Tag: Trump

Narcissism and bad political outcomes

Like many teachers trying to shift to online teaching and still provide a useful experience for students, I’m got way too much to do this week, and so I don’t have the time I’d like for writing about Trump’s putting a “strong” economy over the health of the people he is supposed to care for. I don’t even have the time to point out that his first moves were not to protect the economy, but the stock market. (They are not the same thing.)

All I have time for is to make a few quick points that others have already said. There are lots of ways that Trump could help the economy that would, in fact, raise all boats (something that boosting the stock market does not do)—FDR figured them out. This isn’t about fixing the economy; this is about fixing the perception of the economy (since so many people do associate “the economy” with “the stock market”).

I’m about to give an example of how that way of thinking of things worked out for another world leader in order to make the point that it isn’t a good way to approach the situation. I want to give an example in order to make a claim about process—whether this way or approaching a situation is a good one.

My rhetorical problem is that a lot of people (especially authoritarians) have trouble making that shift to the more abstract question of process. It has nothing to do with how educated someone is—I’ve known lots of people with many advanced degrees who couldn’t grasp the point, and many people with no degrees who could. It’s about authoritarian thinking, not education. (Expert Political Opinion and Superforecasting are two books about this phenomenon.)

To complicate things further, authoritarians (who exist all over the political spectrum) not only have trouble thinking about process, but understand an example as a comparison, and a comparison as an analogy, and an analogy as an equation.

For instance, imagine that you and I are arguing about whether Chester’s proposal that we pass a law requiring that everyone tap dance down the main street of town is a good one, and you point out that the notoriously disastrous leader of the squirrels, Squirrely McSquirrelface, passed a similar law, and it ended disastrously. If I’m an authoritarian, then I’ll sincerely believe that you just said that Chester is Squirrely McSquirrelface, and, in a sheer snitfit of moral outrage, I will point out all the ways he isn’t. For extra points, I will accuse you of being illogical.

All that I will have thereby shown is that I don’t understand how examples about processes work.

I’ll give one more example. I often get into disagreements with people about “protest voting” (or “protest nonvoting”). I think that’s a bad way to think about voting, since I don’t know of any example of a time it’s worked to get the kinds of political changes the people who advocate it want. And, instead of providing me with examples, the people with whom I’m disagreeing dismiss me for not having sufficient faith (a Follower move). They only argue about process deductively (from a presumption that purity of intent is not only necessary but sufficient for a good outcome—a premise I think is indefensible historically).

So, let’s get back to the question of privileging the stock market and “the economy” over what experts on health say. And there’s an example of that way of thinking. (There are a lot, but I’ll pick one.)

I think Trump, who didn’t want to be President, now can’t stand the idea of not being re-elected, because he is ego first and foremost (as indicated by all his lies, even on stupid stuff, like his height). And he believes that he can’t get reelected if the economy sucks in October. And that’s a reasonable assumption. People will vote against a President (Carter) or party (GOP in 2008) if the economy sucks at that moment, regardless of whether it sucks because the President did the right thing (Carter), or the economy tanked because of processes in which both Dems and GOP were complicit (2008). Hell, people vote on the basis of shark attacks.

There are many problems with Trump, but one is that he sincerely believes he is a “universal genius”—a person so smart he can see the right course of action, regardless of having no training in it. This is important to his sense of self, and that’s why he keeps firing people who make it clear that they are more knowledgeable than he is about anything. Not only can’t he be wrong, but he can’t have anyone in his administration smarter than he is.

This isn’t the first administration like that. It doesn’t end well. It can’t end well. The notion of “universal genius” is nonsense. Intelligent (as opposed to raging narcissist) people know that they don’t know everything, and so need people around them who know more than they do about all sorts of thing.

Intelligent people know that disagreement is useful. Raging narcissists fire people for disloyalty if they dissent, and then they make bad decisions. Firing people for “disloyalty” (i.e., dissent) doesn’t play out well in the business world (e.g., Enron, Theranos) in the long run (although it can in the short run), nor does it in the political world, nor the military.

Making decisions about the economy purely on the basis of how it will play out for a regime also doesn’t lead to good long-term outcomes. How Democracies Die shows how authoritarians shift from democracy to authoritarianism through disastrous manipulation of the economy.

There’s another example.

Germans, on the whole, never really admitted that they’d lost WWI. The dominant narrative was that they were winning, and could have won had people been willing to stick it out, but the willingness to stick it out collapsed for two reasons. First, there was the “stab in the back” myth—the notion that Jewish media lied to the Germans and said they couldn’t win. Second was the narrative that people on the homefront lost hope because they were suffering in basic ways, such as food, housing, and coal. And they were.

It’s important to note that the dominant narrative was wrong on both points. There wasn’t a stab in the back, and Germany didn’t lose the war because of homefront morale. The homefront morale could have stayed strong, and they would still have lost. It just would have taken longer and cost even more lives.

But Hitler believed that narrative, and both its points.

As Adam Tooze shows in his thorough book (that I can’t recommend highly enough), Hitler’s economic (and military) decisions were gambles. And those decisions were also at odds. He wanted to prevent the stab in the back by, as much as possible,  ensuring that his base was comfortable. He made bad decisions about the economy because he wanted to preserve his support and win a war he probably shouldn’t have taken on.

Hitler’s way of deliberating was bad. He wanted outcomes he wasn’t smart enough to realize were incompatible. And by “smart enough,” I mean “willing to listen to people more expert than he.” Hitler’s rejection of his military experts’ advice is infamous, as is his firing anyone who disagreed with him.

What matters about Hitler, from the perspective of thinking about process, about the way an administration or leader deliberates, is how he decided. As Albrecht Speer said, Hitler sincerely believed himself to be a universal genius, and the paradoxical consequence was that he only allowed around him third-rate intellects. Hitler was obsessed with world domination and purifying the Germans. But he was even more obsessed with being the smartest person in the room, with having around him people who flattered him, with silencing dissent (on the grounds that it was disloyalty), with firing anyone who actually knew more than he did. He hired and fired on the basis of loyalty, not expertise.

That ended with people huddled in bomb shelters like the one in the photo.

When has it ended well?

Research on businesses says it doesn’t end well; I can’t think of a single historical example when it’s turned out well.

I’m making a falsifiable claim. I’m saying that Trump’s way of handling decision making is bad, and I’m using Hitler as an example.

When I pose this question to people who support the model of a “universal genius” who silences dissent, relies on his (almost always his) gut instinct, and who only get their information from in-group media, the response is always some version of “Hey, I’m winning—screw you for asking.” They say I’m biased for criticizing Trump, Obama was worse, abortion is bad. They say, in other words, because they like what they’re getting, they don’t care whether this has never worked out well in the past.

Guess who else thought that way.

What they don’t say is “here is an example of a leader who claimed to be a universal genius, who fired anyone who criticized him, who wouldn’t allow anyone in the room who was more an expert than he, who made every issue about him, who lied about big and small things, who used his power to reward people and states who were loyal to him and punish ones who weren’t, who openly declared himself above the law, and it worked out great.”

That’s because there is no such example.

In other words, they can’t come up with an example of a time when an administration that reasons that way has been successful. They are committed to a way that has never worked. They are committed to the way that people supported Hitler.

When Germany was finally conquered, 25% of the population thought it was right to have followed Hitler, and that he had been badly served by the people below him. 25% of the German population were so committed to believing that Hitler was their savior that no evidence could prove them wrong.

I’m not saying that Trump is Hitler.

I’m saying something much more troubling: I’m saying that the people who support Trump reason the way that people supported Hitler. I’m not talking about Trump. I’m talking about his supporters. I’m not saying they would have supported Hitler. I’m asking them to consider whether their way of supporting Trump is a good way to support a political figure.

This is two-part: can they give examples of times when this kind of support for this kind of leader has worked out well? And, can they identify the evidence that would persuade them their support for Trump is wrong? What is it?

And, if their answer is that there is nothing that would make them question their loyalty to Trump, and nothing that would persuade them to venture outside of the pro-Trump media, then they aren’t just admitting their political position is irrational, but they’re committing to a way of thinking about politics that has never ended well.

It wasn’t that long ago that that way of thinking about politics ended up with Germans huddled in concrete balls.

If the case for impeachment is so bad, why won’t Fox let you hear it?

Fox News showing Sekulow instead of House managers making case
From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGVjBoE-zio

Aristotle argued that if people who disagree argue as hard as they can, and the people making the arguments have equal skill, then the truth will prevail. And that’s not a bad argument. It might be a little idealistic. After all, there are lots of situations in which the people arguing (the rhetors) might not have equal skill: a 300-dollar an hour attorney v. you. But, if you’re talking about rhetors who have all the money they need, then Aristotle’s argument makes sense.

People with lots of resources making true arguments don’t worry about their audience being exposed to false arguments because, on the whole, people are sensible, and if the audience is shown something true and something false, they can find the truth. So, a major media source, call it Chester News, doesn’t have to worry about people watching other media, unless watching other media will enable Chester News viewers to realize they’re being lied to. A lot.

People who are lying, however, need to make sure you don’t read other sources because then you’ll figure out they’re lying. So, they spend as much time telling you their lies as they do telling you not to tune in to anyone who might disagree.

Con artists (this book is really interesting about con games), like abusers and cult figures, first isolate you. They spend a lot of time telling you what They believe. The “They” here is a fabricated version of various out-groups that lumps them all into one false image that is both much stronger and weaker than any of the groups are—weaker in the sense that their arguments aren’t presented, but just straw man versions of them, stronger in the sense that They are presented as well-organized, powerful, and incredibly dangerous. Chester News might give cherry-picked quotes or data that, in context, don’t mean what they claim, and they don’t give you the sources so that you can see the full quote in context. Similarly, they give you the clip of This Person (who represents They) saying something outrageous, but they don’t give you a link where you could watch it in context.

And Chester news will, as Benkler et al. and Levendusky show, insist you not listen to anyone else, especially not to any They sources. Why?

It’s like the worst moments in junior high, when someone tells you, “Terry said this terrible thing about you, but don’t ask them about it, because I’ll get in trouble.” If you were sensible, you learned not to listen to them. Don’t believe what Fox tells you “liberals” believe, unless they link to direct sources, and you look at those sources in full context. And don’t believe what MSNBC tells you Fox is arguing, unless they link to direct sources, and you look at those sources in full context.

If the Fox case about impeachment were as good as they claim, they would give you all the sources. They would show you the whole videos, all the documents, all the speeches. They don’t. Fox, Trump, and the GOP are all admitting that they can’t defend themselves if all the evidence is open to their base. That’s important.

And, c’mon, we all know what it means when someone won’t let you look at the data. We’ve all had someone tell us, “Here’s the bill, and I won’t actually explain why I’m right.” And we know it means that they’re lying.

We aren’t talking about someone prying into potential irrelevant details. We’re talking about testimony regarding what Trump said in a phone call. If Trump did nothing wrong in the phone call, then all the people privy to that phone call could testify and he would be exonerated. If they can’t testify, then why not? If Fox won’t let you see that evidence, or the arguments about it, why not? If they had a slam dunk for their interpretation, you know they would share it. They won’t because they’re afraid of it.

If Fox won’t let you see the evidence, their case sucks.

That’s rhetoric 101.

There is no principle here to which any GOP wants to commit. Had HRC won, and had all of this played out, but with HRC substituted for Trump, y’all would be screaming for blood.

And that is how democracies die. They die when people value faction over principle. If we value democracy, we hold our party to the same standards we hold the other party. Otherwise, we’re looking at Athens as it imploded. We’re valuing party loyalty above anything— the truth, fairness, the law, any principles. And if we’re supporting a party whose claims are so weak that they have to make sure their base doesn’t have any direct contact with the opposition arguments, then we’re in real trouble.

Why I think impeaching Trump now is not a good choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s interesting.

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

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

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

So, let’s take it seriously.

How many of those things has Trump actually done?

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

That’s interesting.

Trump’s racist tweets

Donald Trump said:

“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run… Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

And the question is: is that racist? And the answer is yes. The more important point is that this is a great moment for talking about how racism actually works, since racism continues because people don’t know it when they see it.

A lot of people look at what he said, and say, “This isn’t racist, because he never mentions race, and he’s talking about culture of origin, not race.”

The notion that something isn’t racist as long as you don’t explicitly mention race is like saying it isn’t cancer as long as you don’t say that word out loud.

A lot of people believe that a racist action happens because a person (who is racist in every single encounter) gets up in the morning and says, “I sure do have an irrational hate of X race. How can I be more racist toward that group every day and every way?” And, when that person engages in a racist action, s/he says, “I am doing this to you purely because you are X race.” Thus, as long as someone isn’t deliberately hostile, or their hostility isn’t irrational, or they don’t explicitly mention race, they didn’t do something racist.

In that world, someone saying that what you did is racist is accusing you of being that kind of really awful person. And so you are offended, and then the conversation shifts to how you feel about getting accused of getting up every morning and ironing your hood. (This is called “white fragility.”) So, you point out that you didn’t use racist terms, you have friends of X race (which might or might not be true), you have done un- or anti-racist things. None of that–your feeling of having been disrespected, your avoiding racist terms, your friends, your past behavior–is actually evidence that this you just did was not racist.

Think about it this way. You’re driving along, and someone (call him Chester) changes lanes into you and causes y’all to crash. Your car is really damaged. And Chester gets out of his car and you have this conversation:

You: You just changed lanes into me.
Chester: No, I couldn’t have done that because that would make me a bad driver and how dare you call me a bad driver! I am a good person. I foster blind owls, and teach a literacy class at the local public library, and pick up trash on the road.
You: Um, that’s all great, but you did change lanes into me.
Chester: I couldn’t have done that because I’m a good driver. I have never been given a ticket (because I treat police officers with respect, unlike some people), I think terrible things about very unsafe drivers, and I always check my blindspots. And I think the real issue here is that you’ve accused me of being a bad driver.

You wouldn’t say, “Oh, wow, well, yeah, that’s all evidence that you are a good driver, so you can’t possibly have just changed lanes into me.” That would be an absurd conclusion. You would say, “I don’t really care if you’re normally a good driver. I don’t care who you are–I care about what you just did.”

Yet, when someone does something racist, and someone else points it out, we have the “I can’t have changed lanes into you because I’m a good driver” argument.

And that’s how this argument about Trump is going.

But, let’s take seriously the argument that he isn’t racist, but xenophobic. He isn’t xenophobic—his wife, in-laws, and father are or were all immigrants—he is not opposed to immigrants. He’s perfectly fine with engaging in chain immigration, which he has condemned in the abstract, for his family, and his wife’s visa is problematic. And, this isn’t really about immigrants—this is about what counts as a real American.

Keep in mind that all of the women he criticized are Americans. That’s the country they’re from. So, he just said the US has a government that is a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world.

Perhaps we should take him at his word. Or, in other words, paging Dr. Freud.

There are only two ways to interpret what he said—either he is unintentionally showing what he thinks of his own government, or he believes that those women should be seen as coming from the countries from which their parents came. Three of them, after all, were born in the US. And he sees their ethnicity—their parents’ country—as what matters about them. And that is what makes it racist. That is how racism works—as seeing some groups as not really American.

That’s really common among racists. Americans gleefully put Americans of Japanese descent into camps (as they were called at the time) because the assumption was that, if you were second generation Japanese you weren’t really American, an assumption not made about the Italians, Germans, Romanians, or other Nazi countries in the 1940s (but made about all of those groups at some point). That was a political, and not biological, decision. All the decisions about who gets to be white have always been political and not biological.

Again, that’s how racism works. Until the rise of biological racism, “race” was always country of origin. Even after the rise of biological racism, there was a lot of “science” that showed that people from various countries (or continents) were inferior—the Irish, the Poles, the Italians–, biological racism never had a coherent biological definition of race.

Some scholars use the term cultural racism, but I’m not wild about that term, since all racism is and always has been about country of origin (sometimes going back pretty far, as with Latinx whose families have been in the US far longer than Trump’s, or Native Americans who are oddly framed as not native to the US). The Jews are not a race.

So, saying that Trump was talking about country of origin and not race means he’s perfectly in line with how racism typically works.

Trump has had a lot to say about what’s wrong with America, and how the government is awful. In fact, a lot of his base believes there is a Deep State trying to work against him. Trump and his supporters are the ones telling everyone how the government should be run.

So, Trump and his supporters have no problem with someone going on and on about how awful the government is—they think that’s great. That’s what makes them love Trump.

And, really, if you want to have an example of viciously telling people things, Trump’s tweets would be up there.

Again, that’s how racism works. When an in-group member engages in a certain behavior—let’s say disrupting coffee shops with protests—you defend it as required by external circumstances, and the consequence of good internal motives. When an out-group member disrupts coffee shops with protests, you say it wasn’t necessary, and it was the consequence of bad motives.

If you believe that disagreement is useful for a democracy, if you believe that people really disagree, if you believe that we should argue with one another—in other words, if you believe in the values on which the US is founded—then you would attribute someone’s disagreement to their disagreeing.

Either criticizing the government is okay, or it isn’t. And if it’s okay for you, then it’s okay for others. And if you say that someone’s argument should be dismissed because of their race, ethnicity, or country of origin, you’ve made a racist argument.

Trump, Clinton, and Epstein

Here’s what clear about Jeffrey Epstein: he has had many plausible accusations of participating in underage sex trafficking, the kind of accusations that would have landed anyone else in jail for a long time, but got him a light sentence because he has powerful  connections.

Epstein has very clear ties to Trump, even more to Trump’s appointee Alex Acosta, who negotiated a deal with Epstein no one else would have gotten. Epstein, in that deal, admitted to sex trafficking. In a later interview, he was clear he had no regret about any of it. (footnote on page nine)

So, as a culture, here’s what we should be arguing: Acosta should resign, and Trump should grovel for appointing him.

Instead, we’re engaged in some kind of weird “Well, Clinton is implicated, so Trump is innocent.” Or, the even weirder, “Trump told someone that he knew Epstein was a child rapist, and so banned him from Mar-a-Lago,” so Trump is in the clear.

The people who are making those arguments would never consider those good arguments if made by Clinton supporters.

And that is what is wrong with our current political world. That’s how far too many political arguments play out. We make arguments we think would be terrible if made on behalf of out-group political figures. We look at every issue from within the frame of “this is a zero-sum contest between us and them” and then only consider evidence that shows we are winning that contest, or they’re losing (which means we’re winning). In that world, if you or an in-group political figure is shown to have done something wrong, you can wipe the slate clean by showing that an out-group person did the same thing.

[Thus, the complaint that SJW are engaged in identity politics is sheer projection. People all over the political spectrum are reasoning from their identity. Not everyone reasons that way, but every position has someone doing it–some have lots.]

When I say this to people supporting Trump, I often get the response, “Well, liberals do it too.”

That would be proving my point.

(It’s a bit more complicated with people who don’t like Trump, because they aren’t all liberals—many of them are self-identified conservatives, some are progressives or Marxists (who hate liberals), some are anarchists—being opposed to Trump does not mean you’re “liberal”. Supporting Trump doesn’t necessarily mean you’re “conservative.”)

Imagine a world that was not people hiding in their enclave throwing reasons at one another like bricks. Imagine a world in which people held all groups to the same standards. That is a world in which people preferred one group over others, but in which simply being in-group didn’t exempt someone from prosecution, let alone criticism.

In that world, anyone with ties to Epstein would be investigated fairly and thoroughly, and we would see anyone who argued anything else as enabling a child molester.

This isn’t about Democrats v. Republicans (to be honest, no issue ever really is); this is about people who enabled Epstein in his sexually assaulting underage women. It should be non-partisan.

We can have a world in which Americans agree that anyone involved in underage sex trafficking goes to jail. Or we can have a world in which we decide that accusations of involvement in underage sex trafficking on the part of our political figures shouldn’t be fully investigated, but their involvement is criminal.

I’d like the former.

Pretending your factionalism is commitment to principle

One of many weird things about politics is how people claim that their opposition to a political figure is a question of principle, but that principle only seems to apply to an out-group politician. Thus, if Chester embezzles, and you are anti-Chesterian, you are likely to try to make your position seem reasonable—and not just in-group fanaticism—by claiming that you’re opposed to dodgy real estate dealing on principle.

But, if Hubert, your candidate, is later caught in dodgy real estate dealing, you’re suddenly going to find a reason your “principled” opposition to dodgy real estate dealing doesn’t apply. There are, loosely, three ways you’ll do that without believing that you have thereby violated your principle.

  1. By not hearing about it, or dismissing any reports of it as “biased.” You simply refuse to listen to anyone who says that Hubert engaged in dodgy real estate dealing.
  2. By claiming that it wasn’t really in dodgy real estate dealing because Hubert had different motives (we attribute good motives to in-group members and bad motives to out-group members) or because there were extenuating circumstances. That is, we explain bad behavior on the part of in-group members externally (circumstances), but bad behavior on the part of out-group members as internally (as a deliberate choice showing their essential evil).
  3. By saying that the in-group situation is so desperate that any behavior on our part is justified (note that this is saying that the stance on dodgy real estate dealing is, therefore, a principle for which there are lots of exceptions—you would operate on the basis of this principle were it not for the out-group).

[There is also the thoroughly unprincipled, openly irrational, and anti-democratic response that anything your group does is okay because the out-group has done a bad thing too. This post isn’t about that response—this is about people who think they’re principled and not fanatical about their in-group.]

In my experience arguing with people, they will also not uncommonly just refuse to admit that they ever claimed that their stance on in dodgy real estate dealing was principled (although they once did). They just don’t care if Hubert had and has dodgy real estate dealings—they admire it; they see it as a sign of his being a person with good judgment. Yet they remain in a white-hot rage about Chester’s dodgy real estate dealing, and they’ll suddenly rediscover they’re principled opposition.

This is just factionalism, but what I find interesting is that people who are clearly engaged in factionalism keep trying to claim they aren’t. (Some people admit that their support for one candidate or another is factionalism—this isn’t about them.)

In addition to number two (above)—you can always find ways to rationalize in-group behavior—there’s something else. It’s about identification.

Kenneth Burke long ago (1939, in a way) figured out that a really persuasive political figure presents zirself [I loathe him/her] as the same kind of person as the “real” people in a community. Many people decide whether to support a political figure on the basis of in-group membership—that person is me; that person gets me; that person cares about me. They see that person as someone they could be.

So, if I think Hubert is basically me with different opportunities, I will take every criticism of him as personally as I take criticisms of me, I will judge and explain his actions the same way I judge and explain mine. And most of us are pretty forgiving of ourselves. All of spend a lot of time finding reasons to justify behavior that violates principles we claim to hold.

Hillary Clinton and Trump both have/had accusations of dodgy real estate deals.

Assume, for the sake of argument, that HRC and Trump have equally plausible accusations of equally serious dodgy real estate deals.

If you liked HRC, if you see her as someone like you, if you think she has had a life you could have, or if you think she is the sort of person you want to be, if you admire a person with her education and intellectual achievements and abilities, if you imagine that you and she could be friends, then you wouldn’t mind accusations against her because you would find ways to explain them. You would find yourself imagining how you could have gotten into that situation, and why it wouldn’t really matter. You might even admire her for having bent the rules because you’d like to do that.

If you see her as a kind of person you don’t like, if you feel that what she is done is something you never could do, if you see her as someone you would never want to be (or you believe the rhetoric that people like her look down on people like you), then she is that bitch over there eating crackers.

If you liked Trump, if you see him as someone like you, if you think he has had a life you could have, or if you think he is the sort of person you want to be, if you imagine that you and he could be friends, if you think he really gets you and looks about for people like you, if you think that he responds to situations the way you would, then you wouldn’t mind accusations against him because you would find ways to explain them. You would find yourself imagining how you could have gotten into that situation, and why it wouldn’t really matter. You might even admit he bent the rules and admire him for it.

If you see Trump as a kind of person you don’t like, if you think he behaves in a way you never would, if you believe the rhetoric about the gold toilet, then he is that jerk to whom rules don’t apply.

So, am I saying “both sides are just as bad”? Nope, because I don’t think American politics is accurately described as “two sides.”

The important point is that neither of these responses is principled. They’re factional.

A person for whom dodgy real estate deals is a reason to reject a candidate, on principle, would investigate the claims by reading the smartest versions of the accusations against both, regardless of in- or out-group source. If that isn’t what you do, then this isn’t really about the principle of dodgy real estate deals—it’s about dodgy real estate deals being a brick you can throw at the other side. Your political positions are the consequence of irrational commitments to your in-group.

Trump supporters/critics and policy argumentation

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

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

And that is what worries me.

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

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

That’s worrisome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    1. Freedom rule
      Parties must not prevent each other from advancing standpoints or from casting doubt on standpoints.
    2. Burden of proof rule
      A party that advances a standpoint is obliged to defend it if asked by the other party to do so.
    3. Standpoint rule
      A party’s attack on a standpoint must relate to the standpoint that has indeed been advanced by the other party.
    4. Relevance rule
      A party may defend a standpoint only by advancing argumentation relating to that standpoint.
    5. Unexpressed premise rule
      A party may not deny premise that he or she has left implicit or falsely present something as a premise that has been left unexpressed by the other party.
    6. Starting point rule
      A party may not falsely present a premise as an accepted starting point nor deny a premise representing an accepted starting point.
    7. Argument scheme rule
      A party may not regard a standpoint as conclusively defended if the defense does not take place by means of an appropriate argumentation scheme that is correctly applied.
    8. Validity rule
      A party may only use arguments in its argumentation that are logically valid or capable of being made logically valid by making explicit one or more unexpressed premises.
    9. Closure rule
      A failed defense of a standpoint must result in the party that put forward the standpoint retracting it and a conclusive defense of the standpoint must result in the other party retracting its doubt about the standpoint.
    10. Usage rule
      A party must not use formulations that are insufficiently clear or confusingly ambiguous and a party must interpret the other party’s formulations as carefully and accurately as possible.
      These are rules for rational-critical argumentation, so these rules aren’t ways that people have to engage in every conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How People Think About Voting (Hint: a centrist v. progressive model won’t help Dems)

A lot of people who don’t want to see Trump reelected are arguing about what we should do, and that’s great. It’s a complicated situation, and we should argue.

There are, however, three big problems with how those arguments are going right now. First, there is the assumption that the answer is, and always has been, obvious, and the Dems have been ignoring the obvious answer out of a combination of cupidity and stupidity. Second, there is the entirely false dominant model of politics being a zero-sum between two points on a continuum (extreme left v. extreme right), so that any move is toward the center (and away from an extreme) or vice versa. We need to stop talking and thinking about politics that way.

The third problem is, I think, that many (most?) of the arguments aren’t grounded in the really interesting empirical research out there about voting practices—people have a tendency to assume that everyone thinks about citizenship in the same way they do. So, for instance, if they tend to vote on the basis of policy, they think that everyone else does too. But, what if not everyone does vote on the basis of policy? Then we can’t get people to vote differently by putting forward different policies.

Many people do vote on the basis of policy. But not everyone; in fact, not most people. There is no one way that people vote, and so there is no one obvious solution. Figuring out what to do to get people to vote differently means being as accurate as possible as to how people decide to vote. And they don’t vote in a way that is easily mapped onto the left/right binary (or continuum).

The problem is that people don’t just vote for different people or parties—people think about how to vote in wildly different ways. There are, loosely, eight factors in how people vote, with those factors mattering more or less for different people, different elections, and different candidates. The factors are:

  • sheer in-group loyalty;
  • charismatic leadership (identification–they believe a political leader is like them or really gets them);
  • their immediate well-being (so they vote against the President if things are going badly for them and with the President if things are going well);
  • last minute information;
  • a “throw the bums out” mentality (aka “protest” vote);
  • voting against the out-group;
  • policy.

The empirical research doesn’t show a neat and simple picture, and so I can’t give a short summary of it or a simple statement of what our true solution is. I’d just be repeating the first error above.

Here are some things I’ve been reading that have deeply changed my understanding of voting habits in the US—that caused me to stop thinking that our problems could be solved through nominating fewer or more people anywhere on the false continuum (we need to stop arguing about whether to elect progressives or centrists—that assumes that people care about policies, and not enough people do) or that we need to have a more coherent policy agenda (same problem as the previous). I think that arguments about what to do should be more informed by readings like these (I’ve tried to find short summaries of each of the arguments—hence the links):

Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President, Kathleen Hall Jamieson

Jamieson cites studies, Mueller’s indictments, and a multitude of sources to show that the Russians did engage in considerable hacking, trolling, sock-puppeting, and generally gaming of social media in order to mislead, misinform, and distract voters with the ultimate goal of ensuring that last-minute voters and potential Dem voters mistrusted HRC.

Extremism, J.M. Berger

This non-partisan book builds on notions of in- and out-group mobilization to distinguish between normal and extreme versions of a political philosophy. I intend to use it in my rhetoric and racism class.

How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

Two political scientists argue that Trump is following the playbook for how authoritarians displace democracy.

How Partisan Media Polarize America, Matthew Levendusky

This book is an empirical study of partisan media, comparing Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly, showing that both rely on fear- and hate-mongering about the out-group more than they promote in-group policies (or even political figures). While not a “both sides are just as bad” argument, it does have good data and analysis that makes it non-partisan. This is the book, I think, that shows how the vexed and entangled political lives that people actually live get reduced into us v. them.

Ideology in America, Christopher Ellis and James Stimson

Like the Mason book (below), it argues that policy arguments get trumped by identification. It points out how very rich and complicated our actual political beliefs are, with emphasis on the behavior of voters who cut across conventional groupings. They show various things that are important, such as that people who are unhappy with how “the government” behaves vote GOP, even if the policies they dislike were promoted and voted in by the GOP.

The Rationalizing Voter, Milton Lodge and Charles Taber

This is the book with all the data about how people actually reason about politics (at least in the short term). They show that it isn’t emotional v. logical (the conventional understanding of rational/irrational) but what other people in cognitive science call System I (intuition) versus System II (metacognition). They are fatalistic about political reasoning of voters, but I think their data doesn’t merit that fatalism.

Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs About How Government Should Work, John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse

They are completely persuasive that many Americans reject the basic premises of democracy–that finding the correct solution is complicated, that people have legitimately different interests, that good solutions are never ideal–that people hold the President responsible for things like weather, sharks, and the current situation of the economy. They’re pretty fatalistic about voting, moreso than I think their data merits.

Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, Lilliana Mason

Another empirically-grounded description of how the mosaic of political beliefs became a false binary of identity.

Stop calling for civility; lack of civility isn’t our problem, and more of it isn’t the solution

We are, once again, at a moment when people are calling for civility. My persistent complaint about American “political” discourse is that it is so rarely policy argumentation. Policy argumentation requires that participants argue (not just make assertions) on seven points: there is a need (aka ill), it’s serious, it won’t go away on its own, here’s what causes it; here is my plan; my plan will solve the need I identified, my plan is feasible, and my plan won’t cause more problems than it solves. American “political” discourse usually involves people arguing need and how it’s serious and then asserting a plan, and not even touching on the other points. (If that—sometimes they just assert need and engage in fear-mongering about it being serious.)

And the calls for civility are a perfect example of that truncated way of talking about important policy issues.

So, according to the “call for civility” argument, what is the need? Sometimes the need is political: we have a polarized Congress, in which any kind of compromise or finding common ground is demonized, when a Speaker brags about an unprecedented level of obstruction and is praised for it.

Sometimes the need is cultural: we are looking at a level of politically-motivated violence not seen since lynching was always on the table as a consequence-free way to terrorize dissent, with violent protests and calls to silence speakers (and sometimes the speakers are advocates of violence).

Sometimes the need is about tone: Kavanaugh’s temper tantrum was unprecedented and would have put the kibosh on any previous Supreme Court nominee (Dem or GOP), we have an Administration that engages in an unprecedented level of trolling, and major political figures and pundits who have accused the last four Presidents of being fascists, racists, and morally bankrupt. Thanksgiving dinners, social media interactions—it’s all ugly name-calling.

I’m willing to grant that the political and cultural needs are serious; the seriousness of the name-calling is a little more vexed. One of the reasons it’s vexed is that various kinds of “name-calling” are treated as equally serious because the need for this case is a little vague—the need seems to be that people are made uncomfortable, or have their feelings hurt. In this case, the problem with a major political figure saying something racist is that he hurt the feelings of members of that race. That “need” case makes hurt feelings the need/ill. In that case, anyone having their feelings hurt is a political problem that must be prevented. People who are called “racist” have their feelings hurt; people who are told that their information is false feel bad. Thus, if our “political” discourse defines the need or ill as having feelings hurt, then people who are racist, and are told they are racist, can present the ill of their hurt feelings as just as valid as a person who can’t get an apartment because of racism.

That’s a very clear example of the fallacy of false equivalency. But, if you accept the false case about the “ill”:  that our problem is that we have a public sphere in which people have their feelings hurt, it seems reasonable. It isn’t reasonable. Don’t accept that false case about the ill.

Our problem is not that people have their feelings hurt.

Every good policy case has a coherent narrative of causality—what caused our current situation? A few (but not all) of the political and cultural arguments have really interesting and plausible narratives about how we got here. The tone/name-calling argument is a very old and appalling one.

The basic argument behind blaming tone is that violent actions come from two sources: aggressive and defensive. People who have vehemently held beliefs engage in violence, and so vehement rhetoric leads to vehemently held beliefs, and therefore to violence. Therefore, to reduce violence, people need to care less. That’s an actively bad argument—caring passionately about our world is our responsibility. It is not a vice. It does not necessarily lead to violence. And much promotion of violence doesn’t come from people who care very much about the argument they’re making—sometimes passionate rhetoric is just a way to get votes, clicks, viewers, money.

The defensive one is even worse: it’s that vehement (and uncivil) rhetoric on the part of a marginalized group is responsible for the violent reaction on the part of the majority. This is, for instance, the logic behind the 1961 decision, the clergy who opposed King, and the current bizarre notion that saying something racist is just as bad as being called racist.

The whole argument for “civility” is that our problem is that people are vehement, and their vehement claims about their situation make other people get angry, and so now we’re all angry. So, we should all be less angry with each other by using nicer tones and being less vehement.

I see no reason for people not to be angry about the water in Flint, or unemployment rate in West Virginia, the number of unarmed people shot by police officers, discrimination in hiring, the use of torture in convictions, class sizes in public schools, an economy that seems to have no hope for advancement for people born into poverty.

Anger is rational under many circumstances, and many people are reasonably angry that they are not being treated as equals. Many people are unreasonably angry that they are not being treated as privileged. Many are angry that they are being treated badly because of complicated economic factors out of their control—that group is particularly prone to believing incoherent narratives of scapegoating. (For instance, they believe they are losing jobs to illegal immigrants when they’re losing jobs to automation or globalization.)

Our political problem is not that people are angry and therefore vehement and therefore seem uncivil. The “let’s be more civil” plan is completely incoherent—it doesn’t have a narrative of causality that would mean people being nicer to each other is the solution. It fails on the point of solvency.

After about 1835, it was common for people to say that the vehemence of the abolitionists caused slavers to become more entrenched in their position. That’s historically false, but rhetorically interesting. Were that argument true, then either there would have been a way to criticize slavery that slavers would have found persuasive, or a “civil” (as people are using the term now) criticism of slavery was impossible. It’s the latter.

There was no criticism of slavery that would not make slavers feel bad. There was no criticism of slavery that would not be an attack on what slavers were doing—profiting by trading in humans. Thus, if we aspire to a public discourse in which no one is criticized for what they’re doing, or made to feel bad about their actions, we have a discourse in which slavers should not have been criticized for their actions.

As long as we have some vague sense that what’s wrong with our current political situation is that people saying things that hurt the feelings of other people makes politicians engage in obstructionism (a narrative of causality that is tenuous at best) then we won’t solve the problem.

People are getting violent and engaging in obstructionism not because of people being rude, but because major media promote the notion that we are in a war, and that violence is our only possible response. In other words, we are in a world in which public discourse about politics is about a war of two identities—good versus evil. We are arguing about identities and feelings instead of about policies.

Calls for civility—meaning a world in which everyone is nice to one another, and no one’s feelings are hurt–are about a fantasy of a world in which there is no actual disagreement. We don’t need a world in which people feel good. We need a world in which people argue vehemently. But we need a world in which we argue, vehemently, about policies—not a world falsely bifurcated into two sides in a zero-sum relationship. We need democratic discourse.