Guest post: The real Doublespeak
Originally a comment by Seth on As a fact not as a statement.
This is the real Doublespeak, of course; not a statement meant to instill contradictory beliefs in the speaker’s mind and thus induce a fugue of passive acceptance of Big Brother, but rather an obvious smokescreen meant to gaslight anyone who takes the plain reading seriously. I foresaw this excuse immediately when I glanced at your previous post. The interpretation being in this case that Trump is a very poor and disorganized speaker who obviously meant that when looting (or really any kind of civil disobedience) occurs, violence often follows (by and upon the looters/disobeyers themselves, obviously), and the government should step in to prevent the looters/disobeyers from harming one another. Of course, even this interpretation is fascist and implicitly racist, not to mention supremely insulting to Trump besides, but it’s rather different from an explicit threat to unleash the violence of the state on peaceful protesters, and this interpretive gap is precisely large enough to drive trollish outrage which Trump’s people will now take.
The cycle is quite simple, and doubtless obvious to you, but it bears spelling out explicitly: Say something horrendous but which could, when interpreted very generously, be taken not-quite-as-offensively; dare anyone to take offence; scream to high heaven how you’re being persecuted and misconstrued when offence is indeed taken; claim persecution and victimhood; feel smugly superior; repeat.
They will do this every time. And every time you do not give them the benefit of every doubt, every time you do not extend them the most generous interpretation imaginable, they will insist it’s because you’re an insipid knave who has had it out for them from the start and they shouldn’t have to listen to the likes of you.
Good analysis Seth. What I wonder is if it’s just a function of his nasty and stupid disposition, I don’t think it’s calculated on his part, he’s not intelligent enough. The ultimate goal for Donnie Dipshit is to get as much face time as he can, publicity, ratings, discussion both polite and gross, anything to keep him in the spotlight and keep his circus running. He knows it doesn’t matter what he says, he will weasel his way out. It’s just unfortunate that anyone buys into his act, but plenty do obviously. Either that or they really don’t, and are what is known in sports as ‘bandwagon fans’, who you see wearing the current champion’s hat despite never having supported the team before. So Donnie sees everyone in this dichotomy of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’.
Seth, my boss does the same thing (not shooting, obviously, but vague statements that could be interpreted two ways). I have found that giving the most generous interpretation means I will be proven wrong when the clarifying email comes, so I quit giving the most generous interpretation. However, in political situations, this can be a fraught exercise. We don’t give the most generous interpretation, we look like soreheads. We do give the most generous interpretation, we don’t call them out on egregious behavior. It’s a lose-lose for us, a win-win for them.
Meanwhile, regardless of how he meant it, the impact on his base is going to be the same: Donnie the tough guy says shoot people. Good job ,and where’s my gun? Meanwhile, it appears to remain true that he could shoot someone on 42nd street and not lose any support from his base.
Wat. Maybe my brain is slow today. I can see perhaps calling said interpretation paternalistic, but I’m gonna need it spelled out to me how governmental intervention to prevent one citizen harming another is either fascist or racist.
This is basically the motte & bailey tactic. You see it bloody everywhere. TRAs and gender ideologues (and the other movements that fall under the modern Social Justice umbrella) engage in it all the time, as do . They spend all day in the bailey talking about how sex is an invention of white European colonialism, but as soon as they are pressed, they retreat to their motte and protest that they’re only talking about allowing trans people to live free from hate-fueled violence. You don’t want to kill transwomen, do you? And when you leave, they immediately run back to the bailey. Because they don’t care about truth. They just want to win.
Nullius:
Interesting stuff. But built into that is one of the oldest debating tricks in the book: sieze the initiative. Best way to do that is ask a question. Simply brush any preceding question from an opponent aside, insisting that your question is the most important, and therefore should be answered first.
Who asks the questions sits in the power chair. Always.
Ophelia/Seth — I would like to use the Seth comment on my blog (https://vridar.org/category/politics-society/) – Would Seth agree to this? Can Seth or you contact me re this, please?
Neil
Neil, sure, use it on your blog. I don’t have the time currently to get into any long diatribes in the comments (either here or there), though. As it stands, I’ve got a summer country garden waiting for my attention.
Nullius,
Tarring all demonstrations as loot-orgies-in-the-making and implicating that they should be shut down upon that characterisation is fascist, whatever else it is. It might not be *very* fascist, but it’s, shall we say, on the spectrum. The “generous” interpretation is nothing if it is not a claim to shut down any demonstration at the first sign of looting (in order to prevent violence from erupting, you understand). This is self-evidently fascist.
The racism comes in because most of those demonstrating against this particular outrage are black, and of course *those* people can’t civilly demonstrate—they’re at least beset by a preponderance of looters from among their ranks. And further, again keeping in mind that this is the generous interpretation, that black people cannot gather without their looting (which the previous supposition guarantees) degenerating into barbarism.
These implications are subtle, perhaps, but they’re obvious to me, and make the statement’s “good” meaning pretty deplorable.
Iknklast and twiliter,
I honestly have no idea how intentional any of this is on Trump’s part. I suspect he has a low self-serving cunning of the sort iknklast has so well described from her first-hand accounts of NPD, and I think he’s spent the last fourteen years honing his decades-long bullying career into the kind of Twitter mastery that he’s come to demonstrate. He certainly knows enough how people will react to him, and he thrives upon it. But he clearly doesn’t have any kind of plan beyond the next self-indulgence, which is possibly to all of our benefit—if he had a real appetite for power, and a hand for statecraft, he’d be infinitely more dangerous.
I maintain that Trump himself might well be eclipsed by whoever rises to overcome him. That person could well be akin to a Sulla, or a Caesar, or, just perhaps, an Octavian. None of these options are pleasant to contemplate.
I should add to my last comment that whatever intentions Trump has, he’s mobilized an enormous number of pseudo-fascists in the US. I personally suspect he came upon this by accident, his ego directing him to whatever gave him the most visceral applause, and this instinctive algorithm moved him to his fascist tendencies. Now he’s stuck digging himself deeper, and getting more passionate reactions from the fewer and fewer die-hards, hence prompting him to more, and so on.
His successor will have to deal with this mass of hate and ignorance, and the energy which that vicious cycle has enhanced, one way or another. I obviously do not pray, but I sincerely hope that whoever comes next doesn’t decide to sharpen that whirlwind into a drill that punches through the last vestiges of the post-war liberal order.
All I said what that it’s a nice store and that it would be a shame if something hypothetically did happen to it. Are You saying it wouldn’t be a shame?
Seth @8
He’s a rat in a Skinner Box.
We can see Trump a number of ways. One is as what he claims himself to be a ‘stable genius’, who by virtue of which has become President of the United States. Another is as a glorified shock-jock, whose fame gained on TV has led to his becoming President of the United States. Shock-jocks commonly have media presence (eg Rush Limbaugh in the US, Alan Jones in Australia.)
The shock-jock’s mantra is ‘speak well of my name, speak ill of my name, but speak my name.’ (Actually coined by one of the earliest of the breed: Eric Baume of Sydney.) Their opponents are commonly referred to by them as ‘elites’, who are opposed to the interests of the honest everyday media consumers who just want a chance to get somewhere in life, and would be doing so but for the efforts by said ‘elites’ to frustrate this worthy and wholesome ambition. So latte-sipping elites in some very secure job somewhere want to stop the honest everyday media consumers aspiring to something better than what they presently have, so that they can continue to look down on them. For example, the ‘elites’ want to prevent the citizenry from accessing reliable, affordable coal-fired power because of some spurious concern about climate change, despite the clear fact, inter alia, that the CO2, being a plant food, will be a beneficial addition to the atmosphere and will cause crops, forests and the rest to grow as never before.
Populists spruiking this sort of thing tend to get listened to and do well. They have been around since classical times. In fact the ancient Greeks coined a term for them: demagogues. Trump is one example of the breed, although inclined to struggle at times with the demands of the role. I would class him as second grade, possibly even third, but a trier.
Adolf Hitler, on the other hand, was an outstanding example of a demagogue, whose example is in many ways perhaps, Trump’s inspiration.
For another bit of context as to whether or not Trump’s use of lies and threats to silence protesters is fascist – I think the checklist of authoritarian moves in How Democracies Die is helpful. Trump ticks a frightening number of the boxes.
To put it another (but related) way, Trump is not a full-blown fascist now, but would he be if all the impediments were removed? Damn right he would.
Seth wrote:
Hm, thank you for explaining. I have to admit that I find this reasoning uncompelling, however. Neither of those is prima facie fascist. Additionally, I can find nothing in his tweet about shutting down all demonstrations. Unless, of course, by demonstrations we mean the riots that are a precondition for looting. But then, riot and demonstration are not synonyms.
First, shutting down demonstrations as nascent looting riots. Can a government body intervene when a reliable precursor to crime is observed? Certainly so. It happens all the time. The question in that case is whether demonstrations are a reliable precursor to looting; i.e., crime. Clearly the majority of demonstrations do not lead to looting, so (at the logical minimum) not all demonstrations should be shut down. However, I am still having trouble understanding how doing so would be fascist rather than aggressively paternalistic. Justifications matter for political philosophies; opposing philosophies can enact identical policies for opposing reasons. A fascist justification for shutting down demonstrations would be that they are a danger to the State, to the Body Politic, or to some exalted national ideal like racial purity. A paternalistic justification for the same would be prevention of dangerous violence, and paternalism can infect any philosophy at all.
Second, shutting down a demonstration when looting begins. This is even more difficult for me to see as self-evidently fascist. Looting, the destruction and theft of property during a riot, is a crime. It also requires a riot, something during which people are subject to physical violence and not inconsequential danger. Police intervene to stop violent crime and prevent citizens from being harmed all the time, and no one bats an eye. We all think it’s fine, for instance, when they intervene to stop a husband from beating his wife and children. The Army helped intervene to arrest and disperse KKK members in the 1870s, and we tend to think that was a good thing.
Again, it is the justification for the action that determines whether it is fascist, liberal, or whatever. Ignoring justification smashes all political ideologies together into a Gordian knot from which it’s hard to disentangle any one from another. Orwell was probably right when he wrote, “almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.”
The form of this argument really bothers me. It amounts to this: S(p), most p are black, therefore S(p) is racist. (Where S is some value-negative predicate and p is a group of people.)
Such a construction admits no non-racist way to state value-negative facts about a group of people if those people are black. Suppose that it is true that whenever people of any race assemble and play shmootball, it is usually the case that everyone gets concussed. By this form, stating that those people playing shmootball over there are likely to get concussed is racist if they are black.
It took me a while to figure out why I was having a hard time with this part. Two things.
First, looting cannot degenerate into barbarism. Looting is barbarism. It is not merely malum prohibitum, but actually malum in se. It is the dissolution of a fundamental pillar of civilization. What is mine is what I can take, and what is yours is what you can hold.
Second, that isn’t the generous interpretation at all. The generous interpretation of, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” is that looting leads to violence, regardless of who is looting. Nothing about black people’s inability to peacefully assemble. The uncharitable (and likely correct) interpretation is a threat of shooting in response to further looting, but again no limitation to a particular class of people, except for “people who are looting”. The batshit insane interpretation is that now the army will be going around shooting random black people until the uppity negroes go back to being quiet and apologize.
Circling back to the notion of doublespeak, I think you’re overreaching here. As you say, the typical cycle is to say something horrendous and then squeal when called on it that something else was meant. But what was meant in this case, even under an uncharitable interpretation, doesn’t come close to “stop all demonstrations”, nor does it come close to “darkies are violent animals”.
The cycle’s most insidious feature is how it undermines our ability to communicate, because of its reinforcing reflection. That is, a truly horrendous interpretation of a statement is offered, and challenges to that interpretation are taken as “trollish outrage” in accordance with the typical cycle. Once we get to this point, there’s no way out. We’re stuck. Any disagreement with someone’s personal reading is evidence of mendacity at worst, naiveté at best.
Nullius,
We’re arguing about the *implications* of an interpretation. Of course the plain text as baldly read does not explicitly state anything fascist or racist. But applying the bald words with the interpretation that they are a simple observation (if looting, then violence between the looters, then the government will step in to stop the violence) results in a rhetorical implication that the people demonstrating are incapable of refraining from looting. The people demonstrating happen to be black, for the most part, in response to state-sanctioned violence against a black man. The man who mentioned looting has a long history of making explicitly racist statements and more implicitly racist ones.
The rhetorical implications are, with this interpretation, that black people mustn’t be allowed to gather to demonstrate their grief and their wish to stop this violence without heavy government intervention standing at the ready to disperse and detain them, because otherwise they will immediately devolve into an orgy of looting and violence. I do not understand how this is not immediately obvious.
Seth:
I suspect that by “implication” we don’t mean the same thing.
When I encounter or use “implication”, I use strictly it in the sense of logical entailment. A implies B means that in all cases where A is true, B is true. Thus, I’m saying that the “rhetorical implication” does not follow. The only way to get to it is to impute it. It’s not immediately obvious, because it’s a pure non sequitur ignoratio elenchi.
It appears that your understanding of “implies” is something much less strict than mine. Something more like “suggests”, perhaps? So that to say that one thing implies another means that the first suggests the second. Or that someone hearing the first could in principle be caused to believe the second.
Is that closer to what you mean? If so, my concern is that identifying this sort of implication is almost wholly subjective and, perforce, not the sort of claim that can be verified (or falsified). A tether to objective reality is ultimately irrelevant to the claim’s “truth”. One either sees the implication as true, because it resonates with one’s paradigm, or one doesn’t see it, because it doesn’t.