Trust Narratives

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sat Dec 01, 2007 at 11:00

Both Yglesias and Klein see this as depressing.  Klein thinks that this puts campaigns unwilling to attack at a 'severe disadvantage', and Yglesias thinks that it means that telling your own lies might be necessary to 'fight fire with fire'.

In my experience handling attacks in campaigns, both issue-based and candidate-centric, neither of these is accurate.  In order to deal with lies and misrepresentations from an opponent, you can't just call out the lies and misrepresentations, you have to call the opponent a liar.  You have to tell a story about why you are being attacked instead of just illustrating that the attacks are untrue, and you have to use this story to reveal the character of the attacker.  Political contests are contests of values and character, they are primary trust contests.

This is so obviously that it shouldn't need to be debated or discussed.  And yet, it is equally obviously that barely one Democrat in a 100 who holds high office understands this.  Here I want to revisit Matt's post, and expand on it in certain ways, because I think it's one of the most important discussions that we need to have amongst ourselves, and to spread to a wider audience.

Above all, what this means is engaging in a whole set of related ideas that conservatives have somehow corenered the market on, while liberals (and pseudo-liberals) have convinced themselves they're not really important.  The big three are character, narrative, and values:

Pointing out that falsehoods are falsehoods, without any underlying narrative, is like discussing torture without pointing out the authoritarian nature of the regimes that use it as a tool.  It becomes an isolated and irrelevant fact, a tragedy like a natural disaster.  Lies are also not always bad; sometimes they are social lubricants and used to spare people's feelings.  Lots of people say things that aren't true, in fact, most of us break our word to ourselves on a regular basis (check your New Year's resolutions list if you don't believe me).  You have to use their lies to tell a story about their character.

Commentator royniles picked up on this :

The problem with calling a politician who lies a liar is that we not only all lie but we understand that all politicians lie, and that they expect the audience to know that, and to sort out which lies make their adherents feel good, and which lies will make the opposition feel bad.  We are in effect expected to judge all political races as lying contests, just as we have been taught in western culture to judge all debates and other adversarial proceedings as lying contests.

Thus to call any politician a liar is begging the question of whether he is a bad or good liar, and whether his heart is nevertheless as pure as our own.  We in fact will sometimes judge a good liar as potentially more effective than a persistent truth teller.

You touched on this when you discussed lying as a reflection of character and trustworthiness.  Trustworthiness is the key word or factor here - if you label someone a liar, it has to be clear you mean he lies because he is at bottom untrustworthy, rather than he is untrustworthy because he lies.

And I seconded this by linking to a column that George Lakoff wrote in September, 2003, "Betrayal of Trust", in which his core argument is stated right up front:

The question of the L-word keeps coming up. Did the president and his chief advisors lie? I think this is the wrong question to be asking. The real issue is betrayal of trust.

Writing about Iraq, Lakoff argues:

Here is the impression that a great many Americans have been left with, especially our men and women in the military and their families: We went to war in Iraq, first, to defend our country against terrorists, second, to liberate that country -- selflessly, at great sacrifice, not out of self-interest.

These are false impressions, and the president continues to create and reinforce them.

Are they lies -- or are they merely exaggerations, misleading statements, mistakes, rhetorical excesses and so on. Linguists study such matters. The most startling finding is that, in considering whether a statement is a lie, the least important consideration for most people is whether it is true!

The more important considerations are, Did he believe it? Did he intend to deceive? Was he trying to gain some advantage or to harm someone else? Is it a serious matter, or a trivial one? Is it "just" a matter of political rhetoric? Most people will grant that, even if the statement happened to be false, if he believed it, wasn't trying to deceive, and was not trying to gain advantage or harm any one, then there was no lie. If it was a lie in the service of a good cause, then it was a white lie. If it was based on faulty information, then it was an honest mistake. If it was just there for emphasis, then it was an exaggeration....

But lying, in itself, is not and should not be the issue. The real issue is a betrayal of trust. Our democratic institutions require trust. When the president asks Congress to consent to war -- the most difficult moral judgment it can make -- Congress must be able to trust the information provided by the administration. When the President asks our fighting men and women to put their lives on the line for a reason, they must be able to trust that the reason he has given is true. It is a betrayal of trust for the president to ask our soldiers to risk their lives under false pretenses. And when the president asks the American people to put their sons and daughters in harm's way and to spend money that could be used for schools, for health care, for helping desperate people, for rebuilding decaying infrastructure, and for economic stimulation in hard times, it is a betrayal of trust for the president to give false impressions.

There is another reason why trust is a better focus:  because the issue is even more than character.  The conservative argument is actually two-fold:  that character counts more than anything else, and that conservatives have better character.  The counter-argument, in turn, is two-fold: that character does not count more than anything else-it's important, but not all-important-and that  conservatives don't have better character.

The argument against elevating character too highly is simply that character alone cannot be trusted.  After all, isn't a central tenent of Christianity that all are sinners?  All are imperfect?  What's more, it is certainly a tenent of the US Constitution.  It's why we have a system of checks and balances.  Sure, we'd like the best possible people representing us in government.  But even the best people will be tempted by power sometimes, even if its just for the purpose of the "higher good" and not for any personal gain.  Thus, government cannot rightly be based on trust.  It must be as transparent as possible, it must be accountable, and it must balance different centers of power against one another.

None of this means that we want scroundrels ruling over us.  But it means that at least we have protection-not just from scoundrels, but also from the well-intentioned, who know not where the road they're paving leads us to.  A trustworthy system is one that requires leaders to earn their trust, to show their evidence openly, to make their arguments in public, to submit their judgements to the scrutiny of others.  We cannot sensibly speak of such trust in purely personal, or individual terms.  Trust is a function of the entire system, and those who refuse to participate-who would set themselves apart as superior to it, above the law, beyond scrutiny-are inhently untustworthy, by that simple act of refusing to be treated just like anyone else.

This is the fundamental narrative of America, the narrative of why we are a republic and not a monarchy, of why we are founded on the notion of a social contract, built from the bottom up, rather than belief in the divine right of kings flowing down from heavan.  We may not be able to start a conversation talking about this out of the blue.  But we can begin where Lakoff suggests, and know that utlimately this is where it ends. The foundations of our nation lie not in the promise of superior men or even women, they lie in acknowledgement of common accountability.  None of us is beyond questioning.  A cat can look at a king. And we can telegraph this end point rather directly simply by saying something like, "Look, he's the President, not the King.  He has to answer to us, because we're the ones who elected him, we're the ones who pay his salary.  He works for us."

Conservatives Are Different

Conservatives have never really accepted all the above.  They really don't believe in equality, and they don't believe that they should have to listen to anyone else.  They think it's perfectly fine to take away someone's rights-especially their right to vote, and be self-governing-just so long as that someone isn't them.

In his essay, "What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?", Phil Agre writes:

Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple:

  Q: What is conservatism?
  A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.

  Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
  A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.

These ideas are not new. Indeed they were common sense until recently. Nowadays, though, most of the people who call themselves "conservatives" have little notion of what conservatism even is. They have been deceived by one of the great public relations campaigns of human history. Only by analyzing this deception will it become possible to revive democracy in the United States.

And he goes on to begin his arugment thus:

//1 The Main Arguments of Conservatism

From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives.

The tactics of conservatism vary widely by place and time. But the most central feature of conservatism is deference: a psychologically internalized attitude on the part of the common people that the aristocracy are better people than they are. Modern-day liberals often theorize that conservatives use "social issues" as a way to mask economic objectives, but this is almost backward: the true goal of conservatism is to establish an aristocracy, which is a social and psychological condition of inequality. Economic inequality and regressive taxation, while certainly welcomed by the aristocracy, are best understood as a means to their actual goal, which is simply to be aristocrats. More generally, it is crucial to conservatism that the people must literally love the order that dominates them. Of course this notion sounds bizarre to modern ears, but it is perfectly overt in the writings of leading conservative theorists such as Burke. Democracy, for them, is not about the mechanisms of voting and office-holding. In fact conservatives hold a wide variety of opinions about such secondary formal matters. For conservatives, rather, democracy is a psychological condition. People who believe that the aristocracy rightfully dominates society because of its intrinsic superiority are conservatives; democrats, by contrast, believe that they are of equal social worth. Conservatism is the antithesis of democracy. This has been true for thousands of years.

Because conservatives deeply believe in inequality, they have little trouble slandering, denigrating, and attacking those they see are their enemies-and they have relatively little trouble seeing anyone who disagrees with them as their enemy.  In contrast, liberals believe in human dignity, and really don't feel that comfortable saying bad things about people.  In addition, they are much more attuned to the systemic nature of things, and imbued with an egalitarian, symmetric ethic: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Finally, both liberals and conservatives tend to mistakenly believe that they are fundamentally alike.  Liberals believe that conservatives really want to be truthful, and thus can and should be swayed by rational argument alone, with no resort to questioning their character, which must be assumed to be beyond reproach.  Conservatives beleive that liberals will really just say anything to gain political power, and so place no particular importance whatsoever on the truth, except as a matter of appearance.  "Sincerity is the key," an old Hollywood saying goes.  "Once you can fake sincerity, you can do anything."

These are the background facts that help elucidate what's going on beneath the surface in another part of Matt's post:

Yglesias and Klein are falling into the fundamental trap of older political liberalism, which assumes that technocratic arguments bear their own emotional content.  You grant the benefit of the doubt to your opponent, and if something someone says is exposed as a bad or false argument, mediating institutions like the press or academia, or even the opponent himself will concede and move towards a more constructive topic of discussion.  The facts are not in dispute.  This is a good model of political engagement, but it assumes that one side of the political spectrum has not institutionalized bad faith, which now is a false assumption.

In fact, conservatives have never played by such rules.  But they have abided by them when necessary, when liberals and liberal ideas have so dominated public discourse that they are forced to make good faith arguments (or very good imitatios of them) and keep their character attacks to themselves in public.  That, however, has not been the case for quite some time.

Matt continues:

What you see, though, over and over, is that old liberals within progressive groups and most Democratic leaders, believe strongly that the facts tell their own story, that it is in fact immoral to call the Republican Party a corrupt vessel.  That is why, I am convinced, they are so hostile to bloggers and their base, who do believe that Bush is not trustworthy to his core, and who do believe that Republicans are bad faith operators.  I'm reminded of this response from Wes Clark to the Petraeus ad, where he became emotional when I asked him what people who thought Petraeus had lied should say.

Matt Stoller:  So how do the millions of people who feel lied to by General Petraeus express themselves?  What's the appropriate way to express themselves?   Wes Clark: Send emails, write editorials, call Senators, write Op-Eds, letters to the editors, but make them substantive, serious letters.  If you feel like he has lied to you say so, but don't make the pun on his name.  Show it with facts and let people draw the conclusion.  It's inflammatory rhetoric to hurl out accusations of lying, that's a conclusion that has to be drawn by a careful review and examination of the evidence and it has to be used with great circumspection.  That kind of reckless language, especially the use of puns and so forth, people don't like it, it doesn't change peoples' minds, it alienates support, and this is a democracy.  We've got to convince moderate middle of the road Americans to come our way.  We won't do it with those kinds of ads.

In other words, show that the arguments are bad, but do not call Petraeus a liar even if that is what you think he is.  Do not name call.  Do not make character-based arguments, not just because it is tactically unwise but because it is wrong to do so.  Do not say that Petraeus is obviously a propaganda tool for a crazy right-wing to continue a war everyone hates, even though that is transparently obvious.  If you do make this call, Wes Clark will go after you.  This is beyond problematic, it is a fundamental strategic and philosophical error in considering modern political engagement.

It is also based on a fundamental misunderstanding about the very nature of conservatism, as I have argued above.

What Clark fails to realize is that conservative attack politics has already defined the nature of political struggle in our time.  And perhaps the clearest explanation of this definition came from Josh Marshall, who dubbed it the "Republicans' Bitch-Slap theory of electoral politics".  He wrote about it during the fleeting millisecond in mid-August, 2004, when John Kerry momentarily fought back against the Swift-Boat attacks on him.  (Shorly after, John McCain told Kerry to stop being mean to the nice Mr. President, and Kerry meekly complied.)  Here's part of what Josh wrote, starting with the tail end of his quoting Kerry:

[Kerry:] Of course, the President keeps telling people he would never question my service to our country. Instead, he watches as a Republican-funded attack group does just that. Well, if he wants to have a debate about our service in Vietnam, here is my answer: "Bring it on."

This is a good thing -- and not simply because Kerry has to respond to the president's surrogates who are trying (and, to an extent, succeeding) in damaging his candidacy with scurrilous and discredited attacks.

There is a meta-debate going on here, one that I'm not sure even the practitioners fully articulate to themselves and one that I'm painfully aware the victims don't fully understand.

Let's call it the Republicans' Bitch-Slap theory of electoral politics.

It goes something like this.

On one level, of course, the aim behind these attacks is to cast suspicion upon Kerry's military service record and label him a liar. But that's only part of what's going on.

Consider for a moment what the big game is here. This is a battle between two candidates to demonstrate toughness on national security. Toughness is a unitary quality, really -- a personal, characterological quality rather than one rooted in policy or divisible in any real way. So both sides are trying to prove to undecided voters either that they're tougher than the other guy or at least tough enough for the job.

In a post-9/11 environment, obviously, this question of strength, toughness or resolve is particularly salient. That, of course, is why so much of this debate is about war and military service in the first place.

One way -- perhaps the best way -- to demonstrate someone's lack of toughness or strength is to attack them and show they are either unwilling or unable to defend themselves -- thus the rough slang I used above. And that I think is a big part of what is happening here. Someone who can't or won't defend themselves certainly isn't someone you can depend upon to defend you.

Demonstrating Kerry's unwillingness to defend himself (if Bush can do that) is a far more tangible sign of what he's made of than wartime experiences of thirty years ago.

However, there's also a deeper level here than the one that Josh pointed out, because conservatism at its core believes that force is more important than reason, while liberalism believes the reverse.  This has two consequences worth noting here.  First, an attack is all the more potent if it is transparently false.  Call it the "nyah! nyah! nyah! nyah! nyah!" factor.  Of course the perpetrator continues superficially denying that it is false, at the same time that they clearly admit its falsity by their actions.  This overt contradiction between actions and words is yet another, deeper layer of demonstrating out-of-control power that is free from all external constraint.  Clark's proposed response to such demonstations is so transparently feeble that no further comment on it is necessary.

The second consequence is that forcing the issue to be about force, not reason, is a way of establishing the conservative frame as predominant.  9/11 made this ten times easier, of course, and everything Josh says in that regard is true.  But 9/11 didn't cause the underlying battle of dynamics, it simply tipped the balance more in the conservatives' favor.  Liberals still have to walk a tightrope: hit back at conservatives swift and hard to show they can't be bullied, and then, as soon as that's settled--but not a millisecond sooner--get back to exemplifying the liberal approach to things.

Just as the conservative demonstates the fundamental logic of their approach through transparently false accusations, and mocking acknowledgement of said falseness, the liberal demonstrates the fundamental logic of their approach by dropping the use of force, as soon as it has accomplished its instrumental goal.

Conclusion

Thus, Clark is correct to sense that liberals have a code to remain true to. But he is utterly clueless about how this code can be rearticulated to account for the perverse logic of conservatism, and defeat it on its own terms without becoming corrupted by it.

As Buffy said, in "Showtime" [Season 7, Episode 11], "Here endeth the lesson."