as a political entity, exterminate most of its population, use it as a launching spot for a war of extermination against the USSR, and then make it (and other areas) a kind of Rhodesia of Europe, with “Aryans” comfortably watching “non-Aryans” act as serfs. But that isn’t how he justified it in his public rhetoric. In his September 1, 1939 speech announcing an invasion that had already started, he said the invasion was an act forced on him, that he had engaged in superhuman efforts to maintain peace, but Poland was preparing for war. Invading Poland was self-defense because Poland was intending to invade Germany, and had already fired shots (they hadn’t). [2] The various wars against the indigenous peoples of what is now the United States, even when they openly involved massacres, were rhetorically justified as self-defense because the indigenous peoples were, so the argument went, essentially hostile to “American” expansion, and therefore an existential threat.

In other words, pre-emptive self-defense says, we are going to invade this other nation while claiming that it isn’t an invasion but self-defense (although we’re the invaders) because they were going to be invaders or would be invaders if they could. That’s nonsense. That’s saying I’m justified in hitting you because I think that, were I in your situation, I would hit me.

It’s such an unintelligible defense that it isn’t even possible to put it into writing without ending up in some kind of grammatical moebius strip. Yet it’s obviously persuasive, so the interesting question is: how does that rhetoric work?

As I’ve often said, I teach and write about train wrecks in public deliberation, what are sometimes called “pathologies of public deliberation.” While there is a lot of interesting and important disagreement about specifics regarding the processes, on the whole, there’s a surprising amount of agreement among scholars of cognitive psychology, political science, communication, history of rhetoric, military history, social psychology, history, and several other fields about some generalizations we can make about what ways of reasoning lead people to unjust, unwise, and untimely decisions. And, basically, that agreement is that if the issues are high-stakes and the policy decisions will have long-term consequences, then relying on cognitive biases will fuck you up good. And not just you, but everyone around you, for a long time.

As it happens, deciding about whether to go to war, how to conduct a war, and whether to negotiate an end to a war are decisions that activate all the anti-deliberative cognitive biases. (Daniel Kahneman has a nice article explaining how some cognitive biases are pro-war.) So, there’s an interesting paradox: cognitive biases interfere with effective decision-making, arguments about whether to go to war (and how to conduct it) have the highest stakes, and those decisions are the most likely to trigger the cognitive biases. We reason the worst when we need to reason the best.

And what I’m saying is that we bring in that bad reasoning to every policy decision when we make everything a war. When people declare that a political disagreement is a state of war (the war on terror, war on Christmas, war on drugs, culture war, war on poverty), they are (often deliberately) triggering the cognitive biases associated with war. The most important of those is that our sense of identification with the in-group strengthens, and our tolerance for in-group dissent decreases. Declaring something a war is a deliberate strategy to reduce policy deliberation. It is deliberately anti-deliberative.

And one of the anti-deliberative strategies we bring in is pre-emptive self-defense. In war, that strategy consists of months of accusing the intended victim (the country that will be invaded) of intending to invade. Then, once the public is convinced that the country presents an existential threat, invasion can look like self-defense. In politics, that strategy consists of spending months or years telling a political base that “the other side” intends an act of war, a complete violation of the rule of law, extraordinary breaches of normal political practices (or claims they already have), then “us” engaging in those practices–even if we are actually the aggressor–looks like self-defense. Pre-emptively. Thus, pro-slavery rhetors insisted that the abolitionists intended to use Federal troops to force abolition on slaver states, pro-internment rhetors argued that Japanese Americans intended to engage in sabotage (Earl Warren said that there had been no sabotage was the strongest proof that sabotage was intended).

I think we’re there with the pro-Trump demagoguery about “voter fraud” (including absentee ballots, the same kind that Trump used–there is no difference between “absentee” and “mail-in” ballots)–it’s setting up a situation in which pro-Trump aggression regarding voting will feel like pre-emptive self-defense.

I asked earlier why it works, and there are a lot of reasons. Some of them have to do with what Kahneman and his co-author said about cognitive biases that favor hawkish foreign policy:

“Several well-known laboratory demonstrations have examined the way people assess their adversary’s intelligence, willingness to negotiate, and hostility, as well as the way they view their own position. The results are sobering. Even when people are aware of the context and possible constraints on another party’s behavior, they often do not factor it in when assessing the other side’s motives. Yet, people still assume that outside observers grasp the constraints on their own behavior.”

In the article, Kahneman and Renshon call these biases “vision problems,” but they’re more commonly known as “the fundamental attribution error” or “asymmetric insight” with a lot of projection mixed in.

The “fundamental attribution error” is that we attribute the behavior of others to internal motivation, but for ourselves we use a mix of internal (for good behavior) and external (for bad behavior) explanations. So, if an out-group member kicks a puppy, we attribute the action to their villainy and aggression; if they pet a puppy, we attribute the action to their wanting to appear good. In both cases, we’re saying that they are essentially bad, and all of their behavior has to be understood through that filter. If we kick a puppy, the act was the consequence of external factors (we didn’t see it, it got in our way); but petting the puppy was something that shows our internal state. In a state of war, even a rhetorical war, we interpret the current and future behavior of the enemy through the lens of their being essentially nefarious.

And we don’t doubt our interpretation of their intentions because of the bias of “asymmetric insight.” We believe that we are complicated and nuanced, but we have perfect insight into the motives and internal processes of others, especially people we believe below us. Since we tend to look down on “the enemy,” we will not only attribute motives to them, but believe that we are infallible in our projection of motives.

And it is projection. I’m not sure whether the metaphor behind “projection” makes sense to a lot of people now, since they might never have seen a projector. A projector took a slide or movie, and projected the image onto a screen. We tend to project onto the Other (an enemy) aspects of ourselves about which we are uncomfortable. If there is someone we want to harm, then projecting onto them our feelings of aggression helps us resolve any guilt we might feel about our aggression.

These three cognitive processes combine to mean that, quite sincerely, if I intend to exterminate you (or your political group, or your political power), I can feel justified in that extermination because I can persuade myself that you intend to exterminate me, since that’s what I intend to do to you.

Pre-emptive self-defense rationalizes my violence on the weird grounds that I intend to exterminate you and so you must desire to exterminate me. Therefore, all norms of law, constitutionality, Christian ethics are off the table, and I am justified in anything I do. It’s a dangerous argument. It’s an argument that justifies an invasion.

[1] And, no, “both sides” are not equally guilty of it. For one thing, there aren’t two sides. On which “side” is a voter who believes that Black Lives Matter, homosexuality is a sin, gay marriage should be illegal, we need a strong social safety net and should increase taxes to pay for it, abortion should be outlawed, the police should be demilitarized and completely changed? What about someone who believes there shouldn’t be any laws prohibiting any sexual practices or drug use, there shouldn’t be a social safety net, taxes should be greatly reduced, abortion should be legal, we shouldn’t intervene in any foreign wars? Those are positions held by important constituencies (in the first case many Black churches, and in the second Libertarians). Some environmentalists are liberals, some social democrats, some Republican, some racist, some Libertarian, some Third way neoliberal. The false mapping of our political world into two sides makes reporting easier and more profitable, and it enables demagoguery.

In addition, not all media engage in demagoguery to the same degree. Bloomberg, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Nation, New York Times, Reason, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post are all media that sometimes dip a toe into demagoguery, but rarely. Meanwhile, The Blaze, DailyKos, Fox, Jacobin, Limbaugh, Maddow, Savage, WND and pretty much every group named by SPLC are all demagoguery all the time.

[2] Hitler was claiming that “Germans” who lived in Poland were oppressed. But, he said, “I must here state something definitely; […]the minorities who live in Germany are not persecuted.” In 1939.

Some of the highlights from Trump’s interview on Fox

From this interview on Fox.

WALLACE: But, sir, we have the seventh highest mortality rate in the world. Our mortality rate is higher than Brazil, it’s higher than Russia and the European Union has us on a travel ban.

[….]

TRUMP: Kayleigh’s right here. I heard we have one of the lowest, maybe
the lowest mortality rate anywhere in the world.

TRUMP: Do you have the numbers, please? Because I heard we had the best
mortality rate.

TRUMP: Number, number one low mortality rate.

[…] [He’s lying. By some statistics, we have the tenth highest mortality rate.
John Hopkins has the US as seventh highest mortality rate. ]

WALLACE VOICE OVER: The White House went with this chart from the European CDC which shows Italy and Spain doing worse. But countries like Brazil and South Korea doing better. Other countries doing better like Russia aren’t included in the White House chart.

[….]

TRUMP: [About the prediction that covid would go away in summer.] I don’t know and I don’t think he knows. I don’t think anybody knows with this. This is a very tricky deal. Everybody thought this summer it would go away and it would come back in the fall. Well, when the summer came, they used to say the heat — the heat was good for it and it really knocks it out, remember? And then it might come back in the fall. So they got that one wrong.

[March 16, 2020, Trump said it would go away. He wasn’t alone in making that prediction, but it was a minority opinion, as covid was thriving in hot places even then. ]

[…]

TRUMP: [Fauci’s} a little bit of an alarmist. That’s OK. A little bit of an alarmist.

[….]

TRUMP: I’ll be right eventually. I will be right eventually. You know I said, “It’s going to disappear.” I’ll say it again.

WALLACE: But does that – does that discredit you?

TRUMP: It’s going to disappear and I’ll be right. I don’t think so.

WALLACE: Right.

TRUMP: I don’t think so. I don’t think so. You know why? Because I’ve
been right probably more than anybody else.

[….]

TRUMP: Chris, let the schools open. Do you ever see the statistics on young
people below the age of 18? The state of New Jersey had thousands of deaths.

Of all of these thousands, one person below the age of 18 – in the entire
state – one person and that was a person that had, I believe he said diabetes.

One person below the age of 18 died in the state of New Jersey during all of
this – you know, they had a hard time. And they’re doing very well now, so
that’s it.

[So, notice that, not only is unconcerned about staff, but he doesn’t seem to understand the concept of the children infecting others, let alone the issues related to long-term damage from the disease.]

[….]

TRUMP: And Biden wants to defund the police.

WALLACE: No he, sir, he does not.

TRUMP: Look. He signed a charter with Bernie Sanders; I will get that one
just like I was right on the mortality rate. Did you read the charter that he
agreed to with…

WALLACE: It says nothing about defunding the police.

TRUMP: Oh really? It says abolish, it says — let’s go. Get me the charter,
please.

WALLACE: All right.

TRUMP: Chris, you’ve got to start studying for these.

WALLACE: He says defund the police?

TRUMP: He says defund the police. They talk about abolishing the police.

[It doesn’t.]

[….]

TRUMP: Because I think that Fort Bragg, Fort Robert E. Lee, all of these
forts that have been named that way for a long time, decades and decades…

WALLACE: But the military says they’re for this.

TRUMP: …excuse me, excuse me. I don’t care what the military says. I do –
I’m supposed to make the decision.

[….]

WALLACE: You said our children are taught in school to hate our country.
Where do you see that?

TRUMP: I just look at – I look at school. I watch, I read, look at the
stuff. Now they want to change — 1492, Columbus discovered America. You know,
we grew up, you grew up, we all did, that’s what we learned. Now they want to
make it the 1619 project. Where did that come from? What does it represent? I
don’t even know, so.

WALLACE: It’s slavery.

TRUMP: That’s what they’re saying, but they don’t even know.

[…]

TRUMP: Biden can’t put two sentences together.

[….]

TRUMP: I called Michigan, I want to have a big rally in Michigan. Do you know we’re not allowed to have a rally in Michigan? Do you know we’re not allowed to have a rally in Minnesota? Do you know we’re not allowed to have a rally in Nevada? We’re not allowed to
have rallies.

WALLACE: Well, some people would say it’s a health…

TRUMP: In these Democrat-run states…

WALLACE: But, wait a minute, some people would that it’s a health
risk, sir.

TRUMP: Some people would say fine

WALLACE: I mean we had some issues after Tulsa.

TRUMP: But I would guarantee if everything was gone 100 percent, they
still wouldn’t allow it. They’re not allowing me to do it. So they’re not —
they’re not allowing me to have rallies.

[….]

[About the test of his cognitive abilities—Wallace says it’s an easy test]

TRUMP: It’s all misrepresentation. Because, yes, the first few
questions are easy, but I’ll bet you couldn’t even answer the last five
questions. I’ll bet you couldn’t, they get very hard, the last five questions.

WALLACE: Well, one of them was count back from 100 by seven.

TRUMP: Let me tell you…

WALLACE: Ninety-three.

TRUMP: … you couldn’t answer — you couldn’t answer many of the
questions.

WALLACE: Ok, what’s the question?

TRUMP: I’ll get you the test, I’d like to give it. I’ll guarantee you
that Joe Biden could not answer those questions.

WALLACE: OK.

TRUMP: OK. And I answered all 35 questions correctly.

[On healthcare]

TRUMP: Pre-existing conditions will always be taken care of by me and
Republicans, 100 percent.

WALLACE: But you’ve been in office three and a half years, you don’t
have a plan.

TRUMP: Well, we haven’t had. Excuse me. You heard me yesterday. We’re
signing a health care plan within two weeks, a full and complete health care
plan that the Supreme Court decision on DACA gave me the right to do. So we’re
going to solve — we’re going to sign an immigration plan, a health care plan,
and various other plans. And nobody will have done what I’m doing in the next
four weeks. The Supreme Court gave the president of the United States powers
that nobody thought the president had, by approving, by doing what they did —
their decision on DACA. And DACA’s going to be taken care of also. But we’re
getting rid of it because we’re going to replace it with something much better.
What we got rid of already, which was most of Obamacare, the individual
mandate. And that I’ve already won on. And we won also on the Supreme Court.
But the decision by the Supreme Court on DACA allows me to do things on
immigration, on health care, on other things that we’ve never done before. And
you’re going to find it to be a very exciting two weeks.

Are Trump supporters racist? Yes. Are Biden supporters racist? Yes. Are they equally racist? No.

Notice that Japanese Americans must report for internment

Far too many people (mostly white)….

…..think that I just did something racist by saying “mostly white.”

People might think that because, if you stop someone on the street and ask them, “what does it mean to be racist?,” a lot of them would say it means:

1) consciously categorizing people by race;

2) and you can know that someone is doing that by “making race an issue” (that is, mentioning race);

3) “stereotyping” a race (that is, making a generalization about it), especially if the generalization is negative;

4) as a consequence of that conscious negative stereotype about the race, treating everyone of that race with aggression and hostility.

It would seem I’ve violated the first through third rule, so, if you think those are good ways of deciding what racism is, I’m racist.

Those actually aren’t good ways of deciding that something is racist (although it’s true that I’m racist). In the first place, these rules imply useless and cognitively impossible solutions to racism. They suggest that the solution to racism is to: not see race; not mention race; not make generalizations about groups; and never consciously behave badly to someone just because of their race.

In the US, we can’t not see race. Race is so important in our culture that saying you don’t see race is like saying you don’t see gender. Unless you are literally blind, you see race and gender. Those are the things we notice about someone immediately. We’re often wrong about someone’s gender, just as we’re often wrong about someone’s “race,” but we can’t help but categorize people. Individuals can resist, but never completely free ourselves of, the culture in which we have been raised. Even Gandhi struggled to free himself of thinking in terms of the caste system. What matters about Gandhi is that he recognized, and acknowledged (publicly) that he wasn’t free of thinking about people from within the caste system, and he tried to account for it.

Aristotle describes ethical action as much like aiming with a bow and arrow. His argument was that every virtue has extremes on either side. It’s a vice to be reckless, and a vice to be cowardly. It’s a vice to be spendthrift, and a vice to be a miser. We all have a tendency toward one extreme or another, just as we are prone to pull to one side or another when aiming a bow and arrow. [1] We need to acknowledge our tendency, so that we can adjust for it. That’s how racism works. We can’t escape it, but we can try to figure out how much it’s making us miss the mark, and adjust for it.

Aristotle’s point is that none of us is born with perfect aim. We can get to ethical actions by acknowledging our tendency to unethical action. The notion that acknowledging (or naming) race makes the action/statement racist guarantees we will not correct our aim. It’s like saying that your shot must have been good because you don’t see misses.

So, are Trump supporters racist? Yes. Are Biden supporters? Yes. They/we are all racist because we’re all Americans and Americans are racist. But not equally so.

Racism isn’t an either/or. It isn’t that we’re racist or not; it’s how racist we are and what we’re doing about it. It’s the fourth (false) criterion for racism that enables racism most effectively.

Racism is an unconscious bias. No one is unbiased. That isn’t how cognition works. You can’t perceive the world without perceiving it in light of what you already believe. Imagine that you’re a white person trying to find an office in a university building. You can find the door to the building because you have a stereotype about how buildings work. You walk past classrooms because you have a stereotype about classrooms. You walk into a room because you have a stereotype (and prejudices) about what an office looks like. For instance, it might say on the door, “Department of Rhetoric,” and you’re looking for that department. You have a prejudice (you have prejudged) that departments put their name on a door.

That’s why the argument that you shouldn’t stereotype groups is nonsense. We stereotype. That’s how we think. The very statement, “Generalizations are bad” is a generalization. Generalizing isn’t the problem.

You walk in to that office. There are several people. Whom do you assume is the executive assistant, and whom do you assume is the Department Chair?

You see a tall white male with slightly graying hair, a short stout Black woman of the same age as the white male, a younger white woman elegantly dressed, a person whose race and gender you can’t immediately identify. Whom do you treat as the receptionist?

Your decisions about whom to treat as the Chair are just as much questions of prejudging, stereotypes, and expectations as your decisions regarding finding the door (and it’s decisions, and not decision—there are a lot of factors). You can rely on your prejudgments, stereotypes, and expectations, or you can decide to treat humans differently from doors. You can’t not have the prejudgments; you can treat know that you have prejudgments and then act differently.

Racism isn’t getting up in the morning and deciding on whose lawn you’ll burn a cross. Racism is assuming the Black woman isn’t the Chair.

Does that mean that the non-racist thing to do is to walk into the office groveling in shame, filled with guilt, hating your whiteness? If you get your information from the GOP-propaganda machine, that’s what you’d think. They say that being anti-racist means being ashamed of being white (something no anti-racist activist has ever said would solve racism). Would walking into that room full of shame for being white change anything about the interaction? If, full of shame, you assumed the white guy was the chair, you’re still racist.

A lot of people assume that racism is a sin of commission, and the common notion about sins of commission is that you know you’re doing something that is a sin and you do it anyway. I think that’s pretty rare in racism. In fact, I’m not sure it’s ever the case.

My experience is that racists—even actual Nazis—don’t (or didn’t) see themselves as acting out of racism. Nazis these days call themselves “racial realists,” the real Nazis claimed that they were acting on the basis of objective and realist science. Racists think racism is irrational hostility to a race; racists believe that their stereotypes are grounded in data.

They’re grounded in confirmation bias.

Sometimes, racists say that they aren’t racist because their actions–such as wanting to restrict immigration from some group–are grounded in concerns about politics, not race. Therefore, they aren’t racist!

That’s how race-based genocide is justified. Native Americans had to be exterminated because they were a military threat. Jews were, the Nazis said, a political threat, as were Poles, Czechs, and various other non-Aryan “races” of central and eastern Europe. The people who engaged in lynching didn’t say they were doing something racist; they said they were trying to preserve a social order (that was racist). I’ve spent a lot of time crawling around the nastiest of the nastiest racist writings—both current and historical—and I can’t think of a time when racists called what they were doing “racist.”

In other words, even people engaged in racist-based genocide—the most extreme version of racism–have ways of rationalizing those actions so that they don’t see themselves as committing the sin of racism. Racism never seems to the racist to be a sin of commission because there are ways of pretending it isn’t racism–we pretend it’s about upholding “objective” (actually racist) standards (such as standardized tests, or arrest rates), reducing crime (but really the crime of not being white).

These were exactly the ways that Nazis criminalized being Jewish. Jews were more criminal, they said, and had arrest rates to prove it (because Jews were arrested for things that wouldn’t have resulted in an arrest for non-Jews), science that agreed Jews were essentially criminal, and media that promoted the stereotype of Jews as criminal.

Are Trump supporters racist? Yes, because they support the most openly racist President we’ve had since Wilson. Racism isn’t a binary; it’s a continuum. And Trump is very far on the racist side of the continuum.

Are Biden supporters racist? Yes, because Americans are racist. He isn’t as racist as Trump.

Does it hurt the feelings of Trump supporters to be called racist? Well, then don’t be racist. One way for Trump supporters to show they aren’t racist is for them to condemn Trump’s racism. Until they do, they’re more racist than Biden supporters.

If I’m a shitty driver and regularly run people over, I don’t get to say that I’m just as hurt by being called a shitty driver as the people are hurt by my running them over. If I want to stop being called a shitty driver, I should try to learn to drive better.

[1] If you’re a geek about this kind of thing, and you want a very scholarly, but beautifully written, book about the Athenians of Aristotle’s era and justice, Martha Nussbaum’s Fragility of Goodness changed my world.

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

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

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

Trump is the Chauvin of demagoguery.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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