Praise of “us” and condemnation of “them”

A couple things to share with you from the March 1 edition of The Washington Spectator.

Patricia Roberts-Miller is a professor of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. She says rhetoric is an old and universal art. She defines it with a quote from Aristotle (yeah, that old): as the “art of finding the available means of persuasion.” Those who study rhetoric have described and cataloged the various methods of persuasion and can point out which methods various speakers use.

So professors of rhetoric aren’t surprised at what methods the nasty guy is using. Actually, method – he appears to be using only one: demagoguery:

Demagoguery displaces policy argumentation with praise of “us” and condemnation of “them,” an it is as prevalent now as it was in Weimar Germany.

Alas, we now live in a culture where demagoguery is considered the normal way for people to argue. Note that this form of rhetoric means the speaker isn’t actually talking about policy.

For those a bit rusty on German History, the Weimar Republic existed just after WWI and its desperate economic situation gave rise to Hitler. Kenneth Burke studied the rhetoric of Mein Kampf and saw that Hitler projected all of Germany’s problems on the Jews. If you didn’t agree with Hitler you were declared to be Jewish, or at least “Jewified.”

If you don’t support us, we’ll declare you to be one of them.

Burke discusses “inborn dignity,” the idea that all humans are born to God and thus automatically have respect and dignity. That idea is behind a lot of movements of liberation.

Burke argued that Hitler bastardized the principle of inborn dignity by asserting that such dignity was born only to certain people. That same bastardization surfaces in the notion of Christianity being racially determined and is behind the rhetoric of Christian identity, conservative Christian defenses of slavery and segregation, and the kind of of right-leaning Christian groups that support Trump.

Yeah, they’re saying some people are not of God, they don’t naturally have dignity, they’re not human. That’s an essential part of the “us v. them” argument.

Roberts-Miller says the nasty guy isn’t Hitler.

But does he use Hitler’s rhetoric? Yes. That doesn’t make Trump unique or even unusual.
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What happens in a culture of demagoguery is that people think in zero-sum terms about politics: whether our country ends up with a good policy matters less than ensuring the winner is “us” (our faction) – or at least that we can make “them” lose.

That is the objective of Trump’s rhetoric and the rhetoric of this loyal media. Anything that makes “them” (“libruls,” government employees, low-income recipients of support) angry is a win. This is his single most important strategy. And he can count on it being repeated. He thereby dodges policy argumentation, turns every issue into a question of belief in him, scapegoats relentlessly, projects his failures onto the out-group (anyone who disagrees with him is a librul), openly invokes racism, and has a media that will support him.

Trump isn’t Hitler, but he has put the rhetorical strategies of modern history’s most galvanizing and villainous demagogue to effective use.

In the other Washington Spectator article, Steven Pressman, professor of economics at Colorado State University, discusses the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 that ended WWI. He does this through the objections of economist John Maynard Keynes, who was a member of the diplomatic support team from Britain. Keynes resigned in protest when he saw how the negotiations were going. Then he wrote the book “The Economic Consequences of Peace” to explain his reasons. These were:

* The reparations demanded of Germany were too harsh. Germany couldn’t possibly pay them. The attempt would put the German economy into a tailspin (see Weimar Republic above). The falling German economy would also affect the United States, France, and Britain, the winners in the war.

* The German people, faced with imposed austerity, would become increasingly angry (see Hitler above).

This peace treaty, wrote Keynes, would make another war more likely. War resumed 20 years later.

The way out, wrote Keynes, was less punishing reparations, a different way for the Allies to pay off war bonds, and the promotion of international trade.

That last idea caught on after WWII and became the European Union.

Pressman says we didn’t learn the lessons of this disastrous peace treaty.

* In the last decade or so, the European Union – led by Germany, no less – imposed austerity on Greece and Spain. Britain imposed austerity on itself. Their economies stagnated.

* Workers around the world see their standard of living fall and they are becoming angry. We get Brexit, Americans blaming the Chinese, the election of the nasty guy and the rise of far-right politicians in France, Hungary, and Italy.

* The nasty guy declares he is “Tariff Man” – trying to destroy international trade.

If only we could get rid of that “us v. them” mentality.