Polarization, Hyperbole and Post-Eristic Political Communication

A lifetime ago, in a state far far away, I was a Democratic Party committeeperson, and as a member of DeSoc (the Democratic Socialist committee – remember the rose in the black fist?) and the Young Democrats, I was privileged to attend a number of campaign management and speech writing workshops.

The themes of those lessons all bore a positive message:  Don’t mention your opponent, as every time you do, you give him or her greater name recognition and thus boost their election potential.  Don’t dwell on what your opponent or the opposition party is doing wrong; always be positive, provide a message of hope and your vision for the better future. Present plans for resolution of conflicts, answers to problems, and options for emerging issues. This was how we were told to win: By persuading the other side to believe in you and the infallible logic of your ability to successfully lead or, at least, to make them feel good about themselves and the direction of their community or nation.

This is about 180 degrees from the current state of political communication theory today. 

Polar Opposites

I’ve spent the last two decades trying to figure out why political candidate campaigns did an about face to become almost exclusively an exercise in opponent-bashing. Why would you say your opponent’s name once or twice per sentence in a very expensive television ad, in your website materials, in your press releases, in community or televised debates? Why would you waste every opportunity to talk about an issue by doing nothing but slamming your opponent candidate or party’s approach, without offering any hope or vision for the future? Obviously the dominant logic had changed dramatically, but I could not figure out why. 

Over time, the opponent-bashing approach flooded into broader fields. With the advent of social media, the public jumped on the band wagon and whole-heartedly embraced the tactic of lobbing highly divisive negative memes and quotes into the blogosphere.

Liberals particularly have adopted this theory. In addition to candidate election campaigns, they have applied it to such wide-ranging subject matter as immunizations, firearms), and evolution.  They place the blame for everything from traffic snarls to global warming squarely on the Republicans.

Republicans are, of course, not averse to using similar tactics, though in past years they’ve combined this with sophisticated media techniques designed to maximize mass social persuasion, particularly in the use of theme language running through all campaigns from the local to the national level.  Their ability to tightly control these language themes has loosened somewhat with the advent of the Tea Party structure, as the national Republican Party hierarchy is not the well-oiled, close-tolerance machine it used to be. In my Democratic Party days, the problem with the left is that it was always fighting amongst itself while the right presented a single Borg-like structure. Today those positions have probably inverted. 

Why Don’t You Get It, You Idiot?

Like Winnie the Pooh with hand on chin, I pondered and pondered the prevalence of these increasingly negative messages bombarding us daily with directives to get angry at the Other.  I spent long hours wondering whether they are contributing to the epidemic of depression, anxiety and suicide that surrounds us. I wondered whether they contributed to Congressional stalemates and the inability to move our country forward in many different realms.  All we hear, even from our most liberal, progressive Vermont Congressional delegates, is how it (whatever the topic of the day may be – global warming, health care costs, international violence) is the Republican’s fault and how they are a bunch of obstructionist uneducated embodiments of evil.  We do not hear the plan, the solution, the way forward, the message of hope. 

When I spout my own message in that vein – which is, “Fund NASA” – I am greeted with jeers: Yeah, right, like that will happen and who needs it anyway. I’d say the biggest economic mistake our country has made in recent decades is pulling out of the Supercollider project in Texas. The point of these things is not necessarily that the Higgs Bosun could have been found in America instead of Switzerland, or that we need better freeze-dried ice cream. The point is that projects like landing a man on the moon pull the nation together with a unified positive goal, give us hope and a sense of excitement for the future, and bring that empowering sense that American ingenuity can accomplish anything. Funding pothole repair or yet another war may create a couple jobs, but nothing would shape the next generation of Americans like being woken up at 2 a.m. by their parents to watch a moon—or a Mars –shot launch.

It irked me that I couldn’t parse out the logic.

Then, I got it.

No wonder I had missed it – it’s a math thing.

Circle the Subarus

Here in Vermont, when faced with an assault on our local independent culture, my friends and I jestingly exhort, ‘Circle the Subarus!’. The reference is to circling the Conestoga wagons when a wagon train westward was under attack by – well, anything. (I’m old enough to remember when we used to say Circle the Volvos, but the Volvos have pretty well disappeared from around these parts.)

The rationale behind the old-school method of Positive Politickin’ that I was taught years ago was that you could already count on your Own Team to vote for you; that if you presented a compelling positive image, you could likely induce a good portion of the Uncommitted Middle to voting for you; and if you were really, really compelling, you might just convert a few members of the Other Team to vote for you. Thus, if there were 1000 registered voters in your district – 250 Republicans, 250 Democrats, and 500 Independents – as a Democratic candidate the logic would be that you already had 250 Democratic votes, and you needed to get 251 Independents to be your new best friends in order to win the election. You won them by being nice. (Decades ago my mother voted for, and has voted in every election since for, a Congressman who, in his first campaign, helped her move her loaded grocery cart over a curb and load the groceries into the trunk while he urged her to vote for him. She votes for him Because He Was Nice. That’s old-school Positive Politickin’.)

The polarizing, enemy-bashing approach to political campaigns and public issues is not remotely intended to make a single convert from the other side – or even to convert much of the uncommitted middle. The New Negative campaign theory is intended solely to solidify your Own Team, and to get it so riled up that every single member of it comes out to vote. 

This New Negative logic arises out of a fatal mathematical flaw in the old Positive Politickin’ model: Most people don’t come out to vote. The old-school assumption that if you have 250 registered Democrats out of 1000 registered voters, you don’t have to worry about getting 250 votes, is a false one.  

In mid-term Congressional election years, about 40% of eligible voters vote in the federal elections. In Presidential election years, about 60% of eligible voters vote for the President. In either of those types of elections, far fewer people vote in the state elections, even though they took the trouble to go stand in line and walk into a voting booth. In off-year and primary elections, and in many state elections, voter turnout is often more like 25% of eligible voters. 

That means out of those 1000 registered voters, you might only get 250 to show up to the polls at a state or local election, and only 400 to show up to the polls in a mid-term Congressional race. In the first instance, if you get your 250 Democrats to show up – you’ve won by a landslide. In the second, if you get your 250 Democrats to show up – you’ve won by a very comfortable margin. 

In other words, the heart of politicking today is not to charm the middle and persuade a few swaying souls on the other side – it’s to light a compelling fire under your Own Team, getting them into such a cohesive, angry, roiling mass that they can’t help but show up at the polls, early and often, possibly dragging along some friends, family or co-workers in the process.

Preaching to the Converted

No one was every persuaded of the wisdom of a different position by being called an evil, uneducated idiot. But the goal of these vitriolic, polarizing, hyperbolic approaches is not to persuade the opposition – it’s to crystallize the proponents. It’s preaching to the converted.  It’s about making sure that the committed Democrat or Republican never even considers voting for an independent or progressive or other candidate because it would obviously be an act of treason; it’s about sulfur and brimstone and God being on the side of the winner.

Eristic argument is argument designed to win at all costs—argument that flays and eviscerates the opposition and leaves them a disemboweled smoldering mass on the sidewalk. Every now and then, in extreme circumstances involving justice or putting a stop to a horrific loss of life, that technique to conflict resolution may be warranted. In most situations – deciding where to go to dinner with your spouse, or trying to encourage a neighbor or patient to immunize their child – eristic effectiveness brings pyrrhic victory. 

Whipping your own team into a frenzy is a post-eristic communication strategy—and ultimately, in the long run, as fruitless and self-destructive as beating up your spouse in public. It might get your vote out in the short run, but it also adds to the Other Team’s sense of cohesion by showing how nasty and horrible you and your team are. It reduces issue and candidate campaigns from meaningful dialogue and sharing of positions, to a mere war of numbers. It removes authority and control from the voters, who no longer are presented with two different visions of the future from which to choose between. 

In this case, not only do you beat the other side to a pulp, but you polarize the sides of any political issue so extremely that any ability to work together, find common solutions, or build a better future is erased, because no one side can afford to loosen their grip on their core hyperbole-based voting block. It is, as William Ury calls it in the Harvard Negotiation Project’s ‘bible’ of conflict resolution, position-based bargaining – and no one can ever back down from a publicly stated position without losing significant face, and when you are preaching to the converted, face  (and faith) is your stock in trade.

A Way Out

The general public, including those affiliated with any of these political teams, holds the keys to the way out of this spiral-into-ineffectiveness which blackens our political landscape.  It involves two simple steps that are entirely within your power. 

First, you can stop participating in it. Stop posting, reposting and repeating stories, social media memes, and slogans that are not aimed at promoting genuine understanding, betterment, and resolution to political issues. Is it phrased in such a way that you’d say it to try to convince your grandmother or best friend to agree with you on the subject? If not, don’t repeat it. Are the facts true? Don’t pass along inflammatory statements without vetting them, and knowing exactly what your purpose is in doing so. The dialogue will become meaningful and civil if you insist on engaging in civil, meaningful dialogue. Don’t buy into tactics of fear, anger, and accusation—especially accusation. Does what you are about to post encourage a solution to a problem – or just generically condemn people you don’t agree with, and who you probably haven’t even met? 

Second, you can vote. When substantially greater than 50% of the eligible voters show up for elections, the preaching-to-the-converted method is no longer certain to win the day. You’ll notice that Presidential candidates rely on their parties, Congressional and state candidates to engage in the bulk of this post-eristic communication, thus cementing and motivating the party faithful, while they themselves engage in enough baby-kissing, grandma-hugging and flowerly feel-good language to entice just enough previously uncommitted voters to win the day. 

Barack Obama was highly effective at this kind of old-fashioned political persuasion in his campaign appearances – a persuasive edge which, as Dan Rather recently pointed out in an interview on CNN, he lost once he was in office, as he’s been highly ineffective at persuading Congress to do most things. This is a good example of the backlash of post-eristic argumentation strategies. Obama won the people’s confidence through his heuristic, hope-based campaigning, but the polarizing approaches of his party and Congressional candidates made coalition building all but impossible. 

If sizeably more than 50% of us also showed up at Congressional and local elections, the mass-media strategies of parties and candidates would change significantly. The math would no longer favor the post-eristic approach. Candidates could go back to saying, Vote for me because I have a better plan. 

And some of the just might. Then we’d all win. 

Oh – and fund NASA.

Science and Fallacies: False Dichotomies Are a Weak Foundation for Law and Policy

Fallacies, like false dichotomies regarding who believes in 'real science', are shaping a number of our most important law and policy debates. 

         Several of today’s most vehement public policy debates are predicated on a chaotic combination of false dichotomy and a claws-out catfight for control of the dominant cultural and media narrative.  The arguments proffered over these vital public issues – immunizations and GMOs chief among them, although the disagreements over climate change, teaching evolution in schools, and abortion all bear similar elements –are ill-structured, fallacy-based, logically-inconsistent, and hyperbolically divisive.   And on such foundations are our laws written and enforced.

The dominant narrative regarding immunizations goes like this:

 “Government and pharmaceutical industry scientists say immunizations are not harmful and are for the common good, and anyone who does not believe this is an ignorant, uneducated, anti-science, superstitious, obstructionist, probably Christian-southern-Republican, idiot and should be punished by being forced to immunize their children.”

The dominant narrative regarding GMOs goes like this:

“Government and agricultural industry scientists say GMOs are not harmful and are for the common good, but anyone who believes this is an ignorant, uneducated, unreasonable, gullible, obstructionist, probably Christian-southern-Republican, idiot, and the agriculture industry should be punished by being forced to label and disclose to the public any molecule of GMO material included in any food product.”

Individuals who question vaccination policies (as well as climate change data or any other official reports bearing numbers and lab studies) are scathingly branded ‘anti-science’ and marginalized by those controlling the media narrative. Yet individuals who question GMO data are deemed cultural heroes who are battling ‘junk science’ and preposterous industry-funded studies. 

These two false dichotomies – if you value science over superstition, you won’t question vaccines; and if you believe those industry shills and their junk studies about GMOs, you’re an idiot—are logical fallacies that serve only to divide the public into ever more distant and angry diametrically opposed camps.  Being called a superstitious idiot never changed anyone’s mind, ever.  

This means that as laws are adopted and enforced on these subjects—as parents are threatened with jail for not immunizing their kids, and huge lawsuits loom over GMO bans and labeling—Americans will be splintered into warring camps.  True, there are winners and losers in every policy debate. But where the process is fair and civil, where the arguments are based on reason and rationality rather than philosophically inconsistent (a.k.a. arbitrary) rhetorical fallacies, most losers can find a way to live with the results, content that they were heard and respected in the process.

Much of this rhetoric has recently focused on the question of whether or not you ‘believe in science’ as well as whether or not the data at issue is ‘real science.’ The arguments which result in marginalizing some people as being ‘anti-science’ assume that ‘science’ is immutable, absolute, not subject to question—and apparently something performed or funded only by entities some group of people decides they like, such as Merck rather than Monsanto.

I run into logical, emotional and philosophical problems with this initial premise. To me, science IS inquiry; science IS an ever-changing understanding; science IS something performed by and participated in by every one of us every day, and not purely the realm of experts in any camp. Science is of course informed by our cultural precepts, including our language, our faith, our emotions – it always has been.  

Following this alternative premise about science, then, I come down squarely in the camp of questioning the various industry-sponsored GMO studies – questioning, mind you, not outright rejecting on account of their source. I’m perfectly willing to accept the industry- and government-science supported notion that eating an ear of GMO corn is not likely to kill you, at least not directly or in the short term. Besides, killing off their customer base too quickly would be bad for business – heck, any virus knows that killing off the host too fast is bad strategy. 

My concern in the GMO debate is that this attempt to vilify and discount all studies indicating that GMOs are not, in themselves, harmful, diverts the public policy arena from addressing the bigger-picture issues. For example, many GMO crops are manipulated to be pesticide and herbicide resistant, allowing—encouraging—far greater use of these chemicals which disrupt our ecosystems and quite possibly human health.  Most GMO crops are also gene-patented, which I—a dedicated open-pollination seed saver—find most troubling of all. 

I personally find this heated public argument over GMO labeling and the question of whether eating GMOs is bad for you to be doing more harm than good.  It strikes me as the same structuring of public policy and law that led Americans to argue over whether the Government could look at your kid’s library records via the Patriot Act – while not raising one complaint over the complete and total surrender of your internet and telephonic communications privacy by warrantless and sealed-warrant FISA court investigations. They robbed the whole store, and we felt good because we got to keep the candy bars.  

By getting enraptured by the passion of proving that GMO science is junk science, we’ve lost sight of the real issues. Allowing companies to patent indigenously developed seed strains, allowing a tiny handful of companies to come into possession of an ownership interest of the world’s seed – and thus food –supply is a terrifying evil.  Having been duped by our vanity over science-based arguments into plunging down this side-show path about labeling and the safety of GMO produce items, we are missing the opportunity to have meaningful, substantive impact on this issue which may well shape the future of humanity.  The GMO industry will make a great show of fighting us all over labeling, then concede, leaving us once again standing in an empty store holding the candy bars with a dumb smile on our face. 

My assertion that this labeling debate is a side show does not sit well with my liberal friends, to say the least—but that is nothing compared to what happens when I apply the same premises and logical inquiry to immunizations. If I should not believe the agricultural industry studies on GMOs, why should I believe the pharmaceutical industry studies on immunizations? This pronouncement is met at dinner parties with the most disdainful astonishment. The response, usually, is ‘Well, that’s different,’ followed by, ‘But it’s science.’

Well, there’s a logical argument for ya. 

I know, there is a significant body of data and studies from a wide variety of sources indicating that most vaccines in use today have very low risks of direct harm to the recipient, and that the public in general benefits relative to particular diseases when a significant portion of the population is immunized. I did immunize my child – but not on the standard schedule, in fact, she did not receive some of the required child immunizations until well into her teens, when she talked through the issues with her doctor and made her own choices on them.  This failure to comply utterly with what ‘science’ tells us has resulted in my being called the most extraordinary names. It’s also led to significant bafflement, since I’m not uneducated, ignorant,  Christian, southern or Republican or any of thoseother horrible false-dichotomy labels heaped on the people labeled as ‘anti-vaxxers.’  

I have seen all the studies, is my response, and science thrives and develops by being challenged. That’s the whole reason we have peer-review journals – so that studies apparently performed along accepted standards of scientific inquiry can be challenged, duplicated, and debated.  I never was particularly concerned about the correlation between vaccines and autism myself, but I’m delighted that enough people raised that challenge that long-term detailed studies were undertaken on the subject. I tend to believe that knowledge about both immunizations and autism was substantively advanced by these studies—and that isa very good thing indeed for all of us. 

What most concerns me is the absolutist, hyperbolical position of the ‘pro-science’ camp, which asserts a downright tyrannical proposition: No one has any right to question the ‘science’ on this subject.  This position ignores, indeed attempts to stomp out, the notion that people have very, very good reason to question Government and industry findings regarding human health. 

Unethical government-sponsored medical practices and public health scandals abound in living memory of many Americans.  The Tuskegee experiments lasted until the 1980s; the eugenics programs into the 1930s.  Forced lobotomies and forced sterilizations continued well beyond the eugenics program, and state law still allows court-ordered sterilization of individuals with developmental disabilities.  From 2001 to 2004 Washington DC and federal agencies covered up the fact that harmful levels of lead were in the public drinking water. Americans have good reason to start with the presumption that the Government is not telling the truth regarding health-related information.

Even removed from Government and industry influence, scientists frequently determine that what they declared with absolutely certainty at one point in time is actually absolutely wrong. For example, for a dozen years or more, ‘science’ in the form of respectable entities from the Mayo Clinic and National Institutes of Health on down have touted niacin supplements – vitamin B3 – as a natural means of cholesterol control. Niacin is cheap, available over the counter (unlike prescription statins), and in fact is highly effective at raising HDL (“good cholesterol”) and lowering LDL (“bad cholesterol”). 

Last week, a prominent peer-reviewed medical journal published a report indicating that despite the fact that it raises good cholesterol and lowers bad cholesterol, niacin does nothing to stop heart disease. In fact, the study concluded, taking niacin supplements increases your odds of dying prematurely.  ‘Science’ said for years, with no reservations, this stuff is fabulous; now science says oops, actually it’s killing you.   This is hardly a one-off – remember DES? It was administered liberally to pregnant women from the 1940s to the 1970s to reduce pregnancy complications, and created a generation of DES sons and daughters with significant debilitating medical problems. 

So how does logic dictate that anyone who questions immunizations – particularly immunizations that have not been around for 50 years so that we can see the long-term impacts and unexpected generational consequences –is ignorant, uneducated, or an idiot?  The more you are educated about the American medical and pharmaceutical industry and its studies and programs, the more you have reason to question. ‘Science’ changes its mind every week about something affecting our health. Coffee has gone from being good for you to being bad for you so many times that I don’t bother to look anymore. Margarine was better for you than butter; now butter is better for you than margarine. Yet somehow, we are told, all immunizations are absolutely good all the time without fail or change in thinking, and if we don’t believe that, then we are idiots.

Increasingly, the law says we are more than idiots. If we doubt, if we question, if we hesitate to immunize our children on the mandated schedule out of concern for the risks (and there are genuine risks – you can check out the data at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Vaccine Compensation program, which has paid out compensation for over 3500 claims of death and serious bodily injury since the program’s inception in 1988, and they only pay for a very narrow range of claims for a small number of vaccines that do not, for example, include flu shots) we can be legally punished. Our kids can be precluded from attending public schools; in some states we might even be thrown in jail, which has long been the political response of tyrants to people who do not agree with them. 

The Americans who dominate our present cultural narrative waive the flag of righteous, patriotic Science and wield it as a banner to vilify and marginalize those with alternate points of view. Fallacies, like the false dichotomy that anyone not with ‘real science’ is an idiot not worthy of discourse, have always been the scurrilous weapon of eristic argument – argument aimed at defeating, squashing and humiliating an enemy rather than engaging in heuristic inquiry and persuasive techniques designed to work together towards a common goal.  

Is a nation of those who sign on to the dominant narrative lined up to legally bulldoze those who bring a different perspective to the table really where we want to be going? 

Or worse – is it where we have already arrived?