Patricia Roberts-Miller's Blog, page 32

Conservative Christians’ support for Trump isn’t hypocrisy

[Image from here]

Many people are dismayed and shocked at how self-described conservative Christians are justifying our government’s heartless treatment of immigrant children. Since most (perhaps all) of these “Christians” are descendants of people who made exactly the same decision they are now characterizing as “irresponsible parenting,” it’s tempting to call their stance hypocritical.

It isn’t. There is no conflict between American conservative evangelical Christians’ support for an authoritarian, anti-democratic, corrupt, bigot and their fundamental values. Those are their values. They’ve always supported bigoted authoritarianism. They always do.

Self-identified conservatives are, as Elizabeth Theiss-Morse’s research shows, if they consider themselves patriotic, “more likely to set stricter boundaries on who counts as American and therefore are more likely to set stricter boundaries on who counts as an American and therefor to limit who should receive the benefits of group membership.” (98) What Theiss-Morse calls “strong identifiers” (that is, people who identify strongly with their in-group)  tend to rely heavily on stereotypes about groups. So, people who self-identify as conservative evangelical Christians are more likely to believe stereotypes about out-groups (immigrants, poor people, non-whites, non-conservatives) as lazy, indulgent, weak, and therefore not deserving of support.

Self-identified conservative Christians read Scripture as advocating an us v. them attitude that calls on Christians to protect “us.” And they define “us” by political, not Scriptural, agenda. And certainly not by what Christ emphasized.

Look, for instance, at a defense  of how “evangelicals” are supporting Trump . And notice, first, that the author assumes that all evangelicals are white, and politically conservative. In other words, as I said, Brown’s sense of “us” (which he falsely identifies as evangelicals) is actually his very narrow sense of who is truly “us.” The no true Scotsman fallacy.

Brown’s argument is fallacious and authoritarian to the core. It’s also a rejection of Jesus.

Brown doesn’t think self-identifying evangelical Christians count if they don’t share his very narrow political agenda. They aren’t even in his world. He only thinks in terms of his in-group’s self-identification: as “evangelicals” who have a very specific (and very new) political agenda.

Brown admits that politically conservative white evangelicals “made a gross miscalculation” to think Trump would “change the moral fabric of the nation,” and defending Trump’s treatment toward others has “compromised [their] moral authority]”.

But, he says, ignore all that because Hillary Clinton would have made things much worse because “she would be a staunch opponent of our religious liberties, a zealous advocate for abortion, and a supporter of radical LGBT activism.”

Let’s be clear: Brown is not an advocate of religious liberty. He is, as he says, concerned about “our” religious liberties. He isn’t concerned about the religious liberties of evangelical Christians who disagree with him about politics, let alone about the religious liberties of non-Christians. Trump’s judicial appointments are doing extraordinary damage to the principle of religious liberty. But, he’s doing great for people who want the liberty to treat other religions in a way they wouldn’t want to be treated. Brown likes that.

Brown is only concerned about the very narrow “us” and he wants that “us” to be treated differently from how other groups are treated.

HRC wasn’t an advocate for abortion, and he isn’t supporting a policy agenda that would reduce abortion. Radical LGBT activism is simply his term for queer people asking that they be treated as Brown wants to be treated, that they have the same rights he does. Brown doesn’t like the idea that the government would treat others as he wants to be treated.

Jesus never mentioned abortion or homosexuality, and, as many people have shown, Scripture is more oriented toward issues of our treatment of the poor than it is about abortion or homosexuality.  As has been shown over and over, bigoted readings of clobber verses about homosexuality are incoherent.  Yet Brown never mentions anything about the poor, about a Christian attitude toward immigration, about opposition to violence and war.

Brown thinks, correctly, that Trump is promoting Brown’s very limited political agenda. Brown thinks his political agenda is evangelical Christian. That’s where he’s wrong. What Brown wants the government to do is a violation of how Jesus says we should behave.

Brown might be able to cherry-pick Scripture to argue that his political agenda is Scriptural, but he can’t cherry pick what Jesus said—he wants a government that enables him to do unto others as he would not have done unto him.

Brown’s “Christianity” is religious demagoguery. He is arguing for a government grounded in an “us” (people who think the way he does) who are privileged in every aspect and a “them” (people who disagree with him) who should be punished, marginalized, and treated differently.

Unhappily, Brown is not unusual for conservative Christianity. It’s worth remembering that conservative Christianity was on the side of slavery  segregation , and are still on the side of marital rape. Conservative Christians justified Roy Moore’s pedophilia, Trump’s sexual assaults (he bragged about watching underage girls undress), Kavanaugh’s plausible accusation of assault. They don’t really care very much about rape. They also don’t care about the poor.

Advocates of slavery and segregation, conservative Christians, sometimes (rarely) responded to progressive Christian arguments that slavery and segregation violated Christ’s “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” And their argument was always some version of why that didn’t apply, why it was less important than other cherry-picked bits from Scripture. That’s why anti-slavery and anti-segregation rhetoric posed the same assertion that enraged conservative evangelicals: they said, “I am a man.” Conservative Christians rejected that claim; they rejected Jesus’ call.

Current “conservative Christians” are the same. They still can’t defend their politics in terms of what Jesus very clearly said: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Instead, they argue that we are in a battle between good and evil that means we should reject what Jesus said in order to save “us.”

American conservative Christians have always been getting their panties in a bunch about how they are being oppressed, about how they are in an existential fight against extermination, and it’s never been true, and it’s always been in service of enacting oppressive, exclusive, and bigoted policies against some other. It’s always been in service of rejecting what Jesus very clearly said.

Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you means that you, and everyone who disagrees with you, are held to the same standards. Were conservative Christians to follow Jesus’ rule (they don’t, and they never have), then they would have to say that their desire for a “conservative evangelical” to have the “religious liberty” to preach in classrooms, would mean that they’d have to be fine with a terrorist Zoroastrian doing the same.

They aren’t okay with their very narrow understanding of Christianity being treated equally with all other religious beliefs because American conservative evangelical Christianity is, and always has been, a rejection of what Jesus’ commandment that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. American conservative evangelical Christianity has always been on the wrong side of history; it has never been about caring for the marginalized, doing unto others, abjuring violence.

Progressive Christians opposed slavery; progressive Christians opposed segregation; progressive Christians advocate effective policies regarding abortion, progressive Christians advocate compassionate and non-punitive policies about the poor, immigrants, and the marginalized. American conservative evangelical Christianity is, and always has been, about rejecting Jesus’ commandment that we do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Progressive Christians are the ones who’ve taken that seriously.

So, no, conservative evangelical “Christians”’ heartlessness about children being separated from parents isn’t hypocrisy—it isn’t a violation of their core beliefs; it’s perfectly consistent with the values they have and have always had.

The post Conservative Christians’ support for Trump isn’t hypocrisy appeared first on Patricia Roberts-Miller.

On false binaries and teacher neutrality

I was taught and trained by liberal humanists, who relied heavily on the seminar method—we’d read a provocative text, and then come to class and argue about it. The job of the teacher was to mediate the generally vehement debate (it was Berkeley, after all), a task that different faculty enacted in different ways. While some of them clearly favored one side or another (as indicated through raised eyebrows, a smile, or even active participation), most of them tried to keep the debate more or less equal either by staying entirely out of it, and just trying to keep the argument from falling too deeply into ad hominem or ad baculum (although all arguments had at least a few people skid through the edges of those ponds), or a few had the strategy of taking the side of the less-skilled interlocutors (insisting that all points of view be treated as equally valid, even if they weren’t equally well defended) and intermittently playing devil’s advocate of various possible positions. While it was clear that the first sort of teacher was actively promoting a point of view, it was conventional to talk (and think) about the latter two pedagogies as the teacher having a “neutral” stance.

And there are considerable educational benefits of those latter two pedagogies—clearly grounded in the humanist tradition of Mathew Arnold and Kenneth Burke, those teachers treated us not only as though every student’s stance was as valid as any other student’s, but as though our literally sophomoric reactions to the central questions of the Western humanistic tradition were as valid as the authors whom we were reading. One of my favorite professors explained why he had students reading Plato, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud in first-year argumentation courses. He said he wanted students to feel that they too could contribute to the long and great debate, and to see that even famous authors had glitchy (or even actively dodgy) arguments. Coming from a working class background himself, he wanted to undermine the notion that Great Authors had nothing to say to non-elite students, and those students had nothing to say back.

I mention all this because, by talking about problems with this pedagogy, I’m not advocating abandoning every aspect of it—I think there is value to honoring sophomoric reactions to complicated texts, and I often say that I benefitted from being trained by humanists who didn’t make an issue of my gender. On the other hand, I equally often say, there were problems with being trained by humanists who didn’t acknowledge that my gender was an issue.

One such moment was when a class was discussing some writings by the Marquis de Sade, and my own visceral reaction to treating rape as a joke and rape-porn as thoughtful philosophy was shouted down, particularized, and pathologized. That course was taught on the basis of the teacher not intervening at all, and I was suddenly profoundly aware that my stance on the material was not equally valid because it was my stance—a woman whose concerns about being raped on the way home from class were dismissed as paranoia.

I was touchy on this issue because, as I walking home from one of the seminar meetings (which ended in the evening) a car full of men started cruising me, with the men telling me about wanting to rape me. I just walked up to a doorway and knocked, and they went on. Not that it matters, but it was in the midst of a bunch of frats with very bad reputations, and they looked like frat boys to me. Berkeley, at that time, was in the midst of an extraordinary number of rapes.

My professors were neutral on that issue, and my reaction to de Sade was explicitly dismissed as not neutral. One of the students in the class (who later wrote his dissertation on de Sade) said that no one could find de Sade erotic, which meant I was now explaining things like snuff and rape porn in a graduate seminar. I was easily moved into the box of “crazy woman.” One of the faculty, the one reknowned for remarking on the asses of women students, and who was having an affair with an undergrad, did, after that, undermine me in all sorts of ways. The other professor became my dissertation director, and told me he would never teach de Sade again. So, which one was “neutral”?

I’m not sure I believe in neutrality as a goal or virtue, but I would say that the person who most worked toward fairness was the one who acknowledged that his personal experience was particular, and that others had (and have) other experiences.

I loved (and still love) my training—I got three degrees there, after all. I’ve had a dream career, and I still stand back and find footing in principles I learned at the Berkeley Rhetoric program. The Berkeley Rhetoric Department had faculty whose commitment to inclusive deliberation, writing instruction as meaningful intellectual work, and passionate commitment to the notion that all students can engage with the intellectual tradition informs every class I teach.

Yet, on the whole, there was a sense of training as the liberal humanist model. And it didn’t always work. The premise of the first-year argumentation course was that papers should be written to be persuasive to the opposition position (a pedagogy that still informs how I teach). In the teaching practicum, we were asked to write papers like that, and a colleague wanted to write a paper about how, for a woman walking alone every strange man is a rapist—to think otherwise is dangerous. That wasn’t her main point. I think she wanted to advocate some change to campus policies regarding safety or training, but I don’t remember because she never got past that sentence in the paper. She was presenting this paper in a graduate course about pedagogy, and the whole discussion exploded. Several males were insulted to be called rapists, which is how they read the argument, and couldn’t read it as a fairly accurate claim from a perspective they don’t have. The goal of a “neutral” classroom meant that her (our) experience as women who have to treat every strange male as a potential rapist were counted as equally valid as his feelings of being insulted.

One last example. I was teaching in a relatively small college in a fairly small and very conservative town, and was continuing to require that students try to persuade opposition audiences, and I was trying to have the same open and vehement discussions I’d had in Berkeley. We had read George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, and the most talkative student in the class had no sympathy for Orwell or the other homeless—he mentioned smoking cigarettes, so he was clearly using his money irresponsibly. (This is pretty typical of people who believe in prosperity gospel.) My training at Berkeley made me think that I could invite students to make any argument they wanted, and all those arguments would be shared, in peer review, with all the other students.

That made me neutral. But it didn’t at all.

Another student (who had spent some time homeless because his parents had kicked him out of the house for being gay) was livid, but couldn’t make his argument in that college in that community because of the potentially violent consequences to him personally if he came out. Whether I was personally or pedagogically neutral didn’t matter—the classroom wasn’t neutral because the community wasn’t.

One characteristic shared in these examples is the tendency to focus on teacher neutrality as though that is both necessary and sufficient for a neutral classroom, and my point is that it isn’t. I don’t think we can have a “neutral” classroom, and I’ve come to think we shouldn’t. I teach about various genocides, and I feel no obligation to be neutral on issues such as whether they actually happened, whether they were morally defensible, or whether the victims brought it on themselves. They did, they weren’t, and they didn’t. Biology professors don’t have to be neutral about evolution, physics professors don’t have to be neutral as to whether gravity is a fact (or if it’s really “intelligent falling”), and geologists don’t have to allow equal time in the classroom for flatearthers.

But neither does that mean that the teacher has the truth and the classroom should be a place in which we pour our truth into the empty heads of students. My favorite teacher as an undergraduate described teaching argumentation as trying to get students into the range of plausible and well-argued claims. Our job isn’t to reward students for getting the right answer, he said, but for putting together a good-enough argument. And, he said, if you’re doing your job, there should be students getting good grades with whom you deeply disagree, and students getting not good grades who share your politics. That isn’t a neutral classroom, because we bring judgment to bear on the arguments, but neither is it an indoctrination session.

It’s hard for us to think about neutrality effectively in pedagogy because our culture has a sloppy neo-post positivist construction of what it means for anyone or anything (a teacher, a text, an author, a news program) to be neutral. Even in composition studies, there is a tendency to create a binary of epistemologies, and assume that there is either naïve realism (it is easy to perceive Reality) or some kind of extreme social constructivism (so that there is no reality external to language or no human can make claims about it). For naïve realists, a “neutral” statement (aka, objective, unbiased, or factual) is one that immediately appears true to a reasonable person—neutrality is the same as non-controversial. (It ends up being “non-controversial to the in-group”, but that’s a different argument.) For rigid social constructivists, there is no such thing as neutrality, nor even degrees of it, so we are all swamped in our own miasma of socially constructed beliefs (except about social construction, which is a factually-based statement and universally true claim). As is clear from my snark, I don’t think either position is either valid or helpful. But, more important than my judgment is the consequence of the belief that there are only two options: many people defend a simplistic naïve realism because they reject the rigid social constructivism and vice versa.

We can have better arguments about teacher neutrality when we have a richer sense of the range of epistemologies—not all realisms are naïve realism, and not all forms of skepticism are rigid social constructivism. Further, we don’t have to agree on any specific epistemology. To have better arguments about neutrality we just have to acknowledge that there are various kinds of fallibilism—that, because of various kinds of cognitive biases, something might appear to be true and yet be wrong, and we can leave it to others to argue about just how wrong we inevitably are. That is, our job is to make students aware that “neutral,” “objective,” “non-controversial to people like me,” “factual,” and “true” aren’t necessarily the same things. And to acknowledge cognitive biases is not to claim that we have no ability to reflect on our own thinking, to make plausible claims about a shared world, or to assess claims.

In short, I’m saying that neutrality isn’t possible as an epistemological or political position, and refusing to intervene in class discussions doesn’t mean our classrooms are neutral. There is another way to think about neutrality, however, that is potentially useful: that we apply the same standards across all groups regardless of group identity.

Just as there are different epistemologies, there are different biases. And, while we can’t be bias-free (that isn’t how human cognition works) we can be aware of what biases are likely to harm us, our students, and our teaching. The main cognitive bias that makes epistemological neutrality unlikely (perhaps even impossible) is in-group favoritism. We tend to perceive people like us as more reliable (even “objective”), having nobler motives, and providing better arguments (we will tend to fill in the gaps in their arguments). Thus, for instance, the male teachers in my experience thought the male reactions to rape were the unbiased ones, because they seemed unemotional, and an unemotional reaction to the possibility of being raped seemed sensible simply because they shared the experience of not worrying about being raped.

It wasn’t anything about logic or emotion; it was about in-group favoritism, with no awareness that that was what was going on.

We are going to have in- and out-group students in our classes, and we are going to be biased toward in-group members. We can stop trying to be epistemologically neutral and instead strive for being fair.

It’s my passion for fairness that caused me to abandon “open” assignments (which I think are tremendously unfair in all sorts of ways). We can set up assignment prompts that are fair insofar as the projects require comparable amounts of time and effort, will result in “writing” (whether papers, podcasts, multimedia projects, or other kinds of texts) that can be assessed by the same standards, and on which we, the teacher, do not have a “right” (or even preferred) answer.

That last criterion is important. We shouldn’t invite students to write papers that will identify them as members of a group we cannot evaluate by the same standards we would use for members of an in-group. They might be members of groups we find appalling, but we should not set ourselves up as judges of their souls. This emphasis on standards that operate across groups doesn’t mean that there is a level playing field for all points of view. If, for instance, we require that students treat a reasonable opposition argument fairly, and/or use scholarly sources, certain arguments are almost impossible to make. And it’s appropriate that we set such requirements, since those are the conventions of academic discourse we are supposed to be teaching.

One advantage of relatively specific assignments is that it’s more straightforward to ensure that students from various political positions can still write good papers, and even to ensure that writing a good paper does not require students to divulge their political, religious, or cultural views.

And the last point I’d make about teacher neutrality is that many people, especially moderately authoritarian ones (a position that appear anywhere on the political spectrum), assume that we are presenting texts as containers of truth—we should only teach texts with which we agree, and that we think are true. Authoritarian teaching methods—insisting that students agree with everything we say or we have them read—doesn’t successfully inculcate that content (we won’t make students into feminists by having them read Susan B. Anthony). But authoritarian grading methods—insisting that students endorse Susan B. Anthony’s arguments in their projects and class commentary by punishing students who don’t—does model and endorse authoritarianism. And authoritarianism and democracy don’t mix.

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Deleting yahoo and hotmail users

Hey all,

I deleted all subscribers with a yahoo or hotmail email address (and a bunch of others). If I deleted a real human (as opposed to a spambot), I’m really sorry! Just email me when you subscribe, and I won’t delete you again!

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People who say you shouldn’t post about politics on FB just don’t want to see they might be wrong

[Image is from here.]

There are lots of memes floating around that make fun of anyone posting about politics on FB. The argument is that it’s a waste of time because there is no way your political meme will change someone’s mind. This argument seems to make sense because it relies on folk rhetorical theory (that is, how most people think persuasion works). Folk rhetorical theory is that persuasion happens when you read (or listen to) something that is different from what you believe, and after reading (or listening to) that text you abandon your belief in favor of this one. If you didn’t change your mind in that moment, then there was no persuasion.

The folk (or lay) model of persuasion is that you change your belief because you are presented with a text that has a new set of beliefs. If you don’t change your beliefs to that new set, then that text was not persuasive.

And, of course, it rarely happens that a person changes their mind because of being given new data. Thus, by the folk model of persuasion, persuasion never actually happens.

A lot of scholars and teachers of rhetoric have that definition of persuasion, and can cite empirical scholarship showing that people are rarely persuaded to change their minds on important issues by being given new claims or reading one piece [and, no, I’m not linking to them because I am not giving them the clicks]. Those people then conclude that persuasion can’t happen, or that persuasion is never based on facts (if the subjects in the experiment are given “facts” and don’t change their minds). Those sorts of claims perfectly confirm Wayne Booth’s argument in Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent—that dominant notions of belief fall into two categories. People believe that their beliefs are completely rational and grounded in facts OR they believe that beliefs are arbitrary and irrational; people generally toggle between the two.

That leaping from one claim about belief to a contradictory one perfectly summarizes my experiences arguing with assholes—they initially claim that their beliefs are objective and rational claims about the universe; when that claim becomes untenable, (and they have to admit that their assertions are false) they resort to the claim that everyone is prejudiced and irrational.

That isn’t actually how beliefs work–that is the rational/irrational split, a way of thinking about belief that comes from the 19th century (with a few earlier reps, like Descartes). Our “beliefs” are actually a complicated multi-modal tapestry of who we think we are, what benefits us in the moment, what helps us feel better about that thing we did or would like to do, performances of in-group loyalty, aspirational claims about what we would like to believe (that might include claims of fairness and rationality), and our passionate and pathetic need to be confirmed in our sense that we are good people with good judgment.

The folk model of persuasion takes nothing of that into consideration. It says that we are an agent of our own knowledge, who, thoroughly objectively, considers the evidence presented to us. It says that such an agent, presented with good evidence, would change position.

Or, since so few people will change position when presented with new evidence, it’s all irrational and arbitrary commitment to the group.

The folk model of persuasion says that either people change their minds on the basis of new data or it’s all arbitrary emotional commitment.

Since there is so much data that the first claim is false, many people claim that the second must be true–that beliefs are completely irrational.

The folk model of persuasion is vexed—while it’s true that people rarely change their minds (and probably never on important issues) by seeing one meme or post, people do change their minds. A lot. (A certain kind of person—the kind to whom their sense of self as someone who always “sees through the bullshit” will rarely admit to having changed their mind, but they do.)

In addition, the arguments that no one changes their mind on the basis of data often provide data from experiments to prove their point. This is called the pragmatic fallacy. They’re providing data in order to persuade people that no one changes their mind on the basis of data.

Anti-empiricists who want to argue about how anything resembling reason is wrong can’t put forward a reasonable argument as to why they’re right (insofar as their arguments rely on empirical research being reliable), and so that whole realm of in-group loyalty performance is uninteresting.

What matters about FB memes and posts, though, isn’t whether a single one changes anyone’s mind (it probably doesn’t). What matters is what those posts mean for propaganda enclaves.

We are in a culture of demagoguery, in which large numbers of people only consume media that confirms their perception that They are awful and We are great. In a polarized media, as Matt Levendusky elegantly shows, people are getting actually different information, most of it negative about the out-group. If you’re in a lefty enclave, you hear about every assistant dog-catcher who did something wrong, if s/he’s GOP. If you’re in a GOP enclave, you hear about every assistant dog-catcher who did something wrong, if s/he’s Dem. So, regardless of the in-group informational enclave in which you live, you sincerely believe that the other party is filled with skeezy corrupt people because your informational imagination is filled with instances of Them being bad, and you never hear about Us being bad.

Posting political memes and links simultaneously enforces and undermines propaganda bubbles. Your perception of your group as entirely good would be vexed by seeing memes and posts about instances of your in-group behaving badly, even if you won’t admit at the moment you see them that they do trouble your desire believe the in-group pure. Instead of admitting that they complicate things, you’re likely to post about how Facebook memes and political posts are useless–they bother you.

Propaganda is a fragile soap bubble that pops when exposed to disconfirming information. Propaganda works by repetition, by its audience working to remain within that bubble. Propaganda says, “Everyone believes this.” So, if someone relying on propaganda is faced with a person who doesn’t believe “this,” they have cognitive dissonance. The easiest way to resolve this dissonance is by dismissing the evidence on the grounds that its source is “biased” (a hilariously bad argument when it’s made by people who rely entirely on partisan media). The more that people who normally live within a partisan bubble are exposed to people they know who post plausible refutations about their in-group beliefs, the more that democracy wins.

Democracy is about people of different beliefs coming together to argue about which policy is best for the nation as a whole.

Trump is a not-very-bright authoritarian who wants a single-party state that would do what he wants, and he is supported by people who don’t want a democracy. Some of them want a timocracy (in which rich people would determine the policies), some want a theocracy (in which their very specific, and Scripturally problematic reading of the Bible would be dominant), some imagine a racist and fascist state that would privilege people like them.

At this point, Trump has two sources of power: Machiavellian support on the part of patriarchal conservative Christians, and charismatic leadership.

The people who vote on the basis of opposition to legal abortion are virtue signalling (or performance of in-group loyalty). They don’t actually want to reduce abortion; they just want to look really moral on the basis of wanting abortion criminalized.

If people were genuinely interested in reducing abortion , they would support cheap and easy access to birth control. If opposition to birth control is really about controlling women’s sexuality, they wouldn’t support cheap and easy access to birth control. Guess which they do. Politicians who are clearly using birth control in their lives don’t want others to have access to it. This is a profoundly irrational commitment and purely in-group loyalty performance.

People trying to undermine the GOP’s use of abortion as a wedge issue shouldn’t be posting memes about women’s right to their own bodies (because it won’t work–it is not a premise they have), but data about access to birth control and the consequent reduction of abortion. The GOP stance on abortion is logically incoherent, even to the level of individuals (political figures who are clearly using birth control to keep from having to think about an abortion are supporting birth control restrictions, thereby ensuring more abortions). So posting memes and links about how reducing abortion means increasing access to birth control is a whack to the vine of irrational argument.

Trump gets support from conservative “Christians” because they have always supported the most racist and patriarchal candidate there is. And that’s who he is. Posting memes about how Christ was neither racist nor patriarchal is another whack to their foundation. It will make them mad, and that’s how you know it’s working.

Trump’s second source of consistent support is pure charismatic leadership. He acknowledged this when he said he could shoot someone and get away with it. Charismatic leadership relies on the belief that the leader has supernaturally good judgment in all realms. But it also panders to the belief that people can see who someone really is. It is a relationship–people think that this figure purely identifies with them, and so this political figure will take care of them. I choose to put my faith in Chester Burnette because he seems to me exactly like me–he gets me. Once I’ve put my faith in him, then my sense of my self as a person with good judgment is entangled in his performance.

What I can’t answer is the question: under what conditions would I admit that I was wrong to support Chester’s policy regarding X?

And, more importantly, under what conditions would I admit that I was wrong to support Chester?

People whose political positions are completely irrational can’t answer either question, and the charismatic leadership relationship is completely irrational.

His base believes that they are victims (of all sorts of things), and that Trump is the one to understand their plight. People who are in a charismatic leadership relationship with Trump believe he’s a great negotiator, he cares about regular people, he’ll clean the swamp, he’s making people respect the US.

For them, all politics is us v. them, and Trump is getting “us” to win. And he’s getting “us” to win to the extent that he’s getting “them” mad. It’s a zero-sum. Anything that hurts “them” (“libruls”) or makes them unhappy feels like a win if you think in zero-sum terms. That zero-sum thinking means you can be talked into shooting yourself in the face just in order to gross out a librul. It political kamikaze action.

This is the worst way to think about politics. The US is us. Good political deliberation is never zero-sum–getting them to lose doesn’t mean you win. But, that is Trump’s whole message, and his (false) narrative about himself–that every situation is him winning and others losing. And if others lose, his in-group wins.  In a healthy democracy, political issues aren’t about a zero-sum among groups, but political deliberation about our options.

So, how do we try to reframe the argument away from a zero-sum between “conservatives” and “liberals” to democratic deliberation? Unhappily, one of the ways is undermining the irrational charismatic leadership relationship that a lot of people have for Trump.

Imagine that you have a FB audience that includes people who love, hate, and are ambivalent about Trump. Posting a meme that shows Trump with a Hitler mustache will make your Trump-hating in-group happy, and persuade the others that criticism of Trump is just irrational hate (and make them happy). Posting a meme that says that Trump is not a self-made man, however, will make your in-group happy, and be a mild chip into the foundation of Trump’s popularity. They’ll rail and rant, and talk about Clinton’s emails but it’s still a chip. Posting an article with the headline about Trump not being a self-made man will do even more (especially if it’s from a conservative site). Again, they’ll rail and rant and talk about Clinton’s emails and Benghazeeeeee (claims easily refuted by pointed out that Trump has already done worse, at which point they’ll say ABORTION).

People change their minds (note the number of people who now claim they didn’t support the Iraq invasion, or the bizarre claim that conservative Christians are trying to make about their role in pro-slavery and pro-segregation rhetoric), but persuasion on big issues happens over a long period of time, and by being exposed to information that contradicts what their propaganda tells them.

In other words, yes, post political memes and links on FB. But don’t post ones that are assertions about identity–post ones that either refute opposition claims (Trump is a good businessman, Trump cares about the little guy) or raise issues of rabid factionalism (would you defend this action if a Dem did it).

I think there are reasons to advocate conservativism, libertarianism, and all sorts of other views with which I disagree. I think a group reasons best when we are diverse and we reason together. That is democratic deliberation, and anyone who isn’t in favor of diverse groups contributing to the argument is not in favor of democracy.

The GOP has abandoned democratic deliberation in favor of a vision of a single-party state. Their argument is that Trump should make all decisions.

Posting articles and memes about how bad Trump’s judgment is undermines that power.

Do it.

People post that sharing political memes and posts are useless because those memes bother them. They should be bothered.

Do it.

The post People who say you shouldn’t post about politics on FB just don’t want to see they might be wrong appeared first on Patricia Roberts-Miller.

ASHR talk: “Lay rhetorical theory and argumentum ad hitlerum”

[Image from here.]

Although Adolf Hitler and rhetoric are deeply entangled in popular culture, and argumentum ad hitlerum a pervasive fallacy in public discourse, there is very little recent scholarship in rhetoric about Hitler. While the reasons for avoiding Hitler are both varied and valid, in this paper I want to argue that those are also the very reasons we should be teaching, writing, and talking more about Hitler, his rhetoric, and the conditions of persuasion.

Briefly, the case of Hitler appears simultaneously too obvious and too complicated for scholars and teachers of rhetoric to pay much scholarly or pedagogical attention to him or his rhetoric. Hitler appears to be the example of the powers of bad rhetoric, a man who, in Kenneth Burke’s words, “swung a great people into his wake” (164); that is, the story of Hitler appears to confirm lay rhetorical theory’s monocausal narrative of rhetoric being a powerful rhetor whose discursive skill transforms the irrational masses into unthinking tools.

This narrative of Hitler and his rhetoric seems to confirm lay rhetorical models of persuasion, a model encapsulated in the notion of a purely agentic speaker who shoots an arrow (the message) into the head of the target audience. This model assumes an asymmetric relationship between rhetor and audience (the rhetor has the power and the audience is a passive recipient, or not, of information). This model also assumes that an “engaged” audience is not purely passive in reception, but engages critical thinking as a kind of “filter” (the metaphor often invoked) of the rhetor’s message. The role of the audience is to judge the message. That is, the dominant popular way of describing and imagining participants in public deliberation is as consumers of a product—they can be savvy consumers, who think carefully about whether it really is a good product, or they can be loyal consumers, who always stick to one brand, or they can be suckers, easily duped by inferior products (and so on).

This isn’t how communication works, as both theoretical arguments (e.g., Biesecker’s 1989 “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation”) and empirical work (especially work on confirmation bias) clearly show, but that isn’t my point. Regardless of how scholars model the complicated relationship among audiences, context, texts, and intentions, in popular culture, there is still the tendency to describe audiences using a consumer/marketing model.

Popular conceptions of Hitler fit neatly with that model—he was a witch doctor, in Burke’s terms, who sold snake oil (ignore the mixed metaphors) to a gullible and desperate audience. This (false) narrative of what went wrong in Weimar Germany ensures that people will not recognize when we are making the mistakes that Hitler’s backers made—because 1) we have defined Hitler’s supporters as hopelessly other (no one sees themselves as a potential mark), and 2) we’ve misdefined the mistakes.

argumentum ad Hiterlum is the consequence of that othering—we accuse any effective rhetor who is popular with an out-group of being Hitler. In addition, there is a kind of timelessness of judgment, and we tend to see our perceptions acontextually—we assume that we would have looked at Hitler then as we look at him now—knowing what we know now. But Hitler didn’t look like Hitler—while there was always evidence that he had genocidal, expansionist, and militaristic aims—but that rhetoric could be (and were) dismissed as mere metaphor not to be taken literally. That his arguments were, to the elite, clearly nonsensical and profoundly dishonest (perhaps delusional) meant they thought he could be easily outmaneuvered. That his arguments were, to many people (elite and non-elite), common and familar (racism, German exceptionalism, social conservatism, vague anti-elitism) meant that they thought he could be trusted to understand how common people think.

He had many arguments and qualities that made some groups uncomfortable—Nazis’ (deserved) reputation for hostility to Christianity, and Hitler’s own intermittent claims of being Christian, concerned many conservative Christians, both Lutheran and Catholic. That he would later work to reduce their power, and had plans for marginalizing the established churches entirely, makes many Christians believe they would not have supported him (there is even the blazingly counter-factual claim that Hitler did not have the support of Christians, as well as the hyperbolic claim that he “persecuted” Christians). The fact is that Christians’ support of Hitler was crucial—the Catholic Party supported “The Enabling Act” (the act that made him dictator) unanimously. (Only the Communists and Social Democrats voted against it.)

Later harassment of Christian churches made some Christians regret their support (such as Niemoller), but many found ways to dissociate the Nazi attacks on church power from Hitler himself, insisting that it must be happening without his knowledge. Christians supported Hitler; they shouldn’t have, but they did. And even those who regretted supporting him did so because of Nazi weakening of Christian power structures, not out of a principled opposition to his treatment of Jews, his authoritarian government, the abrogation of human rights, the factionalizing of the judiciary, or the expansionist and inherently genocidal war. Those who stopped supporting him did so when, as Niemoller famously said, they came for him.

Understanding why so many people supported Hitler means, not seeing his supporters as dupes blind to his obviously evil character, but understanding why people across social and educational groups very much like us thought it made sense to support him, why his rabid antisemitism, militarism, rhetoric of victimization, and history of inciting and rationalizing violence against his critics was either attractive or dismissible.

And that means understanding that Hitler didn’t rise to power primarily because of his rhetoric.

Scholars of Hitler and Nazis, while acknowledging that Hitler was an impressive public speaker, emphasize other factors as more important than his personal ability to give a great speech. These include:

• the important role of calculated and elite support for Hitler, essentially strategic politics. von Papen and Hindenberg weren’t persuaded by Hitler’s rhetoric—they thought he was a putz who could be played;

• the role of Nazi, rather than Hitler’s, rhetoric. Memoirs, autobiographies, and various comments—even from before backing Hitler started to look like a mistake—show that many people came to Nazism via speakers other than Hitler, or not through speeches at all (such as via newspapers and magazines, or even through a desire to participate in the violence of the Freikorps). After the Nazi takeover in 1933, much of the rhetoric that would have persuaded people originated with Streicher, Goebbels, or the army of speakers and writers—most of whom were following Goebbels’ direction, and not Hitler’s.

Even when it was Hitler’s direction, he was persuasive, as even he acknowledged, because he could count on his base only hearing (and only listening to) his version of events. After years of presenting the Soviet Union as the materialization of the Jewish-Bolshevik threat against which Germany and Germans must be implacably opposed, in 1939, Hitler announced that the USSR was a valuable ally and trusted friend. In 1941, he insisted on an about-face from Germans once again when the USSR reverted back to the nation with whom Germany was in an apocalyptic battle. Hitler attributed his success on that (and other instances in which public opinion had to be changed quickly) to complete control of media: “We have frequently found ourselves compelled to reverse the engine and to change, in the course of a couple of days, the whole trend of imparted news, sometimes with a complete volte face. Such agility would have been quite impossible, if we had not had firmly in our grasp that extraordinary instrument of power we call the press—and known how to make use of it” (Table Talk 480-1; see also 525).

• that much of the conversion that happened during the Nazi regime was some version of strategic acquiescence. Historians emphasize that groups like the military chose to support Hitler despite misgivings because they believed, correctly, he would build up the military and fulfill the dream of German hegemony of Europe, finally achieving what had been the territorial goals of the Great War. There remains considerable debate as to exactly how much popular backing Hitler really had, since expressing criticism was so dangerous, with scholars like Gellately arguing it was considerable and others like Kershaw arguing that coercion played an important role. But all of them agree that much of the compliance was the consequence of changes to material conditions—the (apparently) improved economy, lower unemployment, a reduction of street violence, a conservative social agenda, a more reactionary judiciary less worried about the rights of the accused, recriminalizing of abortion, homosexuality, and birth control, and just the sense that Germany was again a respected and feared power. That is, much of Hitler’s support wasn’t because of his rhetoric, but his policies. His successful acquisition of territory without provoking war was the cause of his greatest popularity (in 1939, although some put the height in 1941, when the western Blitzkrieg had done so well)—in other words, propaganda of the deed.

I’m not, like some scholars in the 80s, rejecting Hitler as a factor at all, but simply pointing out that the situation isn’t accurately described by the monocausal narrative promoted by lay rhetorical theories.

People in Germany did change their minds—it’s generally agreed that large numbers of Germans came to new positions on such questions as whether they would participate personally in genocide (Ordinary Men), the ideal relationship with the USSR, the plausibility of a two-front war, and various other points. But they didn’t do so because, believing one thing they listened to a Hitler speech and suddenly believed something else entirely. Hitler’s rhetoric was effective because (and when) it fit with things his audience already believed, needed to believe, or needed to legitimate. His rhetoric was effective because (and when) it was not unique, and he alone was not creating the wake into which Germans would be drawn.

My point is that the popular fascination with Hitler gives scholars of rhetoric the opportunity to promote, not just better understandings of Hitler, but more nuanced understandings of the complicated ways and forces that cultures change beliefs.

The post ASHR talk: “Lay rhetorical theory and argumentum ad hitlerum” appeared first on Patricia Roberts-Miller.

Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez as clickbait

[Photo from here–an example of how to photograph women politicians.]

We are now at the point where, if a second assistant to a dog catcher in South-south-east Nowhere says something negative about AOC, it’s news. If it’s a Democrat, it’s going to be all over Facebook.

At any given moment, there are political figures saying critical things about other political figures. If you watch Fox News, you will never hear about conservative criticisms of the current most powerful GOP figure. Fox promotes the notion that there is a binary—people are loyal to “conservatism” or they are “liberal.” The only opposition voices it allows are supposedly liberal, and amount to Fox paid stooges who will present dumb versions of “liberal” arguments, intended to persuade single-source viewers that they are getting both sides. They aren’t. Fox is all tribal loyalty, and its handling of AOC is proof of that. It doesn’t surprise me that they are in full smear mode–they spent 25 years doing that to HRC (quite effectively)– and I doubt they can be persuaded to stop doing it until there is no longer an audience that wants to shout at the TV.

The non-GOP media, however, are also handling AOC in ways that are actively harmful to democratic deliberation, and that’s something that we can change by not clicking and sharing outrage porn about AOC.

My objection to any propaganda machine is that every one of them (“left” and “right”) presumes a binary of political options—you are us or them. That is a red herring—we are now arguing about the identity of people making the arguments instead of arguing about the policies those people are advocating.

American media sucks because it is profit-driven, and there are three ways to get people to click on and share a link about politics (and thereby make a profit), and all of them involve avoiding policy argumentation:

• outrage porn, in which the pleasure is being outraged at the idiocy of Them (some out-group);

• a cat fight (a fight between two women);

• personalizing politics, so it’s never about policy, but about the identities of the people on the two sides (non-conservative sites generally accept the two sides fallacy).

Any one of those is more likely to get a click than something that offers a reasoned discussion of the various (non-binary) options we, as a community, have available to us.

Effective deliberation doesn’t require that we ignore the identities and bodies of the people involved—those are important considerations—but it doesn’t rely on the assumption that we should derive everything from assumptions (and projections) about identity. The identities of the people involved constitute one consideration among many, not, as media generally present it, the only thing we need to know.

So, a for-profit media and democratic deliberation are inherently at odds (as George Orwell pointed out in the under-appreciated Homage to Catalonia). Were the media oriented toward enabling effective democratic deliberation, it would focus on candidate’s policy arguments (with consideration of their identity as indicative of whether they’re sincere or not). A media interested in generating profit won’t do anything like that. It will identify the people who are so polarizing that any article about them gets clicks, and give them a lot of coverage (think about the disparity in coverage of Clinton and Trump in 2016).

Even supposedly “liberal” media doesn’t cover policy, and even it emphasizes fights between personalities. Think about how the non-conservative media covered the choice between HRC and Sanders—not through discussions of their relative policies, but with articles about their personal conflicts. So, for instance, the very real, and very important, questions of their very different policies were evaded in favor of not important questions about their feelings for each other. There was a lot of outrage porn (we now know much of it generated by pro-Trump bots) instead of policy argumentation.

I think there were good reasons for supporting Sanders over HRC and vice versa, but whether someone in either campaign said snarky things about the other isn’t one of them. And the notion of a stolen election is a non-starter, in that it was (and is) rationally indefensible, but it was useful for fomenting in-/out-group hostility within groups that might vote against Trump.

Just to be clear: I’m saying that I think that the important questions about policy were evaded by media in favor of clickbait articles about personal conflict. And it hurt the Dems. And even supposedly non-conservative sites engaged in it.

And I think we’re seeing the same in regard to AOC. Supposedly “liberal” sites post articles about a second assistant to a dog catcher in South-south-east Nowhere saying something negative about AOC (with a photo that makes her look fanatical). It’s the stinkiest clickbait there is because:

• that controversy, even if entirely manufactured, will get clicks;

• any mention of AOC warms the outrage/attraction desire on the part of people who drink deep from toxic masculinity in order to get chuffed about the possibility of dominating her;

• it’s politically useful for GOP rhetoric to create any kind of rift among the people who might vote Dem, generally on the basis of whether some Dem is being snarky about another one;

• potentially Dem voters are prone to the narrative that the Dem party is hostile to progressives (it is, but I don’t think we should get porny about it).

Anything about AOC is good for generating outrage on the part of misogynists, but anything about any Democrat criticizing AOC is the perfect outrage porn. It’s money shots all the way.

It’s a good Two-Minute Hate for anti-“liberals” because they can hate on AOC as the ultimate liberal (she isn’t) and feel contempt for the Dems who like her and take pleasure in Dems tearing each other up. But it also plays to the porn-y pleasure that people take in a cat fight (as a friend pointed out, it’s much like the faux fight between Kate Middleton and Meghan Merkle or various other celebrity women non-fights—nothing like a good catfight to get clicks). And, of course, it’s a (probably often cunning) repeat of the strategy that worked so well in the summer of 2016—get potential Dem voters to hate each other by fomenting (or even fabricating) a supposed fight between Dems. We really need to learn from 2016. We don’t need to have pure unity, but we need to stop falling for clickbait outrage porn.

I recently posted something about a profoundly irresponsible CNN article that was picked up by USAToday. The claim of the article was that a Democrat (Claire McCaskill) has talked trash about AOC, but neither article had any quotes to support that representation of what McCaskill said. That the articles didn’t quote McCaskill talking trash made me think that it’s likely that McCaskill hadn’t condemned AOC specifically, or even the newly elected fresh class. Video of that interviewed showed she didn’t verbatim say what either article claimed she had said—she said other things that motivism and a hard spin could turn into criticizing AOC.

Maybe that hard spin was an accurate inference of what McCaskill actually meant; maybe it wasn’t. Why go to the trouble of that motivism and spin? Who cares? Why are we arguing about whether McCaskill is a patronizing jerk rather than arguing about AOC’s policies?

It’s all clickbait, and it’s all distraction. And it’s all undermining democratic deliberation.

What matters is that both articles cunningly played into various very stinky baits for clicking, essentially several different kinds of outrage. Dem haters would love the articles because it showed AOC (a potential powerhouse in the DNC) was awful and because it showed Dems tearing each other up. Many lefties would take pleasure in it because it confirmed a narrative of democratic politics being the worst thing ever. (A narrative Russian bots used quite effectively in 2016.) It would also play to the intra-Democrat outrage wars of progressives v. centrist (which often turns into weird ageism—with snarky and bigoted comments about millennials or old farts). All of those narratives are pleasurable, and they’re all about the identities of some other group being essentially evil. That’s fun. And they’re all damaging ways to think about politics.

AOC is a politician with important ideas about policies. Her policies and ideas can and should be debated. What shouldn’t be debated is whether she is uppity, divisive, or a pretty good dancer. Let’s not argue about whether other Dems have criticized her, or how other politicians feel about her.

AOC has policies; let’s argue about them.

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Why y’all should read Lilliana Mason’s _Uncivil Agreements_

The book has a lot that is of interest only to scholars, and much that is of interest only to scholars in her field, but there is a lot that is useful to everyone. I think lefties can particularly benefit because she provides empirical research to show that a lot things we tend to do will not actually help (she isn’t alone in her claims about that–she pulls together a lot of research).

The empirical research, like hers, is clear that Americans agree on policy, especially policies that would imply higher taxes for the wealthy, reasonable gun control, government-funded healthcare, and various other progressive policies. But running candidates who advocate those policies won’t work because people (including a lot of lefties) vote on the basis of partisan identification.

They cheerfully (sometimes without knowing, sometimes completely aware) vote for political figures who will enact policies they don’t want, but they do it because their side winning is more important than any policy issue.

The more people identify with a political group–the more all their various group identifications align with a political party–the more they engage in motivated reasoning. People with cross-cutting identities are more likely to engage in empathy with other groups, advocate tolerance, and be willing to argue about policy.

This is a complicated point I won’t make here, but I think her book helped me understand the very specific ways that GOP trolls and clickbait fractured the left (and are already doing so today, especially in regard to AOC). Here are some of my favorite passages.

The post Why y’all should read Lilliana Mason’s _Uncivil Agreements_ appeared first on Patricia Roberts-Miller.

I read Goebbels’ 1945 diary entries so you don’t have to.

[Image from here]

The 1978 edition (ed. Hugh Trevor-Roper) of Goebbels’ Final Entries begins in late February 1945. By that time, the Battle of the Bulge was over, and it had failed. At this point, Germans have lost Budapest, Breslau is encircled, they’re calling up women, Dresden has been firebombed, bombings of major German cities are a nightly event, American troops have reached the Rhine. It goes downhill from there.

28 February. Goebbels’ reading of the situation is that Western countries are facing a “profound political crisis” with strikes “the order of the day”–so, any minute now, the Allies will collapse.[1] That same day he expresses outrage at “bolshevist atrocities” and, after a conversation with General Vlasov about the USSR in 1941, concludes, “The Soviet Union has had to weather precisely the same crises as we are now facing and that there is always a way out of these crises if one is determined not to knuckle under them.” [Thereby ignoring that USSR got through 1941 by having moved factories, still having access to resources, getting help from the US, and having a much larger potential military force. It was not just the will.]

2 March. “We can count on major operations in the east German area being possible by the end of March” and “if all goes well we can anticipate enormous success” [which is a nice example of a tautology, and summarizes Nazi strategic thinking at this point]. Also, the situation “is not reassuring” and “In the East too operations have not gone through as we expected.” But, meanwhile, he got a lot of letters telling him he made a great speech. Oh, and he condemns Roosevelt for megalomania.

3 March. Anglo-American troops are making progress. “We had never reallyvisualized such a course of events.” [He did another speech that went over well, though.]

4 March. The population in the West is welcoming the Anglo-American troops. “This I had really not expected.” [Later he would—in many entries– blame this problem on the Nazi leadership rejecting his argument that they should openly abrogate the Geneva Convention.] He’s reading Carlyle on Frederick the Great, and that proves it will all be fine. Oh, and a lot of people thought “four weeks ago the situation was such that the majority of military experts had given us up for lost” but Hitler sure showed them! Hitler has a bullet-proof plan: “we must somehow succeed in holding firm in the West and the East.” Hitler also hopes to open talks with some one of the Allies, but, before they could start talks, “it is essential that we score some military success.” So, it’s a clear plan: hold the line everywhere, have some major military successes, and then open talks with one of the Allies. That’ll work.

7 March. [And a lot of other entries.] Goebbels is puzzled that publicizing Soviet atrocities isn’t turning world opinion in favor of the Nazis. He’s also grumpy that a lot of the “Germans” coming in from the East don’t really look German to him. At this point, he begins to blame Goering for all of the Nazis’ problems [a nice instance of projection—yes, it’s true that Goering screwed up, but Goebbels has screwed up just as much if not more].

8 March. Goebbels makes fun of Churchill for saying the war would end in two months. [VE-Day was 8 May.] “Our sole great hope at present lies in the –boat war.” And “Rendulic has now put things in order in East Prussia.”

13 March. Hitler says there are new airplanes, so it’s all good (and, besides, Hitler had been right all along about what kind of aircraft Germany should have been producing).[2]

14 March. “I refuse to be deterred by reports of so-called eyewitnesses.” [Germans in the west are cheerfully welcoming Anglo-American troops.]

21 March. He and Hitler have a long talk and agree “that we must hold firm at the front and if possible score a victory in order to start talking to the enemy.” Well, as long as he and Hitler have decided that the people at the front should hold firm, it’s all good. [It’s fascinating how often Goebbels and Hitler decide that the problem can be solved by telling people to be more steadfast. Sometimes they take a lot of time to yell at people to be more steadfast. ]

22 March. “The military situation both in East and West has become extraordinarily critical; during the course of the 24 hours it has changed noticeably to our disadvantage.” [Because up to that point it was pretty good?]

23 March. “I think that my work too is no longer being totally effective today.” He was getting a lot of reports of being surrendering instead of fighting to the death for Hitler. This might cause some people to think that perhaps things were getting a little bleak for Germany. But, no, his reading of Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great shows that, although Frederick “too [who else is feeling this? Goebbels or Hitler?] sometimes felt that he must doubt his lucky star, but, as generally happens in history, at the darkest hour a bright star arose and Prussia was saved when he had almost given up all hope. Why should not we also hope for a similar wonderful turn of fortune!” So, the fact that things were going badly was proof that things would be fine! As long as you continue to beleeeeeve.

30 March. “This is the beginning of the catastrophe in the West.” He and Hitler agree on the military strategy: “we must now make every effort to re-establish a fresh front.”

31 March. He’s getting letters that are a little “despairing.” Some of them even suggest Hitler might be at fault. He blames it on Goering.

1 April. People in France, he says, must really be regretting the Allies’ success because they are facing a serious food shortage. [Did he really notknow that Nazis had always been starving occupied countries? He mentions, approvingly, Hitler’s decision not to try to feed POW. He has several entries where he says that the liberated peoples must be miserable now, so maybe he really didn’t? On the other hand, he knew about Nazi extermination policies, and the extraordinary atrocities, and yet he expresses outrage at Soviet atrocities, so is all just in- v out-group?]

4 April. “We must act at once if it is not to be too late.”

In other words, this is how an administration steeped in charismatic
leadership and blind loyalty who believes it’s all about marketing responds to
failure. They never learn. They never start behaving rationally.

Never. They will take everyone down with them.

[1] Editors of Goebbels’ diaries always have to
decide what to do about the fact that he is writing the next day about what
happened the previous. So, on February 28, he wrote about what happened on the
27th (“yesterday” in Goebbels’ words). Some editors (e.g., Fred
Taylor, who edited Goebbels’ 1939-41 entries) keep Goebbels’ dates, but
Trevor-Roper doesn’t. I’ve used Trevor-Roper’s dates.

[2] This is also the entry where Goebbels makes clear that it was genocide, and he knew it, and he was happy about it: “Anyone in a position to do so should kill the Jews off like rats. In Germany, thank God, we have already done a fairly complete job. I trust that the world will take its cue from this.”

The post I read Goebbels’ 1945 diary entries so you don’t have to. appeared first on Patricia Roberts-Miller.

Another way that American coverage of political issues sucks

A bunch of people are posting a USAToday article that makes it seem McCaskill dissed on Ocasio-Cortez, and they’re expressing an appropriate amount of outrage about McCaskill doing that. The thing is, I’m not sure she did.

I don’t have a dog in this fight. I don’t know either politician at all. But I do know outrage bait, and both the USAToday and CNN articles reek of it. First, they smell like cropped quotes. For instance, the CNN article says,

“I don’t know her,” McCaskill said when asked if she’d consider Ocasio-Cortez a “crazy Democrat” like the ones she decried on the campaign trail. “I’m a little confused why she’s the thing. But it’s a good example of what I’m talking about, a bright shiny new object, came out of nowhere and surprised people when she beat a very experienced congressman.”

Had CNN presented the whole interview, there would have been
an exchange like, “Do you consider OC a crazy Democrat like the ones you
decried on the campaign trail?” And McCaskill would have answered, “I don’t
know her.”



In other words, no, she was not talking about Ocasio-Cortez.

The next part of her quote might have been praise, and might have been criticism. We can’t tell because CNN didn’t give us the context. But we do know this—that this is the photo CNN chose of Ocasio-Cortez.

Meanwhile, this is the photo they chose for Kamala Harris.

So, and that’s my second point, who knows what McCaskill actually said—CNN didn’t give us the interview, but an abridged version that skews against Ocasio-Cortez. Harris has nothing to do with this interview.

The USAToday version is the classic CATFIGHT version that
always gets clicks—women fighting is such fun. It’s the depoliticized,
hyperpersonalized coverage of political events that has made me loathe USAToday
since it was started.

There might be reasons to criticize Ocasio-Cortez’s
policies; McCaskill might have made them. But neither CNN nor USAToday went in
that direction because policy argumentation doesn’t get clicks.

So, did McCaskill diss Ocasio-Cortez?
Maybe. Maybe not. That isn’t my point. My point is that we don’t know from either
the USAToday or the CNN article because neither of them is oriented toward
giving voters useful information about anyone involved. CNN is part of the
outrage machine, and USAToday is the founder of clickbait journalism. I think
lefties sometimes forget that CNN is more interested in getting committed
viewers than it is in furthering democratic deliberation, and USAToday is an
insult to parrots who might find it in their cages.

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Trump and the long con

One of the paradoxes of con artists is that cons always depend on appealing to the mark’s desire for a quick and easy solution but the most profitable cons last a long time. How do you keep people engaged in the scam if you’re siphoning off their money?  

There are several ways, but one of the most common is to ensure that they’re getting a quick outcome that they like. They’ll often wine and dine their marks, thereby coming across as too successful to need the mark’s money, and also increasing the mark’s confidence (and attachment). They might be supporting that high living through bad checks, but more often with credit cards and money from previous marks, or by getting the mark to pay for the high living without knowing. One serial confidence artist who specialized in picking up divorced middle-aged women on the Internet was particularly adept at stealing a rarely-used credit card from the women while they were showering. He then simply hid the bills when they arrived.

Because he seemed to have so much money, the women assumed he wouldn’t be scamming them, and would then hand over their life’s savings for him to invest.

They do this despite there being all sorts of good signs that the guy is a con artist–his life story seems a little odd, he doesn’t seem to have a lot of friends who’ve known him very long, there’s always some reason he can’t write checks (or own a home or sign a loan). There are three reasons that the con works, and that people ignore the counter-evidence.

First, cons flatter their marks, arguing that the marks deserve so much more than they’re getting, and persuade the marks to have confidence in them. They will tell the marks that those people (the ones who are pointing to the disconfirming data) look down on them, think they’re stupid, and think they know better. The con thereby gets the mark’s ego associated with his being a good person and not a con artist—admitting that he is a con means the mark will have to admit that those people were right.[1] The con artist will spin the evidence in ways that show he’s willing to admit to some minor flaws, ones that make the mark feel that she can really see through him. She knows him.[2]

Second, the con works because we don’t like ambiguity, and we tend to privilege direct experience and our own perception. The reasons to wonder about whether a man really is that wealthy are ambiguous, and it’s second order thinking (thinking about what isn’t there, about the absence of friends, family, connections, bank statements). That ambiguous data will seem less vivid, less salient, less compelling than the direct experience we have of his buying us expensive gifts. The family thing is vague and complicated; the jewelry is something we can touch.

Third, people who dislike complexity, who believe that most things have simple solutions, and that they are good at seeing those simple solutions are easy marks because those are precisely the beliefs to which cons appeal. Admitting that the guy is a con artist means admitting that the mark’s whole view of life—that the world has simple solutions, that people are what they seem to be, that you can trust your gut about whether someone is good or bad, that things you can touch (like jewelry) matter.

And it works because the marks don’t realize that they are the ones who’ve actually paid for that jewelry.

There are all the signs of his being a con artist—all the lawsuits, all the lies, the lack of transparency about his actual wealth, the reports that show a long history of dodgy (if not actively criminal) tax practices, the evidence that shows his wealth was inherited and not earned—but those are complicated to think about. Trump tells people that he cares about them; he (and his supportive media) tell their marks that all the substantive criticism is made by libruls who look down on them, who think they know better. The media admits to a few flaws, and spins them as minor.

Trump is a con artist, and his election was part of a con game about improving his brand. But, once he won the election, he had to shift to a different con game, one that involved getting as much money for him and his corporations as possible, reducing accountability for con artists, holding off investigations into his financial and campaign dealings, and skimming.

 And Trump gives his marks jewelry. If you have Trump supporters in your informational world, then you know that they respond to any criticism of Trump with, “I don’t care about collusion; I care about my lower taxes.” (Or “I care about the economy” or “I care that someone is finally doing something about illegal immigrants.”) They have been primed to frame concerns about Trump as complicated, ambiguous, and more or less personal opinion, but the benefit of Trump (to them) as clear, unambiguous, and tangible.

 They can touch the jewelry.

And they don’t realize that he isn’t paying for it; he never paid for it, and he never will. They’re paying for it. They bought themselves that jewelry.

There are, loosely, three ways to try to get people to see the con. First, I think it’s useful not to come across as saying that people are stupid for falling for Trump’s cons (although it can be useful to point out that current defenses of Trump are that he’s too stupid to have violated the law). It can be helpful to say that you understand why he and his policies would seem so attractive, but point out that he’s greatly increased the deficit (that his kind of tax cuts always increase the deficit). It’s helpful to have on hand the data about how much “entitlement”programs cost. Point out that they will be paying for his tax cuts for a long, long time.

Another strategy is to refuse to engage and just keep piling on the evidence. People get persuaded that they’ve been taken in by a con artist incident by incident. It isn’t any particular one, but that there are so many, and they reject each one as it comes along. So, I think that sharing story after story about how corrupt Trump is, how bad his policies are,and what damage he is doing—even if (especially if) people complain about your doing so—is effective in the long run.

Third, when people object or defend Trump, ask them if they’re getting their information from sources that would tell them if Trump were a con artist. They’ll respond with, “Oh, so I should watch MSNBC” (or something along those lines) and the answer is: “Yes, you should watch that too.” Or, “No, you shouldn’t get your news from TV.” Or a variety of other answers, but the point is that you aren’t telling them to switch to “librul” sources as much as getting more varied information. 

Con artists create a bond with their marks—their stock in trade is creating confidence. They lose power when their marks lose confidence, and that happens bit by bit. And sometimes it happens when people notice the jewelry is pretty shitty, actually.

[1]This is why it’s so common for marks to start covering for the con when the con gets exposed. They fear the “I told you so” more than the consequences of getting conned.

[2] In other words, con artists try to separate people from the sources of information that would undermine the confidence the mark has in the con.

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