The New York Sophist

Happy Thanksgiving, readers!

Tomorrow is Turkey day and if the Northern State Parkway was any indication on Monday, stress is high. I’ve never seen so many accidents. Perhaps our minds aren’t where they should be because we are dreading that Uncle or Aunt coming to dinner and trying to start fights about Trump or Harris or whoever with everyone in the family who thinks the other way. Facing people who see the world differently than you do can be the source of great anxiety. But it’s not the people or the ideas that cause this. It is the lack of training in argumentation that causes us the most grief.

Argumentation is not a breakdown of communication or a failure to care. It is an essential discourse that is necessary for human interaction and even human thriving. We are meant and designed to argue with one another in order to sharpen and improve our thinking. But shouting at one another and attacking people personally isn’t going to help. Neither is bragging, gloating, or blaming someone for the destruction of the world. Instead, we have to think about argumentation as a way to get people to think and understand things differently. Luckily, argumentation works this way rather naturally if you approach it in an appropriate way. Sharing our ideas is sharing who we are, and that includes disagreement and argument. But we have to do it in a way that allows for the productive effects of argument to come to the forefront. Argumentation is not fighting and not related to hate. It is respect for another human mind at work, and it shows that respect by interrogating that mind’s moves. Much like analyzing a chess game or a football match for strategy, it gives us an appreciation for error that improves all thought going forward, optimally.

It is a good thing to argue and defend your point of view. But you definitely need to be able to explain yourself as well as have reasons and evidence for your beliefs. If you don’t have those things, you can still participate but you might have to ask more questions or listen more than you imagined you would. One of the most shocking things that can happen in argumentation is that the other side offers up an idea you haven’t heard or thought about yet. This is a good thing – it’s why we argue. We argue to improve our thinking, knowledge and understanding not of the truth or the facts, but about perception and other people.

Here are some suggestions on how to engage with others productively tomorrow.

How to initiate an argument, or participate in one

Argument is invitational and it’s a group project! People forget this, but argumentation is not the firing of the cannons, it’s the invitation to dance. It’s asking someone to help you carry things. It’s asking someone to open a door for you, reach something on a high shelf, or taste something that you are cooking.

I often refer to cooking when I’m discussing argument. The reason why is Socrates, according to Plato, dismissed the study of argumentation and rhetoric by comparing it to cooking. For Socrates, cooking makes things taste good that are unhealthy for us, so it’s dangerous. It’s also not an art! For Socrates, an art can only be something that has total benefit as its goal. 

I would hate to go to a dinner party at Socrates’s house. 

Cooking is something that brings the family together, brings us all into a room to do that one basic thing all humans have to do to survive: Eat. While we are doing one of our most basic survival tasks, albeit symbolic for many people this time of  year (I know I don’t really need that much food, or these fancy types of food) it’s a celebration of what it means to be alive and human, thankful for being able to take a moment and sit down and eat together. 

Argumentation is something similar. We should be thankful for the chance to “cook up” our ideas and “serve” them to others to see what they need to “taste better.” Like food, everyone prefers different levels and kinds of seasoning in their arguments. 

If someone rejects your argument they are not rejecting you. They are saying “More garlic please!” And a good cook wouldn’t take that as a personal attack. Yet we do in argument!

Another thing to think about in argument is that it’s not about being right, it’s about making a connection with someone and sharing something together. Argument is more like a conversation than like warfare. People don’t see it this way because they forget that argument, at its heart, is an exchange. You can’t have an argument if the other person doesn’t offer anything – that’s just a lecture. And I can tell you that after teaching for over 20 years,, few people really enjoy a lecture. They would rather be participating in a conversation. If you want to have an argument you must have an exchange, and you want that exchange to be substantive – it can’t just be two or three lines. It has to take you both somewhere new.

Knowing something is true is not the ending point. This isn’t how you enter an argument. Knowing something is true should make you want to think about how to make it convincing to other people – that is if you really do care about the truth. Having the truth is not like having power or being dominant. It’s the first step in thinking about how to bring people over to something that is beneficial without question. A good thing to look into if you are interested in how difficult this can be is how doctors are taught to convince patients to change their habits and become healthier. They don’t tell the patients they are wrong or stupid; they explain to the patient what the facts are and what this can mean if they don’t address certain actions. 

Another basic rule is that being right is very different from being convincing. If you think you are right, and you are comfortable with that belief, you aren’t really going to understand why you should work hard to believe it. If it took you some time to come around to it, you are in a better position to argue because you can tell the story as to how you came around to your belief. Saying something is obvious and “only an idiot” would think otherwise isn’t convincing to anyone – you just called your argument partner an idiot. Not helpful. 

Instead, think about how to tell a story about your belief that starts with common concerns, grounds, or ideas that you both might share. The secret trick to winning an argument is to not speak before you have reminded yourself that the person you are speaking with has a human mind and human experiences just like you do. As you eat together, remember that you are both human and have similar capacities for thought and feeling. Then you can say something that will be convincing. This is the root of it, but not the total picture of course.

Finally, think about your goals in initiating an argument. Why do you want to argue? If it is something other than to improve the quality of thought and feeling with others, then you should probably stay quiet. It’s easy to cause a lot of harm expressing anything – even a phrase you think is innocent. In Buddhism they have the saying: “Mouth open; already a mistake.” Think about this before you start to invite others to argue with you about politics or anything for that matter.

If you have the goal of correcting others, think to yourself whether or not this is your role. Should you be the one to correct them? Are they doing great harm? Or is it more that you feel annoyed that they don’t think like you do? If you think about it, and you believe engaging in argument with this person will improve thought and feeling about things, then go for it!

How to get out of an argument

A lot of us fear being cornered by our political relatives and smothered in a bunch of discourse about the election. How do we handle this? 

The best way is to decline. A lot of times people will see this as a “victory!” – oh too scared you are going to lose, huh? Nothing to say!

What I suggest is staying quiet or trying to change the conversation to something else. It might really bug you that they claim this as a “victory,” but a victory over what? What exactly has been won? You have offered nothing and they have offered nothing. Things are as they were when the conversation started. They didn’t gain anything; they are still convinced like they were when they initiated.

Also, if someone feels they are right about something, and they really do believe it, why challenge others to argue in such an aggressive way? To me, this communicates deep doubts. They need the exchange of aggression to convince themselves that they are correct.

Silence annoys people who want to have arguments, who demand to argue because it denies them of the pleasure of expressing their frustration and anger about – well who knows what! It’s too simple to think that their anger and frustration is about politics. It has to be deeper than that. But you are (probably) not a psychologist, so it’s best to just talk about something more fun and interesting and avoid the argument entirely.

You can always respond that you only argue with people when you think there’s a chance to learn something new, change minds, or think – and that you don’t think that the suggested topic and attitude is going to get you there. 

Another thing to do to get out of arguments is to ask questions: I would love to know what good things you think Trump will do his first year, what will be best? Or, what do you think we are missing out on since Harris lost? This usually defuses the debate and allows them to talk but they will talk in terms that pretty quickly get exhausted since you aren’t pushing back, you are just asking for more information. Here’s some other starter questions:

What’s the most important issue to you?
How is Trump going to address that/fail at that?

What policy are you most scared of/looking forward to?

What challenges do you think will be toughest to take on?

Sometimes people don’t really want to argue, they just want someone to listen to them. As I have been told many times using this technique, “thank you for listening to my views.” It seems people don’t want to do it – they are afraid of hearing views they don’t like, or hate, or think are evil. But if you feel this way about those views, what harm is there in listening? Are you afraid you will change your mind? 

Now on to some specific advice for some of you arguers out there.

Advice for the Trump People

Now is not the time to celebrate like you’ve won the big game. People who you want to argue with will find this inappropriate. Social convention, things like appropriateness and timeliness, are vital to successful argumentation. It’s not just important that you have the best information or good phrasing, it’s vital that you also have a sense of when it’s in good taste to bring up what you want to argue about. 

If you just want to make your Democratic relatives feel bad, they probably already do. So there’s no reason to gloat – it’s not an argument and it doesn’t improve thinking, reasoning, or understanding.

But understanding is the bedrock of all good argumentation. You can’t agree with someone if you don’t understand what it is they are saying, what they believe, or how they connect multiple facts or phenomena. If you think you could increase understanding, that’s a good reason to invite an argument.

You should be prepared to defend Trump as a criminal. For many, a criminal is someone who doesn’t respect the law. How will you engage this argument? You can re-define the idea of a criminal – you could argue most businesspeople at his level are criminals, he just got caught – or you can take the approach that the laws he disrespected have no relevance to being President and enforcing constitutional principles. 

Some will argue that Trump has no respect for the Constitution because of January 6th. You should be prepared for this argument. The evidence is pretty strong and convincing that he incited the violent mob to attack the capitol and didn’t want to call them off. This is a tough one.

With any tough argument the best thing to do is research. Have some notes on your phone and take a look at some sources you think are good interpretations of what happened that day. 

But it’s best overall if you can avoid talking about Trump “the man.” One thing to consider is that Trump won the election in spite of all of these things against him as a person. You can always pivot such arguments to policy. This sounds like: “I understand you think Trump is a bad guy, but I like his plan for ________ .” This shifts the argument onto ground about what policies you voted for. You can ask: “I voted on policy as I’m sure you did, not personality.” 

Now this only works if you did vote on policy! I hope you did!!

Be ready on Trump’s big plans for the tariff and the border – what is the evidence that these policies are going to solve major issues in the country? Find some experts who think that these things are going to work. For example, many financial analysts believe the tariff is a negotiating policy to get compliance from our neighbors on a particular model of border safety. That might be a good addition to the argument! Anything that gives another point of view other than the tired views we see on CNN is helpful. 

Remember, the goal of having an argument is to get buy in to your perspective, not to be right. A victory isn’t rendering people into silence. That simply means they need time to think (a good sign for your argument). What true victory would be is hard to say. Perhaps it would be willingness to talk politics with you again in the future? Or saying to you that they have thought about what you said and have changed some of their articulation of their beliefs (but still hold the same beliefs)? Rarely, if ever is it that you face-crushed them. Reserve that for the football game chat. Argumentation never works this way and if you think you have done that in an argument, you most likely didn’t have an argument. That was a fight, and best avoided.

Advice for the Harris people

Kamala Harris ran an entire campaign based on the idea that Trump is a terrible person. This is the argument of ad hominem, or “at the person,” a strategy of discounting someone’s position or claim in an argument by pointing out that they are a mess, evil, or incompetent.

Many logicians believe that the ad hominem is a fallacy, which is an illegitimate way to argue. Instead of taking on the ideas you criticize the person offering the ideas. You dodge your responsibility in the argument to prove the idea or suggestion to be a bad one. 

If you want to argue with Trump supporters, it’s a good idea to abandon this strategy. It didn’t work too well in the general election. Now you see pundits and journalists claiming that the reason the Democrats lost was because they went “too far left.” I think it’s more reasonable to think that they didn’t spend enough time on the policies and values that they believe and support.

If you want to have an argument with Trump supporters, it would be a great strategy to focus on values and policies that you think are better for the country and/or better supported by the Democrats.

Being right about Donald Trump being a terrible person doesn’t help them see why they should support the Democrats, who might – from their point of view -support terrible policies. Start somewhere else in your argument. Perhaps with a Democratic policy that really has done good things in the country or the world.

One of the best strategies here is to localize your arguments. What’s a policy of the last administration that directly impacted you or someone you know in a positive way? Better yet, what’s a policy that impacted them or someone they know? This is a great way to talk about the benefits or even generally the effects of these big policies – such as the infrastructure act – that often get overlooked ironically because they are so massive.

You can even go very general if you like. You could talk about what a good government should do in different situations, and align Democratic party thinking with that principle. You can then point to things Trump supports or has said that indicate difference or some static/conflict with that principle. 

The goal here is not to prove that Trump is a terrible person. A lot of people who voted for Trump would agree with this. They voted for him because he doesn’t support “wokeness,” or because of the border or something like that. You should shift to policy and principle as a way of engaging these ideas to get the other person to see your position. 

Point out that our system works by voting for policy not promise. The record is essential even if you don’t like the people or personalities in a party. You should always try to direct the argument toward policies and what these policies mean for our everyday lives. 

General Advice for Anyone

Establishing an argument requires you to really figure out what idea you’d like to defend or what idea the other person is defending. You can then choose ways to engage with it. By the evidence, by definition, by degree, or by action. There’s also a other way to deal with it and that’s to say wrong forum or wrong place for the conversation. That might work for some argument averse people, but it’s not often what people who wish to share their views will choose. 

The best reason to engage an argument, particularly at a gathering of family or friends is not to make fun of them, belittle them, troll them, or watch people get angry. The reason is to reflect on your own ideas and views. What are our beliefs if not their articulation? We articulate our principles to ourselves every day. And if we don’t, we run the risk of losing the reasons why we believe what we do. Argument with other people is the way in which we examine and understand our own reasoning, or lack thereof, and correct it in ways that not only allow us to communicate our views better to other people but explain them better to ourselves, to really understand why we feel and think the way we do. There’s no other tool quite like it.

The ICC indictment against Netanyahu is getting a lot of attention in the media as being out of line. U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham has said that if an ally arrests him, the United States will tank their economy. Joe Biden has said the charge is “outrageous.” But what other method or manner should be used to investigate whether a head of state with a powerful military has violated the rights that all humans should enjoy by default?

It’s clear that powerful world leaders are not a good source for evaluating this on face. They have a narrow goal of self-preservation, often couched in the rhetoric of the nation-state. The state must defend itself not only territorially, which is obvious, but also symbolically – the permanence and obviousness of borders is best conveyed through material violence. The state has no other tools other than slaughter to convince others that their borders are real.

There are times when border defense via weapons is necessary but these times should be rare. The further you live from a border the more real it seems. The closer you get, the more it seems to be somewhere else. You are never quite there. Sometimes we have to put big signs and facilities on borders to make sure people don’t mistake where they are.

The symbolic necessity of a hard border in the logic of the nation-state means that leaders of nation-states will defer to going hard on defending them – including violating other borders and territorial integrity, invasion, and other such actions that one would see at a pre-school such as breaking your stuff because you broke mine; knocking over your brick tower because you didn’t like mine, etc.

The suffering people on and around the border and the state or organization that has been determined to be at fault pay the price. The ICC makes sure that the state’s actions do not violate the rights of those who happen to be close to these borders, or in a geographically inconvenient spot. The ICC is the agreement that the governments of the world should step back and check one another to determine if state reaction to the flimsiness of borders goes too hard or too devastating on the physical lives and practiced rights of the people who happen to be in the area chosen for this demonstration of force.

The ICC seems like the perfect place to this rhetorician to stand and defend one’s actions. It seems like the best forum we have of this writing to make the argument that the nation-state has no alternative but material destruction and casualty when there is an existential threat to the state. The ICC prosecutor has the burden to argue when and where that line exists: That the defense of the nation-state has limits that should be respected and enforced in order to secure the fundamental rights of the people of the world. This discourse would be incredible to have access to in order to help people have conversations with one another about military reaction to violation of state sovereignty, and why violating peoples’ right to life or right to safe passage, might not be a valid way of re-establishing the symbolic certainty that “borders make the state” (to the tune of the clothes make the man).

Maybe I’m naïve, but I think stepping back and having the arguments articulated as to why such destruction is not only appropriate, but necessary, or perhaps the only option available versus the arguments that this kind of state action is illegitimate because of the cost on human rights, life, etc as well as the interesting argument that perhaps it further de-legitimizes the state in ways that it can’t recover (a very cynical reason to sign on to the Rome Statute, but I would think some governments had this conversation in their parliament or perhaps behind closed doors) is essential for us to figure out not just who to vote for or what policy to protest against, but the very nature and role of things like voting and protest in our world that we increasingly feel as more real and simultaneously deeply, deeply symbolic.

The responses have been poor, to understate it. I see little action plan and a lot of reaction to something that was apparently “hard to imagine” – most of the population voting against foreigners and for America first. I’m not sure who finds that hard to imagine, but it shouldn’t be rhetoricians. But here we are – everyone upset and calling for the most extreme responses in scholarship, teaching, or what have you. Some favorites: Argumentation can’t be taught anymore and that we should only work on the scholarship of fascism.

I have some other ideas that I think are pretty good responses to the election, and none are totalizing or extreme. I think that campaign discourse really locks us into a bad frame when it comes to post-election communication: “This is the most important election of our lifetimes!” (this was said to me when I first voted in Bush vs. Clinton vs. Perot). “Your vote your voice!” and now “the country is doomed!” – we did have a civil war where states turned against the Federal government, and somehow we survived. This crazy extreme response is a bit ungrounded. Here are some things I am thinking about:

Assign more Constitutional reading and assignments

I think that the obsession we have with fact-based assignments for argumentation and/or public speaking is a death sentence for invention. Creating arguments about possibility should be what we are teaching, not “how to look up a peer-reviewed article.” For Christ’s sake, they won’t have access to them in a few years because we continue to support ridiculous paywalls from greedy bastards like Taylor and Francis, who do nothing but count money. Instead, show them how to craft reasonable claims based on past claims, arguments, and moments of controversy. I think rooting that in the Constitution and controversies about rights or governmental powers is a great way to root them in research and evidence that is not paywalled, but free to access as well as showing them how speculative arguments are based on facts/data/information and attempt to move decisions/actions/attitudes based on that. I think this will be a helpful way to intervene in what I see from the national election – an inability to imagine otherwise (both students and faculty are struggling with this). The Constitution is an imperfect document written by imperfect people that has been misunderstood in many ways over its life, then corrected with newer, better misunderstandings. And it’s a discourse that holds power over our daily lives. It’s the perfect pitch upon which to teach some rhetorical practices, particularly ones that claim understanding, truth, or historical continuity about something.

Change Tenure Standards

We have a wealth of amazing research out there, buried in a journal that isn’t accessible unless someone pays over $50 to access it. Most Americans (and even more people globally) don’t have access to our journals. Let’s change our departmental tenure standards to encourage faculty to try to aim their work at public(s). We don’t want to be in another situation where scholars face a devastating election result and all they can do is post links to a limited number of offset copies of their 2017 essay discussing how failures in communication could lead to a fascist state. We need to be in that discussion, as it’s happening, in the publications that people are linking to, sharing, quoting, and texting their family about. We need to encourage graduate students to write in public-facing ways. This intervention can help those who can’t afford or don’t need college to get access to some of our insights and lessons. Furthermore, it can have the added benefit of offering something – anything – against the rising tide of discourse that says universities are just forced liberal education camps. Let’s show them what we are up to.

Create a campus culture of debate

One of the biggest benefits for the plutocrats of election discourse is how distasteful, painful, and horrifying it is to have to talk to a liberal/MAGA person. By not engaging one another as humans capable of changing our attitudes about things, we engage one another as problems, issues, or blights. Democracy, like driving a car, is a cooperative endeavor even though it appears to be an individual act. Encouraging debates, that is the tradition of switch-side debate, where people advocate for positions that are not their own hardcore commitments, allows people to experience debate not as the performance of passionate authenticity but instead the attempt to reach audiences and have them reconsider their attitude about something. The focus on the role of language and rhetoric in shaping what we feel and think is vital to democracy. Changing position is the only real politics available if you want to live in a democracy – you have to believe people can change their minds. We’re losing this idea if we haven’t already. Encouraging such activity as a normal part of the educated life is an important change that I hope to try to push for going forward.

Dialectical Thinking instead of Critical Thinking

Too often critical thinking becomes a crutch for a preference: “That’s not critical thinking” is really “You don’t agree with me so you can’t think.” We need a better way to teach critical thinking then just getting the correct position on an issue or the best position that we can think of. We must prepare students for future problems of which we can only imagine on our darkest days. One way of doing this is teaching a dialectical approach to thought. Teaching students, or demonstrating to them, that as they think and speak about something the relationship to it changes, therefore it changes in their mind to something else as they are speaking about it would be the way to go. Not sure how to do this one. I’m reading a lot about dialectical method and trying to imagine how this would go in the classroom. I’m starting to think that good debate pedagogy and practice winds up here eventually. But we don’t see good debate pedagogy these days. The focus here is the attention to the statement of thought – David Bohm style of freezing the articulation for examination of that itself – in the midst of the discussion/debate/dialogue about the larger issue at hand. This could be done with some more practice perhaps and will really help students see the university as a different place, something really impossible to predict from their high school experiences but all the more lovely for it.

These are my initial responses to the election. I will have more as I think more. Let’s try to avoid the reactions. Leave that to the journalists. Scholars should be better. Professors should profess something other than doom.

Why is Bernie, or any other left-leaning person still using X or Twitter? This makes little sense to me. I guess this is just another example of people not realizing how their daily actions impact their politics. We need actual dialectical analytical folks out there with the political commentary, not just professional politicians with a brand, like Bernie.

Anyway, he X-ed something today in response to the Democratic party loss in the election:

I’m not sure why it won’t embed the way other things do on this site but it’s probably “user error” – which is what a friend of mine calls it every time I complain about my new iPhone. I hope to figure out how to embed tweets better in the future (or X’s).

Bernie misses the point here. He won’t want to talk to working class people, because working class people all share a very similar view – it is the foreigners that are taking away jobs, harming the economy, and increasing taxes. Most working-class people believe there’s a zero-sum game here with public money, and that the more we let in foreigners, legal or not, the less they will be able to take home in their check and the less good jobs will be available.

Politicians like Bernie would rather use the rhetoric of “change” – which isn’t a good word at all, it’s a “change” to move from a democracy, to a republic, to a plutocracy, to a dictatorship (the path we seem to be on now just like the Romans were). Change is so vague that anyone from any political position could use it. This is how we know Bernie isn’t serious; he’s a professional politician with a brand.

Addressing the zero-sum game means that Democrats or any politician who wants to engage working-class people will need to speak about racism and essentialism – two things that most politicians will not touch or discuss. They will vaguely gesture toward it, and then not respond when the racist and essentialist side says, “I support black people better than their own leaders do!” Which, of course, is another essentialist/racist view. What is required is a deep, deep, deep dive into the idea that we somehow have no public money and why that might be, the preconception that there’s a table with limited seats for those who want to work and be a part of a community, and that immigrants do not come here to commit crimes but find themselves in desperate situations due to the slow and poor policies we have for those people.

Bernie’s call to address the American working-class seems really beautiful and easy – it’s almost like a Trump campaign argument! But doing this is something so difficult, messy, and time-consuming no professional politician will do it.

If this interests you, it has to be done by you with the people you interact with in your daily life. This requires strategy, consideration, planning, and having difficult conversations with people who are your friends and who you care about. This is the province of rhetoric.

Unfortunately our universities are filled with RINOS – Rhetoricians in Name Only – who hate public speaking and teach it like they are teaching someone how to assemble a utility shelf for their garage. Most university rhetoricians who teach public speaking resent students, resent the course, feel like it’s beneath them, and just prostrate their entire curriculum to weird and vague assumptions about business norms (without having worked or studied business communication at all).

High School teachers are better positioned because students feel more open there to express ideas and teachers feel the pressure of the school board and community. They are performing more rhetorical dance moves in their class political discussions about class and race than the RINOs are.

A good solution is, unlike some rhetoricians and RINOs on Facebook are saying – only study fascism from now on or your work isn’t relevant (A wild claim from a discipline that encourages dilettantism, just attend an NCA convention to see it for yourself) to refigure the curriculum of the basic course and public speaking to reflect an investigation to how American government is 100% dependent on rhetoric. I’m going to be working on this and I will share my thoughts here on the blog.

But Sanders, or any professional politician, won’t do it. They understand the difficulty and danger of rhetorical engagement. They’d rather call for change for a vague “working-class.” These terms need not only more narrow definition, but serious inquiry behind them. I bet you won’t find many people who describe themselves as working-class – most people in America are middle-class, don’t you know? The problem is with those working-class people who are too stupid to vote correctly, etc. (This is RINO discourse)

I wonder if we really could support a true dialectical thinker in public office. What if they ran on a campaign that yes, government issues are complex and difficult and yes sometimes it feels like politicians ignore you. But I hope to get your support by showing you how deeply interconnected our policies with taxation and public services are with our treatment of people who come into this country, no matter how they get here.

What a rhetorical challenge! It does make me wonder, and oddly, it makes me somewhat hopeful as this difficult dive is quickly becoming our last political option versus a fascist dictatorship.

Take 1:

The difficult rhetorical lesson – if there is any perception that one’s economic situation is not as good as it once was, that belief cannot be engaged with any claims about human rights, rights to live how one wishes, civil rights protections or any such claim.

This perception can be very minimal. For example, if people perceive that the price of eggs is “too high” this will be a reason to dismiss a candidate, even an incumbent, who has a very strong foreign policy record or even economic record. The perception of the economic situation is connected directly to the President.

This means that people will shop at their preferred store, buying their preferred brands or even things that are unnecessary (lampooned in many great memes where an Xbox or PS5 is in with the groceries) and calling it the President’s fault that they can’t afford things.

This is also imaginary – the “better off” might have never taken place. Or it could be an imagined price from prior years. Or it could be a fantasy of what things “should cost.” Such communist fantasies like price fixing are very persuasive to right-wing voters: “A cheeseburger shouldn’t cost $20!” But they will also believe in the power of the free market, or assume the market is a natural force, like the wind and we have to adjust to it.

This is very dire for the rhetorician – any suggestion of a declined economic power, even a fantastical one, will beat out concerns for national security, domestic terrorism, corruption, selling secrets to the highest bidders, colluding with foreign governments to benefit oneself (kleptocracy) – all things that we have seen in Trump’s previous administration but are ok with because we could be really rich one day or rich people should be protected because they are what the country is all about. The idea that one has a very small chance of becoming a millionaire will always outweigh human rights for other citizens, particularly ones you have no connection to at all. The strategy must be one of identification first not division first – and certainly not the Harris ads that I enjoyed but did not help accomplish anything where supporters of Harris were cast as liars, hiding their true vote from friends and family knowing in their heart the right thing to do. It just doesn’t work, because identification/division doesn’t work this way. People love belonging and being a part of something; they don’t want to be shown that it’s an act.

The solution is hard to come up with out of context, but an economic focus is the name of the game. Once that perception is there the stain cannot be removed with “caring for other people.” We don’t have a society that works that way. People are very happy to watch others suffer (emphasis on others) so they can get a nicer car. Thinking about how to run a campaign in that environment is tough, but appealing to the loss of rights or exclusion of the needy isn’t going to do much except make the people who would already vote against the economic fantasy feel good.

Take 2:

“economics” is a catch-all that allows people to articulate deep-seeded racism and misogyny. For example, one can easily vote for the extreme right-wing candidate saying that economics are the bottom line, that they will be better off under such a regime, and conceal a more ruthless and horrific claim, that they don’t trust women, minorities, or foreigners. Even children of immigrants are suspect here. There is a genetic purity to nationalism which makes it well and truly fascist. Belief that American-ness (or any nationality) is genetic or only fully realized by a particular sex is the perfection of the fascist rationality. The conclusion becomes: Your life is meaningless unless the state can use you up. The dialectical rhetorical form is seamless. When people say “I’m voting for economic reasons” they are not voting for their own economic well being, that much is clear. They are voting for a general “economic” sensation that women, minorities, and foreigners (legal or not) are not in their correct places. They need to get back in their boxes and have children, servile minimum wage jobs, and leave. The variant of this is “they’re taking our jobs!” and the newest variant is “They’re eating the pets!”

Take 3:

The media handed the election to the right-wing by mistaking their role in society to give everyone a turn at the microphone instead of being critical about how people put their thoughts together. A well meaning, mass-media journalist can consider it ethical to “report on how people are voting” and then leave the statements out there to flap in the wind. They assume the viewers will be critical themselves and see the flawed reasons people share about why they are supporting this or that candidate. The media’s function – which we haven’t seen since 2020 during the “voter fraud” work of Trump – is to point out the lack of evidence, incorrect connection and assumption, etc. This work is only being done by the comedian-news, something we’d be better off without, where comedians sit with all the trappings of the mediated journalist and dispense the ridiculousness of politics. This has no effect on anything except to make us feel good about our preconceptions. The media, instead of sharing preconceptions and conclusions, should be engaging those by bringing in the experts to respond to the statements of the person on the street.

But mediated journalism will not do this as they are a multibillion dollar business. Instead, they will run with whatever people are saying, unaware (hopefully) that repetition on a national stage isn’t persuasive but informative. The June debate between Trump and Biden is a great example of this where the media decided, without evidence, to repeat over and over again that Biden had a “disastrous debate performance” and give no examples. They were focused on our focus on his elderly mannerisms, not the policies he cited and the accomplishments he touted. Trump’s comments were far more insane claiming Biden should be in jail, calling him a weak Palestinian, and other such statements.

screenshot of CNBC “Squawk on the Street” graphic that aired November 5, 2024

This graphic is a good example of what I mean. Here they present this data in a way that encourages engagement from and with the “journalists” who are hosting the program. These talking heads discuss the meaning of this data and simultaneously convey through the power of national media that there is a relationship here, not between perceptions of investors, not due to outside forces – even some coming from overseas, and not because of the policies of the Congress and President a term or two before them. This implies a spurious and direct relationship between the election of a President and market changes. It’s worse than a mistake, it’s encouraging reasoning that is damaging to any form of democratic order.

Another example is the repetition of the Reagan line “are you better off now than you were four years ago?” This metric is a begged question at best, and harmful, unethical equivocation at worst. For a journalist to ask an average person at a rally or a poll this question is unethical journalism without specifics. It just creates content that can be sliced and diced and served to keep us watching.

More on “Are you better off now than you were four years ago”

The media has helped craft the stage for fascism to steal the show and they won’t care – they are little more than “content creators” now, happy to get views and recycle clips of interviews time and time again until they are no longer getting attention. The role of the journalist is to craft the narrative, share the story of what’s happening, not hand the microphone around for everyone to speak on a national stage. Oddly, organizations like Braver Angels and the like think this is the solution – no criticism whatsoever – so we can continue to have family dinners while the country turns its hegemonic blade to its own throat.

We absolutely do not need Intergroup Dialogue to understand one another nor do we need Braver Angels so we can all go to brunch together or have dinner as a family and enjoy our company. We need a media and a rhetorical culture that celebrates inquiry, asking after the equivocation and begged question, and finding out more about your own stance. It’s not a good thing to know what’s good for the country or be right. It is a good thing to share that view in hopes someone will push back against it with critical faculty.