by Mathias Frisch

ABSTRACT. The Trump administration is in the process of undoing what were the two central planks of President Obama’s climate policy: First, Trump has called for a review of how the social cost of carbon is calculated in used in analyses of regulatory rule making and, second, Trump has announced that the United States is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement. In this paper I examine some of the conservative critics’ objections to the first plank: calculations of the social cost of carbon in climate cost benefit analyses. I argue that while some of these criticisms are justified, the criticisms end up strengthening arguments for the importance of the second plank: the urgent need for an ambitious climate policy, in accord with the Paris Agreement, as precaution against exposing others to the risk of catastrophic harms.

1. INTRODUCTION

As the record-breaking heat of 2016 continues into 2017, making it likely that 2017 will be the second hottest year on record just behind the El Niño year 2016, and as Arctic heat waves pushing the sea ice extent to record lows are mirrored by large scale sheets of meltwater and even rain in Antarctica—the Trump administration is taking dramatic steps to undo the Obama administration’s climate legacy.

In its final years, the Obama administration pursued two principal strategies toward climate policy. First, by signing the Paris Accord it committed the U.S. to contribute to global efforts to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels” (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 2017, Article 2a). The Paris agreement in effect commits its signatories to reduce carbon emissions to levels close to zero by mid century. The Environmental Protection Agency’s ‘Clean Power Plan’ was intended as the U.S. government’s initial effort to work towards this ambitious goal.

Second, the Obama administration attempted to put a price on carbon emissions by charging an Interagency Working Group (IWG) to calculate the social cost of carbon (which is the cost associated with emitting an additional ton of carbon dioxide, or its equivalent, into the atmosphere). The IWG’s results were used in cost–benefit analyses of regulatory actions (Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Carbon 2010).

The two strategies presuppose two starkly different conceptual frameworks for arriving at a climate policy. The Paris temperature goals are motivated by broadly precautionary thinking. Temperature increases of 2°C or more would take us outside of the temperature band that we humans have experienced in our 200,000-year history (Jaeger and Jaeger 2011). Moreover, there is evidence that many climate tipping points are located at around 2°C above pre-industrial levels or slightly above 2°C (Schellnhuber, Rahmstorf, and Winkelmann 2016) (Knutti et al. 2016). Thus, limiting the temperature increase to well below 2°C promises significantly to reduce the risk of catastrophic climate change. By contrast, the IWG’s calculations are situated within the framework of expected utility theory. The cost of carbon is calculated by running so-called optimization Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) that balance the costs of mitigation measures against their future benefits to determine the optimal climate policy.

The Trump administration is dismantling both strategies. In an executive order signed March 28, 2017, Trump ordered a review of the Clean Power Plan, with the aim to “suspend, revise, or rescind” the Plan (Sec. 4a). He also called for a review of the social cost of carbon and ordered that the IWG be disbanded and all documents issued by the IWG pertaining to the calculations of the social cost of carbon “be withdrawn as no longer representative of governmental policy” (Sec. 5). And on June 1, 2017 Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement, claiming that “the Paris Accord is very unfair at the highest level to the United States.” (Trump, 2017)

With his executive order, Trump is following the advice of Thomas Pyle, head of the Department of Energy transition team, who has advocated that the use of the social cost of carbon in federal rulemaking be ended: “The Obama administration aggressively used the social cost of carbon (SCC) to help justify their regulations. During the Trump administration the SCC will likely be reviewed and the latest science brought to bear. If the SCC were subjected to the latest science, it would certainly be much lower than what the Obama administration has been using.”[1] Pyle here echoes criticisms made by Robert Murphy, a senior economist at the Institute for Energy Research (EIR), who in written testimony before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has argued “that the ‘social cost of carbon’ is not an objective empirical feature of the world, but is rather a very malleable figure dependent on modeling assumptions, and can be made large, small, or even negative depending on parameter choices” (Murphy 2013). The basic criticisms Murphy and others make of the IWG’s use of integrated assessment models to calculate a social cost of carbon are, first, that scientific uncertainties are too large to permit any reliable estimate of the SCC and, second, that some of the assumptions going into the construction of IAMs are normative assumptions and, hence, that any model output cannot serve as an objective basis for climate policy decisions (see also Johnston 2016).

Michael Greenstone and Cass Sunstein, two of the architects of the Interagency Working Group, have defended the use of the SCC in regulatory analysis in The New York Times. Citing the central estimate of the IWG of $35 per ton of carbon dioxide they maintain that “this figure plays a central role in the cost–benefit analyses that agencies use in deciding whether to issue regulations to limit greenhouse gas emissions” and that “without it, such regulations would have no quantifiable benefits. For this reason, the social cost of carbon can be seen as the linchpin of national climate policy” (Greenstone and Sunstein 2016). Others share the view of the importance of the SCC. Thus, the climate journalist Andrew Revkin wrote that “there’s probably no more consequential and contentious a target for the incoming administration [as far as climate and energy policies are concerned] than an arcane metric called the ‘social cost of carbon’” (Revkin 2017).

I want to argue here that the conservative criticisms are to some extent correct: models contain deep uncertainties and they rely on normative assumptions. Yet the conclusions the critics want to draw do not follow and their criticisms do not justify Trump’s decision also to undo the Obama administration’s initial steps to satisfy U.S. commitments under the Paris agreement. The models used by the IWG downplay uncertainties by making unjustifiably optimistic assumptions about the values of certain key parameters. Instead of trying to correct for this error by broadening the class of assumptions under investigation, the conservative critics reinforce the error further by cherry-picking predictions that lie at the optimistic end of the spectrum found in the peer-reviewed literature.

In addition, some of the normatively loaded assumptions have the consequence that potential harms to the populations most vulnerable to (and least responsible for) climate change are effectively ignored. Thus, a proper accounting of the uncertainties in our knowledge of how climate and economic systems interact and of the moral challenges of climate change puts us exactly in the epistemic and moral situation to which the Paris temperature targets are a response: in a situation in which we face scientifically plausible catastrophic harms; a precautionary approach is warranted, as embodied in the 2°C or 1.5°C targets. What is more, when many of these potential harms fall in the first instance upon the poorest populations and will do so as a result of our own activities, we have a moral duty to cease these activities and adopt policies that protect the most vulnerable populations from catastrophic harms.

Those associated with the Trump administration and with Republicans in Congress have offered a wide variety of criticisms of climate science and of the Obama administration’s climate policies. Trump himself has famously called climate change a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.[2] William Happer, an atomic physicist who at one point seems to have been under consideration for the position of Trump’s science advisor, points to the fact that during the last 520 million years there have been periods when atmospheric CO₂ concentrations were much higher than at present, as reason for why the current increase in emissions presents no cause for concern (“Trump’s Potential Science Adviser Will Happer: Carbon Dioxide Demonized Just Like ‘Poor Jews Under Hitler’” 2017). As dangerous and as false as these views may be—Trump’s claim is flat out wrong and Happer’s claim while true is solace only for those who do not care about coastal cities or for a planet inhabited by the species with which we have coevolved in the last 100 million years—these views are not very interesting philosophically. Thus, I will here focus on what is arguably a more interesting criticism of at least one plank of the Obama administration’s approach to climate policy: criticisms of the cost–benefit approach pursued by the Office of Management and Budget under Obama.

While some of the conservative criticisms of this approach are not without merit, the right conclusion to draw from the deep uncertainties that plague the IWG’s calculations and from the ethical context of the climate problem is that we need to act even more aggressively on climate change than the Obama administration was prepared to do.

 

2. THE SOCIAL COST OF CARBON

According to expected utility theory, we should adopt the climate policy that maximizes expected utility. Calculating the expected utility associated with a climate policy requires as inputs, first, the costs and benefits of different policy choices, including the economic costs of mitigation measures as well as future benefits of reductions in temperature increases, and, second, a probability distribution over costs and benefits. In practice, the maximization calculation is performed with the help of so-called ‘optimization integrated assessment models’ (IAMs). These models couple an economic general equilibrium model to an extremely simplified climate model with the aim of representing the impacts of climate change on human welfare, the impact of changes in economic activity on GHG emissions, and the effect of mitigation measures on economic growth. The IWG considered three widely discussed IAMs in its calculation of the social cost of carbon: William Nordhaus’s DICE model (Nordhaus 2008), which is one of the earliest optimization IAMs and remains one of the most influential models; the PAGE model used in the Stern Review (Stern 2007); and Richard Tol’s FUND model (Tol 2002a; Tol 2002b).

The two core components of optimization IAMs—the climate model and the economy model—are coupled through two different channels: economic activity is assumed to affect climate change through the emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs); and economic activity is modeled as being affected by climate change through a so-called ‘damage function.’ Optimization IAMs are used to determine what the optimal emission abatement strategy would be by maximizing the present value of overall utility, which consists in an aggregate of utilities across time. Any such cross-temporal aggregation faces the problem as to what relative weight to assign to utilities at different times. It is common practice to discount future utilities with respect to the present. The IWG calculated values for the SCC for three different discount rates, 2.5%, 3%, and 5%. The results, reported on the EPA website, are $56, $36, and $11.[3]

In what follows I want to briefly discuss three areas in which uncertainties arise: an IAM climate model, the discount rate chosen in the economy model, and the damage function that models climate impacts.[4]

2.1. Climate Sensitivity

The climate model of an IAM consists of a small number of equations with parameters, whose values need to be calibrated with the help of more complex climate models. One central parameter is the so-called ‘equilibrium climate sensitivity’ ECS, which is defined as the equilibrium mean surface temperature response to a doubling in atmospheric CO₂. The IPCC report (AR5) reports probability density functions for the value of ECS derived from complex climate models or paleo-climate data (Bindoff et al. 2013, Figure 10.20a). Now the first thing to note is that the basic physical mechanism by which an increase in atmospheric CO₂ concentrations affects the Earth’s energy balance is extremely well understood and that climate scientists know a lot about the value of the climate sensitivity. According to the (AR5) “there is high confidence that ECS is extremely unlikely less than 1°C and medium confidence that the ECS is likely between 1.5°C and 4.5°C and very unlikely greater than 6°C.” (Bindoff et al. 2013, 10.8.2) Thus, we know a range of values within which the climate sensitivity is very likely to fall. The second thing to note is that the climate sensitivity is much better constrained on the lower end—it is, with high confidence, extremely unlikely to be less than 1°C, but that it is only very likely less than 6°C and this statement is made with only medium confidence.[5] The third thing to note is that even though we know a lot about the value of the climate sensitivity, what we know is not enough to perform a cost–benefit analysis or welfare maximization analysis. In order to calculate the optimal emissions policy we would need to know the probabilities with which different consequences would occur. But in order to derive a single probability distribution for ECS we would have to know what the probabilistic dependencies between the different models are from which the IPCC distributions for ECS are derived. And these dependencies are unknown. Thus, despite the fact that we know quite a bit about the value of ECS, we are in a situation of deep uncertainty with respect to its value—that is, not only is the exact value of ECS unknown but we do not even have grounds for associating a specific probability distribution with ECS.

IAMs ‘solve’ this problem by simply positing a probability distribution that is peaked at the center of the IPCC range, but no formal justification for this procedure is given. Moreover, the probability distributions posited by different IAMs are symmetric and do not have fat upper tails and hence ignore the possibility of extreme runaway climate change, which according to some models has a low but non-negligible probability of occurring.[6] Hence, IAMs turn deep uncertainties into precise probabilities and do this in a manner that skews uncertainties towards less serious threats.

There is a fourth point to note. The different probabilities for ECS summarized by the IPCC are derived within the frameworks of various climate models and are not adjusted for any idealizations or factors left out in the models. The IPCC probabilities for ECS are model-based probabilities and not yet decision-relevant probabilities. Sophisticated climate models offer an increasingly fine-grained representation of the climate system and include more and more factors that are believed to be relevant to the overall state of the system. Even so, many potentially important factors are omitted. These include melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets; melting of the permafrost and large-scale release of methane from Siberian methane clathrates; and release of seabed methane. The factors not represented in the models tend to be positive feedback factors that are likely to exacerbate the rate of warming and could even result in ‘tipping point’ behavior. Indeed, Previdi et al. (2013) argue that ECS would be between 4°C and 6°C if the ice sheet and vegetation albedo feedback were included. As Sir Nicholas Stern puts it, quoting Sir Brian Hoskins: climate models predict “the climate we get if we are very lucky” (Stern 2013, 842). Decision-relevant probabilities would have to take into account the probabilities of futures in which we might not be so lucky, but these probabilities are unknown.

2.2. Future Discounting

The second core component of an IAM is an economy model with a welfare function representing overall global welfare at a time. In principle, the concept of welfare equivalent consumption is meant to be broad and include not only consumption but also environmental goods and other goods that are not marketable. Thus, Nordhaus says: “Economic welfare should include everything that is of value to people, even if those things are not included in the market place” (Nordhaus 2008, 13). In practice, however non-marketable goods are simply ignored and IAMs measure welfare equivalent consumption in terms of GDP.

IAMs aggregate welfare across time. The discount rate allows us to calculate the net present value of future welfare. There is widespread disagreement in the literature not only on what choice of discount rate is appropriate but even on what the proper methodology for choosing a discount rate ought to be. What makes matters worse is that predictions derived from IAMs are extremely sensitive to the choice of discount rate, as is evident from the different values for the SCC derived by the IWG.

Here I want to focus on one aspect that highlights both the uncertainties affecting IAMs and the normative import of some of their assumptions. There are at least two normative issues that affect the discount rate.[7] First, the value of the pure rate of social time preference captures to what extent present welfare should be valued more highly just because it occurs in the present. Second, it is common to posit the law of diminishing marginal utility and assume that marginal utility declines. If we adopt a temporally egalitarian position (as many philosophers and economists argue we should) and set the pure rate of social time preference equal to zero, the discount rate becomes a measure of inequality aversion.

Standard IAMs posit a representative consumer at each time and consider the wealth transferred between representative consumers at different times. If we take the rate of pure time difference to be zero and assume positive worldwide economic growth, then we are justified to discount future welfare just in case the future will be richer than the present. But as Fleurbaey and Zuber( 2012) show, this assumption changes dramatically if we adopt a slightly more complex model and allow for different populations at each time with different levels of wealth. If in modeling the transfer of wealth we distinguish between the transfer between different populations at different times the overall inter-temporal discount rate will in the long run be mathematically dominated by the discount rate governing the transfer from the worst-off population in the present to the worst-off population in the future.

The effect of this is that discount rates may very well be negative. If the costs of a climate policy are carried by the high emitters of greenhouse gases, who also tend to be among the most affluent, and the beneficiaries include many of the future poor, then such a policy will have a negative discount rate. What is more, if we make the not implausible assumption that there will be climate change losers among the poorest populations, wealth transfer from the present poor to the future poor will be transfer from a comparatively richer population to even poorer populations in the future. Thus, even a climate policy that asks the present-day poor to contribute to mitigation costs could have a negative discount rate.

The overall discount rate reflects normative assumptions and has a large effect on the value of the SCC. Does this show that the Institute for Energy Research (IER) economist Murphy is correct when he says that the overall SCC is “a very malleable figure dependent on subjective modeling assumptions” (Murphy 2013)? This does not follow. First, for many scientific predictions it will be the case that they are “very malleable figure[s] dependent on modeling assumptions,” as Murphy says. Quite generally, scientific predictions are derived by constructing a model of a phenomenon. That predictions are sensitive to modeling assumptions, which invariably will include idealizations and abstractions, is to be expected. The crucial question is how well supported the modeling assumptions are.

I have argued above that any choice of probability distribution for ECS cannot be fully supported by predictions from climate models and our physical understanding of the climate system and is to some extent unprincipled. But not every modeling assumption that is not underwritten by the relevant science is subjective in the sense of being arbitrary. There may be principled and legitimate reasons supporting an assumption even when it is not justified empirically. Normative assumptions are a case in point. While normative assumptions might not be objective in the same way as physical assumptions are they might be intersubjective and reflect widely shared commitments. Thus, just as we can hope that our choice of climate parameters represents the climate system adequately (for a given purpose), so we can hope that normative parameters adequately represent either our actual intersubjectively held ethical values or the values we ought to have (given our other shared ethical commitments). Moreover, just as uncertainties concerning the value of ECS do not imply that there exist no scientific facts about how the climate system responds to anthropogenic changes in atmospheric GHG concentrations, uncertainties in the value of the discount rate do not imply that there are no normative facts about how inequalities among and between different generations should affect climate policy.

The problem with the IWG’s calculation of the social cost of carbon is not, as Murphy charges, that it is based on moral or ethical assumptions. The climate problem is a moral problem just as much as it is a scientific problem, and any adequate discussion of climate policy has to engage with the moral challenges raised by climate change. Rather among the problems are the following:

First, existing deep uncertainties concerning both normative and scientific assumptions—that Murphy correctly highlights—undermine our ability to apply expected utility theory to the climate problem in a principled manner. Second, as Fleurbaey and Zuber’s argument shows, by considering only discount rates greater than or equal to 2.5%, the IWG’s calculations ignore climate risks for the future poor. And, third, the choice of the expected utility framework restricts the type of ethical considerations that can be brought to bear on our policy choice. Not only do our choices for some of the models’ parameters have normative implications but also the choice of modeling framework itself is not ethically neutral.

By modeling each generation in terms of a single representative consumer IAMs ignore inequalities among each generation with significant consequences for the choice of discount rate. But the problem runs deeper than that and points to the limitations of treating climate change within the framework of expected utility theory in that the utilitarian framework within which the IGW’s calculations are performed is blind to considerations of justice and harm, which arguably are at the core of the moral problem posed by climate change.

There are strong intuitions, I take it that Fleurbaey and Zuber’s result gets at something important: a model allowing for different contemporaneous populations with an overall discount rate that is dominated by that between the worst-off at different times seems to get something right. I want to submit that this intuition has less to do with the fact that the model takes inequality aversion more comprehensively into account than models with a single representative consumer do. Rather, the intuitive appeal of the result lies in the fact that it is sensitive to the needs of those who both are the most threatened by climate change and are the least responsible for climate change. Fleurbaey and Zuber themselves hint at this when they support their analysis by saying that “mitigation efforts, when they are well conceived, should put the burden on the high emitters who are typically among the affluent members of the present generation” (Fleurbaey and Zuber 2012, 15). But that well-conceived mitigation measures should put the burden on high emitters is not an obvious consequence of a cost–benefit analysis, which at best can favor a redistribution of welfare from the rich to the poor. Instead, that high emitters should carry the main costs of a climate policy is suggested by principles of fairness or justice (Shue 2014a). We, as high emitters, are harming future generations, and in particular the future poor in less developed countries, by threatening to deprive them of an environment in which they can support themselves and thrive. A cost–benefit analysis is blind to this fact.

2.3. The Damage Function

IAMs couple a climate model to a welfare function in two ways: first, consumption is taken to affect GHG emissions and, second, climate change is taken to affect consumption through a damage function. Nordhaus’s DICE model assumes that the effects of climate change on the economy can be represented in terms of a single temperature-dependent quadratic function—a choice that has become particularly influential in IAM modeling. The PAGE and FUND models contain more complex treatments of damages, aggregating several sector- and region-specific damages. Climate damages are significantly more uncertain than the climate system’s response to GHG emissions. While IAM modelers point to climate impact studies in support of their treatment of damages, the empirical constraints are much weaker than in the case of climate models.

Moreover, damage estimates on which the IWG draws appear extremely optimistic. For a difficult-to-fathom 8°C increase in global temperatures, the DICE and PAGE models predict ‘only’ damages of roughly 15% global GDP—a loss that would correspond to taking the 2016 U.S. GDP back to its 2004 level—while the FUND model predicts even smaller damages of roughly 6% GDP.[8] Indeed, a recent study (Burke, Hsiang, and Miguel 2015) reaches dramatically different conclusions about climate damages: Burke et al. consider economic data from 166 countries in the years 1960–2010 to determine how changes in economic activity are coupled to annual fluctuations in temperature. They project that under business as usual, damages in 2100 will be an entire order of magnitude higher than those predicted by standard IAMs even when ignoring sea-level rise. Moreover, damages are extremely unequally distributed and will lead to an extreme widening of global income inequalities. While damages in North America or Central Europe may be small enough to allow overall economic growth, Sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia are projected to see a catastrophic 75% decrease in GDP per capita. Thus, as in the case of the discount rate, we find that standard IAMs do not adequately represent the uncertainties associated with climate change and underestimate the threats to the poorest and most vulnerable populations.

 

3. UNCERTAINTY AND PRECAUTION

Our brief survey of some of the core features of IAMs used by the IWG to calculate the social cost of carbon suggests that some of the conservatives’ criticisms of the IWG’s approach are warranted. In particular, the IWG posits precise values for some parameters and probability distributions for the values of other parameters even though the values of the parameters in question are deeply uncertain and we do not know what appropriate probability distributions associated with their values would be. Thus, the critics are right in contending that the IWG’s estimates depend on scientifically not sufficiently constrained modeling assumptions and that the IWG treats climate change as a problem of risk with known probabilities rather than as a problem of deep uncertainties. We have also seen that at least some of the modeling choices in IAMs reflect normative assumptions.

One might argue that the IWG is aware of the uncertainties and responds to it by not just calculating a single value for the SCC, but by proposing three different values. In fact, one response to the problem of deep uncertainties might be to run IAMs under a whole range of different assumptions exploring the space of scientifically (and normatively) plausible values for its key parameters and thereby derive a range of value for the SCC. But, first, this is not really what the IWG is doing, since the only quantity varied in their three estimates is the discount rate, and the IWG dramatically underestimates the range of plausible values of this quantity. On the one hand, one of Murphy’s complaints is that the IWG does not also calculate a SCC for a discount rate of 7%, even thought the U.S. Office of Management and Budget instructs that a 7% rate should be used for regulatory analysis in addition to a 3% rate. On the other hand, as we have seen, there are compelling arguments for using a negative discount rate.

Second, IAMs were intended to enable us to calculate the optimal climate policy. If we were to use IAMs merely to explore the space of plausible values for the SCC, we still need an additional decision strategy that tells us what climate policy to adopt given a range of plausible values for the SCC.

We can glean two different decision strategies that policy advisors associated with the Trump administration appear to endorse. The first strategy, which has more or less explicitly been advocated by Trump’s Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, is that in situations of deep uncertainty we should ignore any uncertain costs (or benefits) associated with our policy decisions. Thus Tillerson has said: “It is a judgment of balance between future climatic events which could be catastrophic but are unknown, by the IPCC’s own acknowledgement, and more immediate needs of humanity today to address poverty, starvation, broad-based disease control, and the quality of life that billions of people are living in today, which is unacceptable to many of us.”[9]

The current poor, Tillerson claims, are energy-poor. They rely on energy—and, hence presently still on carbon emissions—not only to escape poverty but as a means of survival. On this point Tillerson will find broad agreement. But while some would argue that the energy needs of the current poor are a constraint on climate policy just as much as the threats associated with unabated emissions are (see, e.g., Shue 2014b), Tillerson suggests that, because of the deep uncertainties in climate predictions we ought to focus exclusively on the needs of the present poor (and on the value associated with maintaining our “quality of life”!). The deep uncertainties associated with precise predictions of climate impacts are sufficient to trump any concern about climate damages, no matter how catastrophic they might be.

Now, one might think that it is obviously a mistake to ignore threats simply because they are associated with deep uncertainties. Yet there is an argument that suggests that not ignoring deeply uncertain threats can result in paralysis. Take a situation in which uncertain threats suggest a certain policy response, perhaps based on precautionary considerations. In many such cases we can imagine highly speculative chains of events, according to which the proposed policy would itself result in catastrophic consequences. And while the chain of events we are imagining might be utterly implausible, the more outlandish the scenario we are imagining is, the less likely it might be that we can give a precise, albeit small probability for the scenario’s occurrence. Now, if we could associate probabilities with various catastrophic outcomes, expected utility theory would tell us how serious we ought to take these outcomes. The worry is that under conditions of deep uncertainty—that is, without being in possession of probability distributions—we have to treat all catastrophic threats on a par. But then we may frequently find ourselves in situations of paralysis in which a decision strategy will counsel both for and against a given policy. In effect, Tillerson’s strategy responds to the problem of paralysis by proposing that deeply uncertain threats ought to be ignored in decision making.

But do we really need to consider all uncertain threats? Just as considering uncertain purely speculative threats may lead to paralysis, ignoring threats just because we cannot associate precise probabilities with them may strike us as reckless. A more promising reply to the argument is the following. Allowing that some uncertainties cannot be represented in terms of precise probabilities does not imply that all deeply uncertain outcomes have to be treated equally. It may be possible to introduce yet more fine-grained non-probabilistic distinctions, but at the very least we should distinguish between threats that have at least some minimal plausibility and arise as the result of reasonably well-understood mechanisms and threats that are outlandish and purely speculative. We have to consider only the latter in decision problems. That is, threats only have to be taken into account if they do not violate what Henry Shue has called an “anti-paranoia requirement” (Shue 2010, 49).

Climate threats clearly satisfy Shue’s requirement. Recall our discussion of the climate sensitivity above. The basic physical mechanisms behind anthropogenic climate change are well understood. Even though no precise probability distribution for ECS can be given, we know that it is likely to be between 1.5°C and 4.5°C (at least under climate models’ idealizing assumptions). And while the science of climate damages is much less settled than basic climate science is and, hence, for example Burke et al.’s estimate of the damage function is a lot more uncertain than estimates of ECS, their study is based on a wealth of historical data and suggests a robust relationship between temperature changes and economic activity.

Tillerson’s strategy is to completely ignore threats in situations characterized by deep uncertainty. A second decision strategy is implicit in the claims by Murphy and by Trump’s advisor Perry that the SCC ought to be close to zero. Murphy and Perry’s strategy amounts to cherry-picking data and modeling assumptions in the face of uncertain predictions. As Murphy and others correctly point out, there does exist a selective body of evidence that jointly appears to support the view that climate change poses no serious threat. Thus, there are some studies that arrive at a value for the climate sensitivity at the lower end of the IPCC range (e.g., Otto et al. 2013) the FUND model posits that the effects of climate change will be positive up to a temperature increase of 2.5°C and, some argue, still overestimates damages (see Johnston 2016) and the OMB instructs that a discount rate of 7% be one of the values used in regulatory analysis. Combining these assumptions may indeed result in a value for the SCC that is close to zero or even negative.

Yet Murphy and Perry’s cherry picking of assumptions appears even less justified than Tillerson’s strategy. While some climate models predict a value for the ECS of only 1.5°C, others allow for a value of up to 6°C (see Previdi et al. 2013). While the FUND model predicts that economies will be relatively resilient in the face of rising temperatures, Burke et al. (2015) predict damages an order of magnitude higher than standard IAMs and catastrophic declines in economic activity in many regions of the world. And while the OMB instructs that a discount rate of 7% also be used, taking the threat to poorer populations seriously suggests that we use a negative discount rate.[10] Now, there may be scientific reasons to trust some of these predictions more than others. But if, as Murphy himself argues, our knowledge of the relevant parameters ultimately remains deeply uncertain, proposing to base policy decisions on a combination of the most optimistic assumptions suggests a reckless preference for an extremely risk-seeking decisions strategy.

There is, of course, another approach to decisions under conditions of severe uncertainty that provides an alternative to the strategies advocated by Tillerson and Murphy—an approach that in light of the severity of the threats posed by climate change seems significantly more prudent than its two rivals—and that is a precautionary approach. Henry Shue (Shue 2010) has identified three conditions under which prompt precautionary action is required. These conditions are: (i) we are facing the possibility of massive, catastrophic losses; (ii) the mechanisms by which these losses can occur are well understood and are scientifically plausible, even though we cannot give precise probabilities; and (iii) the costs for preventing these losses are not excessive. The second condition is the anti-paranoia requirement. The third condition, like the second condition, helps to prevent paralysis. If there were uncertain possible costs of preventing a catastrophe that are comparable to possible losses from the catastrophe, then a precautionary approach might recommend for and against taking preventive measures (see also Steel 2014). All three conditions are met in the case of climate change.

Now one might think that the choice between Murphy’s or Tillerson’s decision strategies and a precautionary approach is ultimately a matter of taste. Prudence might suggest a precautionary approach, particularly in light of the stakes involves, but those brave or reckless enough might favor a more risk-seeking strategy. But there is a further feature of the climate problem that implies that a precautionary approach may not only be prudent but is in fact morally required. What is morally odious about Tillerson’s or Murphy’s extreme risk-seeking approach to climate change is that they seek risks not for themselves, but that their strategy exposes future generations, and in particular the future poor, to grave threats. In deciding on a climate policy we are in the main not considering threats of possible harm to ourselves but threats to others—we are considering whether or not to engage in activities that threaten to expose others to grave harms. If future generations, and in particular future populations in less developed countries and in countries more exposed to climate risks, have a right to food, to water, to shelter, and, more generally, to an environment that sustains them and in which they can thrive, then we have a moral duty not to engage in activities that seriously put these rights in jeopardy. Moreover, as Shue has argued, our duty is not mitigated by the fact that the threats at issue are uncertain. As Shue says: “If I play Russian roulette with your head for my amusement as you doze and the hammer of the revolver falls on an empty chamber, I will have done you no physical harm. But I will have seriously wronged you by subjecting you to that unnecessary risk” (Shue 2010, 152). We wrong future generations by exposing them to the risk of serious harms as a consequence of our actions.

A broadly precautionary approach underlies the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement, the signing of which was at the core of the second plank of the Obama administration’s climate policy. As Knutti et al. (2016) and others have argued, there is no purely scientific argument for the 2°C temperature limit. Rather it is an anchoring device that was agreed on based on a combination of scientific arguments, moral arguments, potential costs, and feasibility. Deep uncertainties, some of which I have discussed in this paper, imply that it is a mistake to think of 2°C as a guardrail or as a safe upper limit. Yet, there is evidence that suggests that various climate tipping-points will be reached at or above 2°C. Thus, limiting the increase in global average temperatures to well below 2°C above preindustrial levels promises significantly to reduce the risk of catastrophic climate change, but no precise calculation of expected damages associated with these tipping points has (or can) be given.

 

4. CONCLUSION

I have here argued that some of the conservative criticisms of the Obama administration’s use of cost–benefit analysis to calculate the social cost of carbon are justified. The deep uncertainties characterizing our knowledge of the future climate and of climate damages make the exercise of trying to calculate a single well-supported value for the social cost of carbon impossible. Moreover, the framework of cost–benefit analysis used by the IWG is blind to important moral dimensions of the climate problem. At best, then, the type of calculations performed by the IWG could provide us with a range of possible climate costs associated with our emissions, which might inform but cannot determine a specific choice of climate policy.

I also argued that there are moral reasons to adopt a precautionary approach: unless we want to gamble immorally and recklessly with the lives and the wellbeing of future populations, the uncertainties to which Murphy, Tillerson and others point suggest the need for the U.S. to remain committed to the Paris agreement. Since even the final climate plan proposed by the Obama administration fell far short of the emissions reductions that likely will be needed to remain with the 2°C target (let alone within the 1.5°C target),[11] one might have hoped that those within the Trump administration, who understand both the basic science of climate change and the deep uncertainties concerning precise predictions of future damages, would advocate vocally and vigorously for an even more aggressive climate policy than the Obama administration was prepared to adopt.

 

Mathias Frisch is a professor of philosophy at the Leibniz University in Hannover, Germany. Prior to that he taught at the University of Maryland from 2003 until 2016. His main areas of interest include philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, and the philosophy of climate change.

 

REFERENCES

Bindoff, N. L., P. A. Stott, K. M. AchutaRao, et al. 2013. “Detection and Attribution of Climate Change: From Global to Regional.” In Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Edited by T. F. Stocker, D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S. K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex, and P. M. Midgley. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Burke, Marshall, Solomon M. Hsiang, and Edward Miguel. 2015. “Global Non-Linear Effect of Temperature on Economic Production.” Nature 527 (7577): 235–39.

Fleurbaey, Marc, and Stéphane Zuber. 2012. “Climate Policies Deserve a Negative Discount Rate.” Working Paper halshs-00728193. HAL. http://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/wpaper/halshs-00728193.html.

Frisch, Mathias. 2012. “Climate Change Justice.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 40 (3): 225–53.

———. 2013. “Modeling Climate Policies: A Critical Look at Integrated Assessment Models.” Philosophy and Technology 26 (2): 117–137.

Greenstone, Michael, and Cass R. Sunstein. 2016. “Donald Trump Should Know: This Is What Climate Change Costs Us.” The New York Times, December 15. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/15/opinion/donald-trump-should-know-this-is-what-climate-change-costs-us.html.

Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Carbon. 2010. “Appendix 15A. Social Cost of Carbon for Regulatory Impact Analysis under Executive Order 12866. Final Rule Technical Support Document (TSD): Energy Efficiency Program for Commercial and Industrial Equipment: Small Electric Motors. U.S. Department of Energy. Washington, DC, U.S. Department of Energy.” http://go.usa.gov/3fH.

Jaeger, Carlo C., and Julia Jaeger. 2011. “Three Views of Two Degrees.” Regional Environmental Change 11 (1): 15–26.

Johnston, Jason Scott. 2016. “The Social Cost of Carbon”. Regulation. The Cato Institute. Spring 2016.

Knutti, Reto, Joeri Rogelj, Jan Sedláček, and Erich M. Fischer. 2016. “A Scientific Critique of the Two-Degree Climate Change Target.” Nature Geoscience 9 (1): 13–18.

Mastrandrea, M. D., C. B. Field, T. F. Stocker, et al. 2010. “Guidance Note for Lead Authors of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report on Consistent Treatment of Uncertainties. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”

Masur, Jonathan S., and Eric A. Posner. 2010. “Climate Regulation and the Limits of Cost-Benefit Analysis.” Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1662147.

Murphy, Robert P. 2013. “Written Testimony of Robert P. Murphy, Senior Economist, Institute for Energy Research Before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works on the Matter of ‘The “Social Cost of Carbon”: Some Surprising Facts.’”

Nordhaus, William D. 2008. A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies. Yale University Press.

Otto, Alexander, Friederike E. L. Otto, Olivier Boucher, John Church, Gabi Hegerl, Piers M. Forster, Nathan P. Gillett, et al. 2013. “Energy Budget Constraints on Climate Response.” Nature Geoscience 6 (6): 415–16. doi:10.1038/ngeo1836.

Pindyck, Robert S. 2013. “Climate Change Policy: What Do the Models Tell Us?” Journal of Economic Literature 51 (3): 860–72.

Posner, Eric A., and David Weisbach. 2010. Climate Change Justice. Princeton Univ. Press.

Previdi, M., B. G. Liepert, D. Peteet, J. Hansen, D. J. Beerling, A. J. Broccoli, S. Frolking, et al. 2013. “Climate Sensitivity in the Anthropocene.” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 139 (674): 1121–31.

Revkin, Andrew. 2017. “Will Trump’s Climate Team Accept Any ‘Social Cost of Carbon’?” ProPublica. January 11. https://www.propublica.org/article/will-trumps-climate-team-accept-any-social-cost-of-carbon.

Schellnhuber, Hans Joachim, Stefan Rahmstorf, and Ricarda Winkelmann. 2016. “Why the Right Climate Target Was Agreed in Paris.” Nature Climate Change 6 (7): 649–53.

Shue, Henry. 2010. “Deadly Delays, Saving Opportunities: Creating a More Dangerous World?” In Climate Ethics: Essential Readings, 146–62. Edited by Stephen M. Gardiner, Simon Caney, Dale Jamieson, and Henry Shue. New York: Oxford University Press.

———. 2014a. Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection. New York: Oxford University Press.

———. 2014b. “Human Rights, Climate Change, and the Trillionth Ton.” In Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection. New York: Oxford University Press.

Steel, Daniel. 2014. Philosophy and the Precautionary Principle: Science, Evidence, and Environmental Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stern, Nicholas. 2007. The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review. Cambridge University Press.

———. 2013. “The Structure of Economic Modeling of the Potential Impacts of Climate Change: Grafting Gross Underestimation of Risk onto Already Narrow Science Models.” Journal of Economic Literature 51 (3): 838–59.

Tol, Richard. 2002a. “Estimates of the Damage Costs of Climate Change. Part 1: Benchmark Estimates.” Environmental and Resource Economics 21 (1): 47–73.

———. 2002b. “Estimates of the Damage Costs of Climate Change, Part II. Dynamic Estimates.” Environmental and Resource Economics 21 (2): 135–60.

Trump, Donald. ” Statement by President Trump on the Paris Climate Accord,” https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/06/01/statement-president-trump-paris-climate-accord. Accessed June 7 2017.

“Trump’s Potential Science Adviser Will Happer: Carbon Dioxide Demonized Just Like ‘Poor Jews Under Hitler.’” 2017. DeSmogBlog. Accessed February 28. https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/02/25/trump-potential-science-adviser-will-happer-carbon-dioxide-demonized-jews.

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. 2017. “The Paris Agreement.” Accessed March 28. http://unfccc.int/paris_agreement/items/9485.php.

Weitzman, Martin L. 2012. “GHG Targets as Insurance Against Catastrophic Climate Damages.” Journal of Public Economic Theory 14 (2): 221–44.

 

ENDNOTES

[1] In a memo leaked to the press. See https://cleantechnica.com/2016/12/08/leaked-transition-team-memo-outlines-trumps-catastrophic-energy-agenda/ accessed 17. Feb 2017, 1 pm EST.

[2] On Twitter: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/265895292191248385?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

[3] https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/Downloads/EPAactivities/social-cost-carbon.pdf accessed on 2/25/2017

[4] For additional criticisms of IAMs and their use by the IWG see (Masur and Posner 2010; Frisch 2013; Pindyck 2013).

[5] For an explanation of how the two axes along which the IPCC report expresses confidence, see the IPCC Guidance Note (Mastrandrea, M. D., C. B. Field, T. F. Stocker, O. Edenhofer, K. L. Ebi, D. J. Frame, H. Held, E. Kriegler, K. J. Mach, and P. R. Matschoss, G.-K. Plattner, G. W. Yohe, and F. W. Zwiers 2010)

[6] The consequences of fat-tailed distributions for climate policy are explored in (Weitzman 2012).

[7] For discussions to what the choice of discount rate is a normative or ‘descriptive’ issue, see (Posner and Weisbach 2010), which is critically discussed in (Fleurbaey and Zuber 2012; Frisch 2012).

[8] See (Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Carbon 2010).

[9] https://thinkprogress.org/exxons-ceo-just-won-his-shareholders-rejected-climate-change-proposals-573d12dde5e7#.h7xpxfs4x . Accessed 2/28/2017

[10] Murphy refers to the OMB Circular A-4 of September 17, 2003 (Regulatory Analysis), which states that discount rates of 3% and 7% be used in cost–benefit analysis. Trump’s executive order from March 28, 2017, also refers to this circular, instructing that “agencies shall ensure, to the extent permitted by law, that any such estimates are consistent with the guidance contained” in that circular (Sec. 5c). It is worth pointing out that Circular A-4 has a separate discussion of intergenerational discounting, which explicitly recommends using lower rates (as low as 1%) for benefits and costs across generations reaches the following conclusion: “If your rule will have important intergenerational benefits or costs you might consider a further sensitivity analysis using a lower but positive discount rate in addition to calculating net benefits using discount rates of 3 and 7 percent.”

[11] See the 2016 Emissions Gap report by the United Nations Environmental Program: http://web.unep.org/emissionsgap/

By Anna Gotlib

ABSTRACT. This paper addresses and critiques the anti-refugee rhetoric and policies, as well as their uncritical uptake, which developed around the candidacy of Donald Trump. My intent is to examine some of this election’s cruelest, most violent, and most racist rhetoric, reserved for Syrian (and other) refugees, and to consider some possible responses to such speech in the future. To that end, I problematize the representations and treatment of refugees within the United States from three distinct groups: European Jewish refugees of the Second World War; the Eastern Bloc refugees of the mid- and late twentieth century; and the current Syrian, largely Muslim refugees. I begin by defining the concepts of homelessness and moral luck. Second, I examine the three varying histories of refugee policies in the context of these two notions. Finally, I conclude with a combination of despair and hope: First, I offer a few observations about the role of language in the recent presidential election; second, I propose alternatives to the resulting linguistic and political violence by extending Hilde Lindemann’s notion of “holding” into sociopolitical contexts.

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

I.  Introduction

The American election of 2016 was, in its vitriol, polarization, and outcome, unlike any in recent memory. This paper addresses and critiques the anti-refugee rhetoric and policies, as well as their uncritical uptake, which developed around the candidacy of Donald Trump. My intent is to examine and confront the fact that some of this election cycle’s cruelest, most violent, and most racist rhetoric was reserved for Syrian (and other) refugees, and to consider some possible responses to such speech in the future. This anti-refugee rhetoric, I suggest, both contributed decisively to Donald Trump’s victory and created potentially lasting toxic, nativist narratives about who matters and who does not; about who gets to survive, and whose survival is doubtful at best. And before we simply answer that American (and more generally Global North) refugee policies, and Americans (and more broadly Westerners) themselves, have simply always tended toward isolationism and suspicion of the outsider, I argue that we ought to consider that historically, there were notable exceptions to this rule. I examine the checkered history of refugee-related policies, and contrast and problematize the representations, perceptions, and treatment of refugees within the United States (and in a more limited way, Western Europe) from three distinct groups: European Jewish refugees of the Second World War era fleeing Nazi invasion; the Eastern Bloc refugees of the mid- and late twentieth century fleeing Soviet totalitarianism and anti-Semitism; and the current Syrian, largely Muslim refugees fleeing war, poverty, and other oppressions. And while the paper emphasizes public, political speech, my motivations are also personal: My own experiences as a Soviet refugee, and as a beneficiary of politically motivated American openness to the refugees of my generation, move me to problematize the distinctions between the political narratives that shaped my own flight and those developing presently. This is a paper, then, that insists that we pay closer attention to how and why the powerful nations of the Global North create, shape, and undo the identities—indeed, the lives—of refugees through historically situated public narratives that in turn create policies often determining nothing less than life or death.

By “refugee,” I mean, broadly, people who are directly or indirectly forced to flee their homes with no reasonable prospects of returning in the foreseeable future. In this, I am largely following Michael Walzer, who argued that refugees differ from immigrants in general because of the moral dimension of their claims. Refugees, he writes, “make the most forceful claim for admission. ‘If you don’t take me in,’ they say, ‘I shall be killed, persecuted, brutally oppressed by the rulers of my own country’” (Walzer 2008, 163, quoted in Parekh 2013). These are people whose moral claims “cannot be met by yielding territory or exporting wealth, but only by taking people in” (Walzer 2008, 48, quoted in Parekh 2016). I am also following the definitions established in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which (together with its 1967 amendment) states that refugees are persons outside their country of origin because of a “well-founded fear of persecution” at home, and to whom the host state is obligated to offer asylum. Refugees cannot be sent back to a place where their lives or freedom would be at risk from persecution (UK Refugee Council 2001). Refugees, then, are fundamentally “homeless” people whose legitimate moral claims can be met only by admission to a state—to a new home.

Because so many narratives about refugees touch upon broad notions of home, this is also a paper about homelessness. By that, I mean the kind of estrangement that disempowers and denies the moral worth of those who are not storied as claim-makers against others. I say “storied” because I take the differences in the rhetoric of how the various groups of refugees are defined to be both identity-constituting and born of historical accidents, circumstances, and socio-political climates that have little to do with the actions or agency of the migrants themselves. In other words, how refugees are viewed, how their moral agency is construed, have a lot to do with moral luck: the blaming or praising of agents who possess little or no control over an action or its outcome.

Yet American policymakers and the media held wildly differing attitudes toward three groups of oppressed people: World War II-era European Jewish refugees were regarded as potentially dangerous and “other”; Russian Jewish refugees of the 1970s–1980s were held as courageous and defiant; and the current generations of Syrian and other Muslim refugees, in an era marked by a “war on terror,” are painted as morally suspect and dangerous. This, then, is a paper about the power of moral luck to create and undo personhood, for it is the luck inherent in the vicissitudes of history that can constitute existentially-perilous public narratives about those least empowered to formulate or control them. I claim that by challenging the dangerous certainties of the current Western sociopolitical rhetoric about refugees, we might generate new narratives, and thus new policies, which may move us toward helping vulnerable populations not merely survive, but find some measure of belonging, well-being, and agency.

The paper is composed of three parts. I begin by briefly defining the concepts of homelessness and moral luck. Second, I examine the three varying histories of refugee policies in the context of these two notions. I argue that an existential, as well as a sociopolitical, homelessness that robs refugees not only of a sense of physical and psychological security, but of a sense of themselves as persons, is very much a matter of luck (good or bad). I suggest that because the narratives employed by those empowered to shape the fates of the refugees have shown to be powerful creators of not only public attitudes but of outcome-determinative policies, the historical contingencies that seem to govern these responses ought to be made clear. Finally, I conclude with a combination of despair and hope: First, I offer a few observations about the role of language in the recent American presidential election; second, I propose alternatives to the verbal and political violence designed to exclude by extending Hilde Lindemann’s notion of “holding” into sociopolitical contexts.

II.  Homelessness and Moral Luck

a. Homelessness

I began by noting that refugees are fundamentally homeless. While this might seem like an obvious claim to make, I want to clarify what I specifically mean by homelessness here. For this, I turn to Hannah Arendt.

Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism that citizenship (a kind of a social, political, and emotional home) uniquely grants to human beings the “right to have rights”—that it is a prolegomenon to any other discourses about state membership. Homeless, stateless persons, however, are different: they are not merely home-less in the sense of not having a place to call their own, but in the sense of not having the right to demand it (Arendt 1968). In other words, they have lost the possibility of making a claim on others for an opportunity to regain a home.

This loss of claim-making is crucial: Refugees are not only fleeing violence and persecution, but socioeconomic deprivation, racism, sociopolitical ostracism, and many other barriers to a minimally acceptable existence. Thus, even before they are relegated to the status of non-citizens, they are already one step removed from being fully at home in the land of their origin. Being thus estranged from their home in ways that are independently de-centering and destructive, they are unable to begin again. The rejection by their intended destination is thus not merely social or political—in losing their home without regaining one, they lose their story. And the closing of the door that they hoped would be open also destroys the hope that the story could continue. The self becomes the self-in-exile—physical, emotional, psychological, political, without a reasonable possibility of rebuilding.

Thus, homelessness can be understood as a kind of liminality, a state of permanent non-belonging. One is no longer of a rejecting place of origin, and one is not of any other place, either. What remains is an unending process of transition, where uprootedness is a permanent condition. The homelessness of today’s Syrian refugee, therefore, is twofold: First, there is the loss of one’s home and one’s identity as a rightful citizen—a rightful member—of one’s community of origin. Second, there is the lack of any reasonable ground on which to re-build one’s new identity. Thus, the newly homeless, stateless refugee has lost access to her familiar moral and political spaces in which her agency was once enacted and granted uptake without replacing it even with an ersatz home. In this way, these refugees are liminal not necessarily in

that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion…but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. . . . They are deprived, not of the right to freedom, but of the right to action; not of the right to think whatever they please, but of the right to opinion. (Arendt 1968, 295–296)

This pariah-like status not only places these newest refugees in physical danger, but also does something else: it renders them homeless in that deep Arendtian sense of being deprived of an appeal—of being existentially disowned not just by a particular nation-state, but by the global community itself.

b. Moral Luck

Refugee homelessness does not happen in a moral and political vacuum. Sometimes, one’s mere presence in particular circumstances tragically seals one’s fate. I will now consider what this means for refugees, both lucky and unlucky.

People can be lucky, and their luck can also run out due to factors beyond their control. One person trips over a curb while walking and texting, landing on a small child, while another, engaged in exactly the same activity, happens to lift her foot a quarter of an inch higher, thereby stepping over the curb and avoiding harm. And seemingly counter to a Kantian ethic of an unconditioned will, we judge the former harshly, while letting the latter go without much note. When we are speaking of moral luck, then, we usually mean that a particular set of circumstances, one’s luck, makes a difference in how we perceive, and evaluate, one’s actions—how one is viewed as a person. Thus even though our intuitions might suggest that (good or bad) moral luck ought not make a difference in our judgments of how good, blameworthy, or responsible a person is, the phenomenon of moral luck suggests that it indeed does. Nothing less than a person’s moral standing rides on the presence or absence of such luck (Williams 1982; Nagel 1993).

But moral luck does not occur in an epistemic or social void, and those whose lives are affected by its vagaries are already located in circumstances that make such luck more or less likely. Or, put more simply, moral luck has a lot to do with what agents can, and cannot, control—and not all agents are situated in the same way in regard to levels of control. As Margaret Walker has noted, when we are talking about moral luck, what we really mean is that our “responsibilities” have “outrun [our] control” (Walker 1991, 247). That is, regardless of our actions and intent, we might still nevertheless be held responsible. Claudia Card, in The Unnatural Lottery, noted that all human beings are vulnerable to moral luck, and the role that moral luck plays in the options available to oppressed moral agents might leave them only with bad ones (Card 1996). Lisa Tessman, in part adopting Card’s account, offers another conception of moral luck: “systemic” luck that comes from “circumstances that are systematically arranged and that tend to affect people as members of social groups” (Tessman 2005, 13). In this way, “systemic” luck is distinguished from “natural” or “accidental” luck (Tessman 2005). For my purposes here, I build on Tessman’s distinction within the broader moral luck paradigm between “systemic luck” and that which is non-systemic or accidental.

I call my version of Tessman’s systemic luck refugee systemic luck. This turn to systemic luck as a way to talk about the moral luck of refugees might at first seem odd: After all, if one of my contentions is that refugees are precisely not in control of the unpredictable circumstances that determine their fates, why would I rely on a conception of moral luck that is grounded in an idea of systemic social arrangements that are not at all accidental?

The short answer is that the deepest sense of unpredictability and historical accident of their circumstances is experienced by the refugees as an already-oppressed class of people. From their perspective, the chances of success of escape might very well seem to be more like the vagaries of the weather: some get a storm, and some get fair skies. But there is also the other side of the equation—the systemic one. The fate of the refugees has to do with the actions of those empowered to help or to reject them. That is, my claim is that refugee systemic luck traps refugees in a two-tiered system of oppression: While an unpredictable and uncontrollable bad-luck force acts on an already-oppressed people by making their flight existentially necessary, a more systematically and deliberately enacted luck-making one takes over once they are homeless and stranded between an impossible home and an uncertain future.

This second force is the socio–political and economic circumstances of their intended destination, and how it reacts to its own circumstances. What this means is that on the one hand, no nation to which the refugees flee can be said to systematically arrange and control every policy (for they inevitably inherit the domestic and foreign policies of their predecessors). On the other, these (usually Western, more well-off) nations do have agential control over how they approach the historical circumstances that they have been dealt. And it is in how they respond to the political and moral dilemmas before them that these leaders and government representatives create the systemic luck of those whose lives are bound by their decisions.

Thus, refugee systemic luck can be understood in two steps: First, the refugees are thrown into historical, geopolitical circumstances not of their choosing. Second, they must contend with the actions and the powerful master narratives of those who may, or may not, offer them asylum. A system of luck is thus created: some refugees are storied as undeserving and unwanted, and thus experience refugee homelessness via systemic (bad) luck; others are storied as wanted and deserving, and thus can begin again via refugee systemic (good) luck. I argue in the final section of this paper that other choices and responses to the refugee’s needs are possible. I now turn to a consideration of what this refugee systemic luck looks like in practice.

 

III. “Model” Refugees

Part of my argument about the relationship between moral luck, public narratives, and the fate of refugees is predicated on the claim that some refugees, such as the Soviet Jews of the 1960s–1980s, were model refugees— “model” not only in the sense of being (mostly) well-educated, European, and ready to assimilate, but also in the sense of being wanted by their intended destinations. My point, however, is not to make a blanket statement about particular ethnicities, educational levels, or faiths as being outcome-determinative. Instead, I take the happenstance of one’s historical moment to be at the heart of the presence or absence of one’s moral luck.

What follows is a reminder that a lack of moral luck has worked against a population very similar to the one that was welcomed decades later. Just before (and certainly after) the outbreak of World War II, it became increasingly difficult for (mostly Jewish) refugees fleeing Nazi persecution to leave: the combination of fewer passenger liners crossing the Atlantic Ocean, SS-generated prohibitions, capricious, expensive, and complicated visa requirements, and other barriers stood in the way of European Jewry’s escape westward, and away from the growing Nazi threat (Lind 2017). Moreover, fearing the possibility of Nazi spies and saboteurs who could pose as refugees, the American State Department put great pressure on its diplomatic consuls in Europe to screen potential refugees carefully, and to reaffirm strict admission quotas, especially from southern and eastern Europe. Add to this fear of sabotage ongoing anti-Semitism and the generally isolationist, xenophobic posture of the United States, and a picture emerges of a nation that was neither willing nor ready to receive the tens of thousands desperately attempting to flee a nightmare (US Holocaust Museum 2017).

But this is how refugee systemic luck works. Given the background politico–historical conditions, the public messages of those in power were getting through: In July of 1938, Fortune magazine asked its readers whether European refugees should be allowed to come to the United States. Fewer than 5 percent of Americans surveyed believed that the United States should raise its immigration quotas or encourage political refugees fleeing fascist states in Europe (Tharoor 2015). Two-thirds of the respondents agreed with the proposition that “we should try to keep them out” (Tharoor 2015). Similarly, a 1938 article in the Daily Mail warned of “German Jews Pouring into This Country.” It began with: “The way stateless Jews and Germans are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage” (Tharoor 2015). The people were clearly listening.

But that was another time, with differing domestic and international political priorities, bringing with them different fears, different alliances—and different narratives about who was deserving of rescue and who was just an “ugly” refugee. When, decades later, the descendants of those European Jews again turned toward the West for asylum, a very different narrative shaped their flight. With the Cold War at its apex, images and articles depicting the flight of the persecuted Russian Jewry appeared in the Western press on a regular basis, storying them as defiant of a failed social system, of a failed economy, as well as of political and cultural totalitarianism—and most importantly, of an unrelenting, cruel anti-Semitism. Calls for support of the newly arrived and wanted citizens-to-be were loud and growing throughout the 1970s and 1980s, especially in the United States (Beckerman 2010). This was, of course, not universal, as anti-Semitism and general xenophobia were a part of the general background hum of the Western world. But, importantly, this anti-Semitism and xenophobia were not a part of the official master narratives about Soviet refugees: the stories heard on the radio, seen on television, and printed in most major newspapers set both the tone, and the policies, of collective openness. Officially, these refugees were welcome from the frozen totalitarianism of the Soviet gulag, and American policymakers and the media storied them as the educated, the intellectual, the courageous. And for most of these new refugees, that was enough to begin again.

And here is where the other side of refugee systemic luck—the good kind—began to gain momentum. The conservative political advisor, consultant, and Senator Henry Jackson’s staffer, Richard Perle, noted in an interview that Jackson, as a co-sponsor of the refugee-friendly Jackson-Vanik Amendment, viewed the right to leave and to find a new home as a singularly important and powerful human right: “if people could vote with their feet, governments would have to acknowledge that and governments would have to make for their citizens a life that would keep them there” (PBS 2002).

This public narrative of political—and, crucially, moral—rights of refugees was echoed in 1989, when the U.S. Congress passed the Lautenberg Amendment, classifying Soviet Jews and certain other religious communities as persecuted groups, qualifying them for refugee status, and thereby opening the doors over the next decade or so to increasing number of Russian–Jewish refugees, bringing as many as 25,000 individuals a year to New York alone—with some measure of public approval (Rosenberg 2015). When in the 1970s and 1980s the news broadcasts in the West began to be filled with stories about Soviet “refuseniks,” the very public messages about the oppression of religious beliefs, as well as of the threat to Western-oriented intelligentsia, predominated as a narrative of the West’s moral responsibility to offer safe harbor (Beckerman 2010). Indeed,

“[s]ince the mid-1970s, a number of programs were adopted by Congress to encourage the smooth adjustment of refugees from . . . the former Soviet Union. The most important of these was the Refugee Act of 1980 [reauthorized in 1991]. This legislation was intended to provide transitional assistance to refugees in the United States, and assist them with, among other things, job training and placement, as well as English language training and cash assistance” (Bruno 2011).

Thus, American policymakers found it politically advantageous to challenge the Soviet Union both culturally and geopolitically by targeting their most public political critiques and actions at what they viewed as the soft, vulnerable underbelly of the Soviet machine—its human rights record, and in particular, its longstanding record of anti-Semitism and the persecution of both religious and intellectual communities. In this way, by encouraging Soviet refugees, they were able to accomplish two simultaneous goals: to (less publicly) maneuver their central Cold War foe politically and economically, while (quite publicly) doing so under the umbrella of human rights pressure, mobilizing national (and world-wide) sympathies for the beleaguered Soviet Jewry, which could now be rescued by the United States and its allies. This acceptance of refugees from the Eastern Bloc would not only demonstrate the failure of communism, but it would do so by painting those seeking to leave it as heroic, and those taking them in as morally righteous (Beckerman 2010).

And it worked. Families such as my own were assisted not only by the federal legislation, but by those who heard and responded to the call for refugee assistance: local groups of assimilated refugees and American citizens organized to help new arrivals, assisting them with finding homes, helping them with the language and cultural norms, and so on. Newspaper columns, editorials, entire books were written about the process of welcoming those fleeing totalitarian oppression in the East. And the American public, always historically suspicious of newcomers, generally made an exception for those who were storied as communism-defying, freedom-seeking, educated—and white—families, seeking only to plant new roots in the quest for the American Dream. No longer crypto-spies, German agents, or “ugly” foreigners, these refugees were publicly, repeatedly storied as objects of sympathy, empathy, and support—of enormous systemic luck. Although not having much personal control over their circumstances, these refugees happened to find themselves in a historical moment when their needs matched those of powerful systems that were themselves neither natural nor accidental. Approvingly narrated by Western socio–political forces, these particular refugees were favored as useful agents of the West’s growing dominance over the East. And it is out of this luck—this tremendous, unearned luck of being a convenient “humanitarian” pawn—that my family, and so many others, found a way to a home out of the homelessness and darkness of political flight. But these favorable narrative winds can also be capricious.

 

IV. New Refugees, New Stories

This pro-refugee narrative is largely absent for the current generation of Syrian refugees. Since the 2011 civil war began, an estimated 11 million desperate Syrians have fled their homes, and about 13.5 million are in need of assistance (Syrian Refugees 2016). As more Syrians are forced to flee war, terror, hunger, and other disasters, wrought in no small part by the lethal combination of religious extremism and wars of economic and geopolitical advantage, the Global North has taken a dramatically different attitude toward their needs. Austria passed tougher asylum laws, allowing itself to declare a state of emergency if refugee numbers “threaten public order” or overwhelm public institutions. The Austrian media reported that the government was planning to build a fence at its border with Italy for protection in the event of rising migrant numbers (BBC 2016). And though the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, David Cameron, argued for a “moral responsibility” to welcome Syrian refugees, he quickly announced that the U.K could accept only 20,000 over a five-year period (Wintour 2015). Cameron’s flagging support of the refugees was, however, not sufficiently meager for the anti-immigration U.K. Independence Party, whose leader, Nigel Farage, unleashed a lengthy public campaign of openly racist speeches, written commentary, and ads designed to frighten the British public and turn them against the “hordes” of Muslims about to land on their shores.

The infamous Brexit vote that followed was spurred largely by anti-immigrant and anti-refugee narratives. In fact, an overwhelming number of Britons who voted for Brexit did so in response to the anti-refugee messaging prevalent in the media, the political sphere, and elsewhere (Forster 2016). Not surprisingly, incidents of violence against immigrants and refugees have risen significantly following the Brexit vote (Forster 2016). Even in Germany, which opened its borders to more than a million refugees, mostly from Syria and Iraq, relying on its Wilkommenskultur (welcoming culture) for national support, the welcome has been noticeably eroding as support for extreme right-wing anti-immigration groups such as Pegida and the Eurosceptic Alternative für Deutschland party has increased, with violent nationalist-led confrontations on the rise (McCarthy 2015). In fact, 2016 saw the German parliament pass laws forcing Syrian refugees who are not “personally persecuted” to wait two years to even begin their application process to bring their families to Europe. The phrase “national suicide” has been repeated by large numbers of influential European nationalists when discussing the crisis (Brown 2015).

But perhaps nowhere has bad systemic luck been put into practice as successfully, with the official endorsement of a general election, as in the United States. From casual anti-refugee sentiment, to the gubernatorial resistance to allowing the crossing of state boundaries, to the unabashed racism and xenophobia of Donald Trump, many narratives painted this new generation of refugees as a feared and unwanted “other.” And despite calls for tolerance and compassion, much louder, shriller voices told frightening tales of the “Islamization of America”; about thousands of terrorists “sneaking through” the immigration process; about the establishment of “Sharia Law” and the disappearance of jobs and opportunities for “real Americans,” and so on (Steinback 2011).

For example, American Thinker declared that the United States was “Expediting National Suicide with ‘Refugees’” (SPLC 2015). When the Obama administration announced plans to resettle an additional 10,000 Syrian refugees within the next fiscal year, the organizing Islamophobic movements reacted angrily:

Pamela Geller, head of the anti-Muslim hate group American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), called the announcement a Trojan horse, writing on her website, “The Islamic State threatened to send half a million Muslim migrants to Europe as a “weapon” against the West. Obama is bringing them here.” (SPLC 2015)­

Ann Corcoran, founder of the anti-refugee and anti-Muslim website “Refugee Resettlement Watch” has similarly called the Obama administration’s policies a part of the “human rights industrial complex” and claimed that the “mostly Muslim” refugees are “many more than most Americans want to take care of” (SPLC 2015). Meanwhile, “Numbers USA,” the largest grassroots anti-immigrant and anti-refugee group in the country, called for a ban on Syrian refugee relocation to the U.S., insisting that “the risk is simply too great” (SPLC 2015). Compare this to the American press in November of 1976, when The Washington Post focused the public’s attention on Soviet human rights abuses and argued for the necessity of helping those trying to flee; the Los Angeles Times ran five such stories; and in 1977, the New York Times ran fifty-eight stories addressing the plight of Soviet dissidents (Beckerman 2010).

This national battle cry against the threat of the other was heard, granted uptake, and reproduced in the smallest of towns: In Twin Falls, Idaho, anti-refugee activists targeted refugee centers and loudly opposed the relocation of refugees, repeating what they have heard: that most refugees entering the U.S. are Islamic extremists. Even before the relocation process was to begin, the House and Senate Judiciary Committees planned hearings on the national security “threat” Syrian refugees pose:

[i]t took about a day and a half for Republican politicians to move from “What happened in Paris was awful!” through “Barack Obama is weak on evildoers!” to “Terrorist foreigners are coming to kill your children!” . . . 26 Republican governors . . . have said publicly that they oppose bringing Syrian refugees to their states, with most saying they’d refuse to accept them. . . . Meanwhile, every major GOP presidential candidate has come out against bringing Syrian refugees here, and Ted Cruz has introduced a bill to bar any Syrian refugees from settling in the United States. (Waldman 2015)

These narratives—these voices—had their effect. The current generations of refugees face the barriers of an historical American moment particularly drenched in xenophobic, anti-Muslim sentiment, reified into policy that paints the least powerful as the vilest, the most dangerous, the most unwanted. And even if we grant that the current generations of politicians and other leaders perpetuating these master narratives cannot help but respond to what they take to be the dominant national zeitgeist, we can still wonder at the seeming readiness with which they give into the worst impulses and sentiments of their political base. The fact that this racist narrative of the “dangerous refugee” succeeded even though not all prominent persons participated is, first, demonstrative of the need for a more focused, cohesive, and powerful response by those empowered to shape the national anti-racist counternarratives; second, it is demonstrative of the power of strategically wielded public narrative itself. It is an object lesson in how to do very bad things with effectively deployed words.

So, words and contexts matter—that much seems clear. But Trump’s 2016 victory is odd for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the lack of his own conservative bone fides. That is, while the majority of those engaging in racist, oppressive narratives were not only historically well-positioned to do so, but were already of a certain public stature that would lend immediate credence to their political views, Trump was not necessarily included in this “vetted” circle. This raises two questions: First, to what extent is Trump’s victory predicated on narrative prestidigitation? Second, what do we do about this power of public speech—especially when its content and manner hold the fates of those less powerful in the balance? The last section of this paper offers some possible answers.

 

V. Holding as a Political Act

While polls have shown that many Americans echoed vague suspicions of Islam and of refugees more generally, when they heard Donald Trump as Presidential candidate loudly calling for “extreme vetting” of foreigners, they listened (Kahn 2017). And enough of them liked what they heard when Trump declared:

I can look at their [Syrian refugee children’s] faces and say, Look, you can’t come here. . . . Their parents should always stay with them. But we don’t know where their parents come from. We have no documentation whatsoever. . . . There’s absolutely no way of saying where these people come from. (Allen and Sherlock 2016)

But consider that for most of his pre-presidential career, Trump was neither a consistent Republican, nor a “true” conservative. He supported universal health care, additional tax on the super-wealthy—he even claimed to “love” Hillary Clinton (Schwarz 2015)! His run for President as a Republican was in many ways an odd move: questions about whether he was genuinely reflective of the increasingly-right, anti-foreigner Republic Party was a central one of the 2016 electoral season. And so Trump chose to re-create himself in an act of legerdemain that might very well be studied by political scientists for decades to come. In order to rid himself of every left-signaling shibboleth, certain drastic narrative re-alignments had to take place—certain words needed to be uttered, and certain stories spun (Tierney 2016). Knowing where “his people” were in relation to their views on refugees was key—and tapping into the suspicions, the Islamophobia, and the fear required repeated, public calls to reject, to deny, to label, to hate. More than others. Louder than others. Most importantly, more “genuinely” than others. Not only did Trump signal to his voters that he was on their side, but that he has always been there, creating what psychologists call “cognitive consistency” for his supporters (Tierney 2016). Importantly, “[w]hat Trump has discovered was that to win the GOP nomination, it’s not enough to attack the Democrats. He must speak the unspeakable” (Tierney 2016). In this case, the “unspeakable” was nothing short of dehumanization of the Muslim refugee. And in order to assume this position of the master narrator of anti-refugee messages, Trump had to be a convincing mimic: Trying to reflect, and increase, the existing anti-refugee sentiment, he gave official, eventually Presidential, voice to messages of suspicion, otherness, and exclusion.^[1]

Thus, Trump turned his extreme anti-refugee rhetoric into a transgressive discursive act by construing Muslim refugees in a way that othered them as no traditional Republican candidate was able to do. Through his words—from his campaign promises to single Muslims out for “extreme vetting,” to the executive order banning immigrants and refugees from majority-Muslim nations, to his repeated mantras that what is to be feared the most from desperate refugees is “radical Islamic terrorism”—what emerges is a creation of a subclass of people who are simply not deserving of basic human compassion, assistance, or refuge. And through these words, Syrian and other Muslim refugees encounter the worst of refugee systemic luck: more than finding themselves thrown into socio–political circumstances over which they have no control, and more than being storied as dangerous interlopers by those empowered to make policy, they have become victimized by a new kind of demagoguery—the rhetoric of a political outsider who desperately desired to be the ultimate insider. With not much expertise or credibility behind him, Trump relied on his anti-refugee words and posturing to not merely capture the imagination of his intended audiences, but to win them over completely as the genuine article, the only one truly concerned about American safety. And through his narratives, he determined, and continues to determine, refugee fates by publicly destroying their moral and political personhood—their identities themselves.

So what is to be done? Let’s turn once again to narratives and identities. The idea that one’s identity is largely shaped and defined by others is one that is familiar to narrative ethicists, bioethicists, and others (Gotlib 2015; Charon and Montello 2002; Lindemann 2001; Eakin 1999; Frank 1997). Hilde Lindemann (2001) has argued that our personal identity is largely a function of the first-personal stories we tell others about ourselves in combination with the third-personal stories others tell about us, or include us as participants in the stories of others. These stories constitute us as moral agents who are held responsible, who can hold others responsible, and who engage in practices that allow us to become a part of a universe of mutual moral understandings with other such agents (Walker 1997). In other words, through stories, we become precisely the kinds of people that moral theorists take to be central to questions of moral judgment and accountability. And although my intention here is not to offer a defense of narrative as an approach to normativity, I do want to suggest that a narrative approach to identity makes both theoretical and practical sense if what one wishes to do is to examine morality as a real-time practice: theoretical, because of the serious explanatory gaps and epistemic weaknesses of top-down, hierarchical moral theories; practical, because if we are interested in the questions of how we understand and address the oppressions of actual refugees in real-life dilemmas, we must engage with their lived realities (Lindemann 2001). My claim, then, is grounded in the idea that we are natural storytellers, and that this storytelling is a fundamental part of how we create, (mis)understand, and destroy each other. Thus, if we are to challenge the destructive narratives of the anti-refugee movement, it will have to be with other, better narratives.

But we would first need to grant that if identities are narratively constructed, the consequences are not only interpersonal and moral, but political and public. Stories that are shared about one as a political subject are told not just by individuals or groups, but by institutions, organizations, nations. This political self is then situated not only in the universe of normative judgments, but also in the social and political sphere of policy and law. The self is thus located not only within narratives about who she is as a person, a friend, a daughter, or so many other matrices of personal identity, but also within stories of who she is as a citizen, a rights-claimant, a participant in political and socio-economic institutions.

One’s political identity, one’s political self, can be said to delineate which political roles one can, and cannot, occupy; to what kinds of treatments one might be subjected; whether one’s narratives about what one deserves receive social uptake; whether one can choose one’s communities of belonging. And these narrative practices are deeply political not only because they create identities—citizens, non-citizens, refugees, illegal aliens, the wanted, the unwanted—but because they reify them with policies that can be nothing short of weaponized instruments of identity-assassination, where the only intelligible narrative about a disfavored group is that of “other.” And what is not said also matters: when Donald Trump fails to refer to refugees as fellow human beings, what remains between the lines of his narrative is heard clearly by the audience—these are not only dangerous hordes, but as persons, they do not matter.

I hope that the direction of this argument is clear: the master narratives that shaped, and are shaping, the experiences and fates of different sets of refugees call for, among other things, narratively-based responses. European Jews were denied rescue. Soviet Jewish refugees saw a door open. Syrian refugees have heard too many of them shut.

I suggest that the beginning of a narrative response starts with the idea of holding. What I mean by “holding” here is largely borrowed from Lindemann’s 2014 book, Holding and Letting Go: The Social Practice of Personal Identities, where she defends a view of the moral universe that is not only shared and relational, but where we are fundamentally dependent on the stories, attitudes, and actions of others for our flourishing (or its lack), for our ideas about who we are, and, importantly for our socio–moral position in that very universe. In fact, she notes that “[t]o have lived . . . as a person is to have taken my proper place in the social world that lets us make selves of each other” (Lindemann 2014, 159). Lindemann’s central insight is that human beings cannot help but create and undo each other as persons, and that this process begins before birth and does not end with death. It is this process that she calls “holding”—the moral practices of narrative recognition of, and response to, who someone is (Lindemann 2014). As holders and the held, we are constituted through webs of stories about what matters to us, about what our central characteristics are (or should be), about our relationships, commitments, experiences, and so on. It is the narrative tissue of these stories that shapes our personal identities not just as particular people, but as kinds of persons— “lesser” persons, or non-persons (Lindemann 2014).

I noted earlier that Trump’s extreme anti-refugee rhetoric is a kind of holding. By this, I mean to suggest that Lindemann’s concept of holding can be empowering and liberating, but also oppressive and dangerous as a political linguistic practice. Indeed, as Lynne Tirrell eloquently argues, this practice can be one of

derogation . . . made up of many kinds of language games, which comprise many kinds of speech acts. These derogatory acts, games, and practices are repressive prima facie but even more, they produce a positive set of licenses and permissions which foster behaviors that both construct the positive identities of all parties to the games, and permit destructive actions which undermine the very logic of the game and practice. (Tirrell 2012, 216–217)

Through these stories—and by “stories” here, I am emphasizing expressly public narratives and speech acts directed at large audiences, designed to influence opinion and subsequent policies—vivid and outcome-determinative pictures are painted of who is wanted, who is unwanted, who is to be welcomed, and who is to be rejected and denied refuge. An aspect of Lindemann’s earlier work (Lindemann 2001) is especially useful here. Her emphasis on the power, and the effects, of master narratives clarifies what holding can do: It not only matters that one is held, but it matters how, by whom, and under what circumstances. Practices of holding by individuals with relatively little sociopolitical power and influence might not be as identity-constituting, or as outcome-determinative for the held—some kinds of holding are simply not equal to others. But the narratives of those who engage with others on a massive scale can matter greatly simply by holding a group as inferior, dangerous, or alien.

A detailed and fully realized analysis of holding as a political counternarrative is beyond the scope of this paper—but I do want to conclude by moving in that direction. If we allow that public narratives about others can hold them in ways that increase their vulnerabilities, then how we hold them certainly ought not be a function of political expediency, party politics, or refugee moral luck. What this might mean in practice is a question complicated by the imbalances of power between the subject and the object, between the holder and the held. But what seems to be a not impossible set of initial moves includes first, paying and bringing attention to the kinds of speech and actions that are indicative of bad holding; second, understanding the significance of the historical and political contexts in which damaging narratives tend to occur, for it is far too tempting to view one’s sociopolitical predicament as special, or as ahistorical; and third, de-weaponizing certain at-risk identities by responding to oppressive, and often existentially-threatening, public speech with public counternarratives of holding well, of holding in ways that contribute to personhood rather than destroy it.

This might include an increased amount of vigilance and responsiveness on all of our parts—to construct and to publicize counterstories about Syrian and other threatened refugees, and to push back on the pervasive narratives of terrorism, danger, and otherness. To call out those political and social leaders whose words can hold the most vulnerable so badly—or not at all—and to challenge their narratives on the grounds of the deep injustices born of bad moral luck. And even if we are somewhat successful, these leaders might be reminded that the refugees they see as threats are fleeing horrors much like generations of refugees before them, and that the question of whether we open our doors ought not be a function of our own expediency or electoral politics.

Lindemann argues that narratives hold us by expressing and signaling who we take others, and ourselves, to be (Lindemann 2014). I have suggested that not only can this signaling be extended into the political realm, but it can, and should, be applied to groups—especially to those who are oppressed, threatened, or otherwise exposed to exploitation, isolation, and othering. To put it simply, we have to learn to do less damage with words, to recognize bad holding, and to take a stand when others do damage—especially the kind of damage that is only possible with public language wielded by powerful people. We have to do so urgently, given the role that moral luck can play in the lives of the vulnerable. Arendt tells us that “[w]e humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human (Arendt 1968, 24–25). And so it is imperative that we deepen and broaden our practices of humanization—of our politics, our words, ourselves. The other way lies the unthinkable.

Anna Gotlib is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College CUNY. Her areas of research and teaching include bioethics/medical ethics, moral psychology, social/political philosophy and the philosophy of law, and feminist philosophy. Her work has appeared in Hypatia, The International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, Humana Mente, and several edited collections. She has two edited volumes on the moral psychology of the emotions coming out with Rowman and Littlefield International in 2017 and 2018, and is currently working on a monograph.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Rebecca Kukla and the entire fantastic staff at KIEJ.  I am also grateful to Hilde Lindemann and Jade Schiff for their invaluable advice and feedback.  Finally, thanks goes to the lively audience at the Night of Philosophy & Ideas (sponsored by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and Brooklyn Public Library), and to my colleagues at the 33rd International Social Philosophy Conference at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.

 

REFERENCES

Allen, Nick, and Ruth Sherlock. 2016. “Donald Trump: ‘I’ll Look Syrian Children in the Face and Say They Can’t Come’.” The Telegraph, February 9. Accessed March 5, 2017. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/donald-trump/12147515/After-tomorrow-Donald-Trump-could-be-unstoppable.html.

Arendt, Hannah. 1968. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt.

BBC. 2016. “Migrant Crisis: Austria Passes Controversial New Asylum Law.” April 27. Accessed February 24, 2017. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36152927

Beckerman, Gal. 2010. When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle To Save Soviet Jewry (Kindle Edition). Mariner Books.

Brown, Carol. 2015. “Expediting National Suicide with ‘Refugees.’” American Thinker, September 9. Accessed December 15, 2016. http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/09/expediting_national_suicide_with_refugees.html.

Bruno, Andorra. 2011. “U.S. Refugee Resettlement Assistance.” Congressional Research Service, January 4. Accessed February 27, 2017. www.crs.gov.

Card Claudia. 1996. The Unnatural Lottery: Character and Moral Luck. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Charon, Rita, and Martha Montello, eds. 2002. Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics. New York: Brunner-Routledge.

Eakin, P. J. 1999. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Forster, Katie. 2016. “Hate Crimes Soared By 41% After Brexit Vote, Official Figures Reveal.” The Independent, October 13. Accessed March 3, 2017. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/brexit-hate-crimes-racism-eu-referendum-vote-attacks-increase-police-figures-official-a7358866.html.

Frank, A. W. 1997. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gotlib, Anna. 2015. “Feminist Ethics and Narrative Ethics.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ISSN 2161-0002, http://www.iep.utm.edu/July 2015.

Kahn, Chris. 2017. “A Third of Americans Think Trump’s Travel Ban Will Make Them Safer.” Reuters, February 1. Accessed March 5, 2017. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-immigration-poll-exclusive-idUSKBN15F2MG.

Lind, Dara. 2017. “How America’s Rejection of Jews Fleeing Nazi Germany Haunts our Refugee Policy Today.” Vox, January 27. Accessed March 5, 2017. http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/27/14412082/refugees-history-holocaust.

Lindemann, Hilde. 2001. Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair. New York: Cornell University Press.

Lindemann, Hilde. 2014. Holding and Letting Go: The Social Practice of Personal Identities. New York: Oxford University Press.

McCarthy, Barbara. 2015. “Refugee Crisis: Voices from the Streets of Germany.” Al Jazeera, September 17. Accessed February 17, 2017. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/09/refugee-crisis-voices-streets-germany-150917065620167.html.

Nagel, Thomas. 1993. “Moral Luck.” In Moral Luck, edited by Daniel Statman, 57–71. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Nelkin, Dana K. 2013. “Moral Luck.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/moral-luck/.

Nelson, H. L. 2001. Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Parekh, Serena. 2013. “Beyond the Ethics of Admission.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 40 (7): 645–663.

Parekh, Serena. 2016. Refugees and the Ethics of Forced Displacement. New York: Routledge.

PBS. 2002. “Richard Perle: The Making of a Neoconservative.” Accessed December 18, 2016. http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript1017.html Aired 11/14/2002.

Rosenberg, Victor. 2015. “Refugee Status for Soviet Jewish Immigrants to the United States.” Touro Law Review 19 (2): Article 22.

Schwarz, Hunter. 2015. “The Many Ways in Which Donald Trump was Once a Liberal’s Liberal.” Washington Post, July 9. Accessed January 17, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/07/09/ths-many-ways-in-which-donald-trump-was-once-a-liberals-liberal/?utm_term=.dbcf10f2a376.

Southern Poverty Law Center. 2015. “American and European Radical Right Attacks Refugees Fueled Anti-Muslim Sentiment.” October 6. Accessed December 7, 2016. https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015/10/06/american-and-european-radical-right%E2%80%99s-attacks-refugees-fueled-anti-muslim-sentiment.

Steinback, Robert. 2011. “Activists Attacking Muslims and Islam Are Springing up around the Country.” Southern Poverty Law Center, June 17. Accessed December 17, 2016. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2011/anti-muslim-inner-circle.

Syrian Refugees. 2016. Accessed March 4, 2017. http://syrianrefugees.eu/

Tessman, Lisa. 2005. Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles. New York: Oxford University Press.

Tharoor, Ishaan. 2015. “What Americans Thought of Jewish Refugees on the Eve of World War II.” Washington Post, November 17. Accessed January 17, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/11/17/what-americans-thought-of-jewish-refugees-on-the-eve-of-world-war-ii/?utm_term=.080dc6c6fd06.

Tierney, Dominic. 2016. “Trump’s Unspeakable Strategy To Erase His Past.” The Atlantic, February 10. Accessed January 27, 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/02/trumps-unspeakable-strategy-to-erase-his-past/458748/.

Tirrell, Lynne. “Genocidal Language Games.” In Speech and Harm: Controversies Over Free Speech, edited by Ishani Maitra and Mary Kate McGowan, 174–221. Oxford University Press, 2012.

UK Refugee Council. 2001. “The Situation at the Sangatte Camp in France.” September 7. Accessed March 5, 2017. http://www.refugeecouncil.org.uk/latest/news/754_the_situation_at_the_sangatte_camp_in_france).

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 2017. “United States Policy Toward Jewish Refugees, 1941–1952.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. Accessed March 5, 2017. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005143.

Waldman, Paul. 2015. “Republicans’ Anti-Refugee Rhetoric Is Shameful and Despicable — and Probably Good Politics.” The Week, November 18.

Walker, Margaret Urban. 1991. “Moral Luck and the Virtues of Impure Agency.” Metaphilosophy 22: 14–27

Walker, Margaret Urban. 1997. Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics. New York: Routledge.

Wallace, David Foster. 2012. The Pale King. New York: Back Bay Books.

Williams, Bernard. 1982. Moral Luck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wintour, Patrick. 2015. “UK to Take Up to 20,000 Syrian Refugees Over Five Years, David Cameron Confirms.” The Guardian, September 7. Accessed March 2, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/07/uk-will-accept-up-to-20000-syrian-refugees-david-cameron-confirms.

 

ENDNOTES

^[1] Compare Trump’s rhetoric with that of Cold War-era Vice President George Bush, echoing Ronald Reagan’s Berlin Wall demands: “Let’s see not five or six or 10 or 20 refuseniks released at a time, but thousands, tens of thousands. Mr. Gorbachev, let these people go!” (Beckerman 2010, 526).

 

by Shelley Park 

ABSTRACT. This paper advances the somewhat unphilosophical thesis that “Trump is gross” to draw attention to the need to take matters of taste seriously in politics. I begin by exploring the slipperiness of distinctions between aesthetics, epistemology, and ethics, subsequently suggesting that we may need to pivot toward the aesthetic to understand and respond to the historical moment we inhabit. More specifically, I suggest that, in order to understand how Donald Trump was elected President of the United States and in order to stem the damage that preceded this and will ensue from it, we need to understand the power of political taste (and distaste, including disgust) as both a force of resistance and as a force of normalization.

My 5-year-old granddaughter refers to foods, clothes, and people she does not like as “supergross.” It is a verbiage that I have found myself adopting for talking about many things Trumpian, including the man himself. The gaudy, gold-plated everything in Trump Towers; his ill-fitting suits; his poorly executed fake tan and comb-over; his red baseball cap emblazoned with “Make America Great Again;” his creepy way of talking about women (including his own daughters); his racist vitriol about Blacks, Muslims and Mexicans; his blatant over-the-top narcissism; his uncontrolled tantrums; his ridiculous tweets; his outlandish claims; his awkward hand gestures and handshakes; the disquieting ease with which he is seduced by flattery; his embarrassing disregard for facts; his tortured use of language; his rudeness toward other world leaders; the obsequious manner in which other Republicans are treating the man they despised mere months ago; the servility of many Democrats in the face of a military–industrial coup. All of this is gross—indeed, supergross. This is not a sophisticated language; it provides no careful analysis of, or reasons for, my attitude toward the 45th U.S. President, his policies, or the people and objects that surround him. It is, moreover, a language that lacks nuance—that lumps together what are merely aesthetic infractions of good taste with seemingly much more serious failures of epistemic responsibility and ethical character. Is this not a mistake?

I answer this question with a (cautious) “no.” In what follows I adopt the deliberately unrefined language of “gross” (and, for additional emphasis, “supergross”) to draw attention, first, to the slipperiness of our distinctions between aesthetics, epistemology, and ethics and, secondly, to suggest that we may need to pivot toward the aesthetic to understand and respond to the historical moment we inhabit. More specifically, I suggest that, in order to understand how Donald Trump was elected President of the United States and in order to stem the damage that preceded this and ensues from it, we need to understand the power of political taste (and distaste, including disgust) as both a force of resistance and as a force of normalization.

 

BEING GROSSED OUT BY THE CANDIDATES

The American Heritage Dictionary defines gross as follows:

1. a. Exclusive of deductions; total: gross profits
   b. Unmitigated in any way; utter: gross incompetence.
2. So obvious or conspicuous as to cause or heighten offense: gross injustice.
3. a. Brutishly coarse, as in behavior; crude: “It is futile to expect a hungry and squalid population to be anything but violent and gross” (Thomas H. Huxley).
   b. Disgusting or offensive: Don’t you think slugs are gross? He told a gross joke.
4. Overweight; corpulent: “Sally is fat. She is gross. She must weigh twelve stone and more”(Margaret Drabble).
5. a.On a large scale; not fine or detailed: gross anatomical similarities; gross motor skills
   b. Broad; general: the gross necessities of life.

There are several things to note about these definitions. First, the five different meanings of “gross” offered are not altogether distinct. For example, we may find those who are “obvious or conspicuous” (def. 2) to be crude or ill-mannered (def. 3) due to their lack of subtlety (def. 5). Many will find those who are large (def. 5), especially but not exclusively women, to be oversize or overweight (def. 4), a bodily condition that is frequently aligned with hypervisibility (def. 2) and which elicits disgust (def. 3). Secondly, as these examples demonstrate, the typical connotation of the adjective “gross” is negative. While the first and fifth senses of the term “gross” offer potentially neutral meanings, the ways in which these definitions intersect with the others may render even those senses of “gross” less than neutral. For example, impoverished populations, concerned (objectively speaking) with the gross necessities of life, may be viewed by other more privileged segments of a society as having “unrefined” tastes and thus as being crude or even disgusting. Alternatively, workers or consumers may view the corporation whose gross profits are large as grossly unjust; in such circumstances, the gross (total) profits become gross (disgusting) profits symbolized by images of “fat cats” with bulging (gross) waistlines. Third, as these examples and those provided by the dictionary itself make clear, both explicit and implicit biases frequently creep into our characterizations of this or that as “gross.”[1] What is obvious or conspicuous to one person may be difficult to see by another whose tastes have been differently shaped. Contemporary Euro–American beauty standards align female beauty with thinness; in other times and places, Sally’s weight may be considered neither excessive nor gross. The hungry populations considered squalid and violent in Huxley’s Brave New World are, from another perspective, engaged in righteous social justice struggles.

When we are compelled or repelled by something, however, we rarely reflect upon the legitimacy of our affective attitudes. This is especially true, perhaps, of repulsion. When my granddaughter proclaims cat vomit to be “supergross,” she is describing it as something obviously repulsive, something of which I am warned to steer clear; when she uses the same term to describe the broccoli on the dining table, she offers a description of the food as offensive and thus justifies her refusal to put it near her lips. When I go near the vomit (to clean it up) or the broccoli (to eat it), the negative properties of the offending object now adhere to me, as I become “supergross” for engaging with it.[2] In calling something “gross,” we both describe and prescribe an attitude, an orientation, an aversion. We also offer a reason for our aversion: we are disgusted because it is disgusting; we are offended because he is offensive. In short, we are grossed out by something, someone, some event, or some circumstance that is gross.[3] And because it/he/she/they is gross, we should be grossed out.

Our culinary, fashion, sexual, artistic, and political distastes frequently follow the same pattern. Mild distastes may be compatible with accepting alternative tastes. However, the stronger our distaste the more likely we are to both rationalize and moralize our taste. Some vegetarians find the smell and taste of meat repulsive; some non-smokers are grossed out by the smell and taste of cigarettes. Neither wants to kiss (get too close to) someone who ingests the offending object. Some feminists, understanding the burqa as a deeply offensive symbol of patriarchy, wish to ban it from their nations. The evangelical Christian does not merely refrain from engaging in acts of sodomy himself; he is repulsed by the idea of anyone else engaging in such behavior and wishes to have no proximity to it (including the baking of wedding cakes). Congressional legislators who find works of art offensive may react by defunding the arts. The aptly named “divided electorate” during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election followed this pattern also. Voters did not merely “lean” in one direction or the other, “preferring” one candidate to another. Most citizens found one major party candidate so repulsive that they could not vote for that candidate, nor could they understand how anyone else could (“In their own words” 2016). Some found both major party candidates disgusting and “held their nose” while voting for the so-called “lesser of two evils” (much as we learn to hold our breath while cleaning up cat vomit). Others could not stomach voting for either candidate, choosing thus to cast their vote for a third party or failing to vote at all.

While the labels “Crooked Hillary” and “Dangerous Donald” cast aspersions on the ethical temperament of each candidate, these labels “stuck” in part because they provided a seemingly legitimate reason for rejecting a candidate who was already reviled (McGill 2016).[4] Clinton had a much touted “likeability problem” that had little to do with her honesty. Indeed, fact checkers ranked her as the most honest candidate—especially as compared to Trump who was deemed a “pathological liar” (Palmer 2016). If the truth were to be told—as in some social media quarters it was—Hillary was disliked because of the perception that she was an unmitigated power-grabbing bitch with a gross sense of entitlement (“it’s my turn”) (“Hillary Clinton” 2014; Card 2015). What her opponents reviled as a conspicuously elitist attitude was confirmed by her offensive description of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables” (Reilly 2016).[5] She was castigated for throwing other less elite women (e.g. those who had accused her husband of sexually inappropriate behavior) under the bus in order to protect her own proximity to power (Crowder 2015; Thomas 2015). And she was, of course, deemed physically as well as emotionally repulsive (fat, old, mean, and “nasty”). Others found her presumption that she could trump Trump by playing “the woman card” both obnoxious and audacious (Rappeport 2016).[6] Found to be gross along several different definitional axes, Hillary Clinton became reviled and ridiculed as supergross by those who attended Trump rallies, as well as by many of those who stayed home on election day. Such portrayals of Clinton persisted post-election. After her re-emergence onto the public scene, she was castigated for blaming others for her loss and cast as a sore loser who demonstrated “little grace and even less class” (Limbaugh 2017; Croure 2017).

Trump’s “toxic favorability ratings” (Martin and Sussman 2016) were (and are) also attributable to his perceived “grossness” in each of the senses offered by the dictionary: He is unmitigated, utterly himself, he holds nothing back. He is obvious and conspicuous, as are the hotels that he builds; he likes—indeed demands—to be noticed. His behavior is coarse, his jokes are crude, his taste is questionable, his demeanor is unrefined and disgusting (James 2016). He is corpulent in both a physical and a metaphorical sense, i.e. he is “too much”; he is an unapologetic “fat cat.” He speaks in generalities, he thinks and acts in grand—indeed, grandiose—terms, leaving the details for others to sort out. Voters who were and are grossed out by Trump respond to his unmitigated narcissism, his absence of decorum, his offensive comments about women, ethnic minorities, and disabled folk, his conspicuous consumption, and his lack of delicacy or nuance. Tellingly, 45% of Clinton voters polled chose the word “disgusted” to describe their reaction to Trump’s victory (“Low Marks” 2016). Voters were not merely disappointed in the outcome (as is often the case when one’s preferred candidate does not win), but disgusted. Disgust is an emotion that is both stronger and more intense than disappointment. It is also an attitude more likely to affix itself to its cause than its bearer. Quite simply, Trump opponents were (are) disgusted because Trump was (is) disgusting.

In shifting responsibility for our aversion to political candidates to the candidates themselves, we claim that other citizens should share our aversion. The stronger our aversion, the stronger our sense that others will be, like us, compelled to work against—or at least vote against—that candidate. Thus, many who found Trump grossly repellent were stunned by his victory. The sense of unreality (how could THIS be?) following Trump’s election was not merely a matter of feeling misled by inaccurate polls. The outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election was not merely implausible to Trump opponents; it was inconceivable. Like a small child who cannot understand how anyone would eat broccoli, we could not imagine a possible world wherein any sizable portion of the populace would choose Trump. Many of us continue to have a sense of unreality about the political world we inhabit (Hemon 2017; Gabler 2017), finding it unimaginable that Trump’s base, most rank-and-file Republicans on Capitol Hill and the women closest to him continue to defend and excuse behaviors that late night television hosts have characterized as “abusive,” “repulsive,” “repugnant,” and “disgusting” (Maddow 2017; Lemon 2017; Meyers 2017). How are we to make sense of the fact that many of our fellow citizens did not and do not share our aversions?

 

BASKETS OF DEPLORABLES

If another fails to share our strongly felt aversions, we are apt to find that other deficient epistemically, morally, or aesthetically. We find them guilty of bad judgment, bad character, and/or bad taste. After the November 2016 U.S. Presidential election, media commentators and political analysts, attempting to answer the question “How did Donald Trump become President?” focused heavily on the epistemic failures of Trump voters with secondary attention to their moral failures.[7] Although post-election polling showed it false, some clung to the common wisdom of the campaign season that Trump’s victory was attributable to support from “uneducated,” working-class voters (Ross 2015; Hamilton 2016). Others contended that Trump’s support was linked to a constituency of “low-information voters,” namely voters “who do not know certain basic facts about government and lack what psychologists call a ‘need for cognition’” (Fording and Schram 2016). Echoing concerns about the “stupidity” of the American voter voiced after the election of President George W. Bush, political scientists claimed that Trump voters were particularly susceptible to emotional appeals and other cognitive fallacies. (Fording and Schram n.d.; cf. Caplan 2007; Shenkman 2008). Many voiced concerns about the vulnerability of voters to “fake news” stories as circulated on social media (Maheshwari 2016; Meyers 2016; Wolff 2016). Claiming that Trump voters will regret their choice, some implied that the President’s supporters are also the victims of false consciousness (Johnston 2016).

Denying that Trump’s win was rooted in voter ignorance, other commentators pointed to the flawed ethical character of Trump voters. “You shouldn’t assume Trump’s voters are experiencing false consciousness,” wrote opinion columnist, John Barrow; “in many cases, they just want bad things” (Barrow 2016). One widely held explanation for Trump’s victory contends that it represents a white backlash (“whitelash”) against the gains made by minoritized populations during the Obama era (Blake 2016; Ryan 2016). Others have pointed to sexism—including the internalized sexism of women who voted for him and sexism in the media—as a primary explanatory factor in Trump’s win (Barbato 2016; Bordo 2017). That a majority of white women would vote for the man who was caught bragging about “grab[bing women] by the pussy” pointed to persistent intersections of racism, xenophobia, and misogyny within a key demographic upon which Clinton’s team relied (Anderson 2016). The willingness of Trump voters to overlook Trump’s pervasive stereotyping and scapegoating of people of color, immigrants, and non-Christians, his verbal and sexual assault of women, his mocking of a disabled reporter, and his belittling of POWs (among other things) strongly suggested that such voters were not just plain ignorant but willfully ignorant and thus, whether overt bigots or not, deserving of the label “deplorable” (Schram 2016; cf. Pohlhaus 2012; Lynch 2016).

Much to the dismay of those who hoped Trump supporters might suffer buyer’s remorse, President-elect Trump’s nomination of record numbers of CEOs and Wall Street insiders to his cabinet (despite his earlier pledges to “drain the swamp”) did little to dislodge the support of his base. Similarly, when President Trump—who, as candidate Trump, had excoriated Clinton for jeopardizing national security through her use of a private e-mail server—established a private server for himself, those who had previously chanted “lock her up” did not question the ethics or legality of his actions. Indeed, Trump’s base seems unconcerned by clear breaches of national security combined with Trump’s fairly obvious conflicts of interest in his Mar-a-Lago resort and other properties following the election. As the President chatted with the Japanese Prime Minister about Korea’s nuclear missile test in the midst of a restaurant, those who could afford escalating resort fees to be in proximity to such power took pictures. As the U.S. intelligence community confirmed that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. elections, President Trump—who has a history of business dealings in Russia but refuses to disclose current financial interests—revealed classified information to a Russian Ambassador during a visit the U.S. news media were not allowed to cover. How could the Trump supporter be unconcerned about such violations of Presidential protocol? Here again, it is tempting to critique the Trump supporter as either ignorant or morally suspect: they are either idiots or moral hypocrites (or both). To stop at this conclusion, however, is to lock ourselves into one half of a self-perpetuating cycle of mutually assured disgust. As MSNBC host Chris Matthews accurately noted post-election, Trump’s supporters “don’t care what he says [or does] as long as he snarls at elitists while he says [or does] it” (Hardball 2016). When we—disgusted at their stupidity, stunned at their hypocrisy, and grossed out by their uncritical support for policies we deem disgusting—pity, belittle, ridicule, or shame the Trump supporter, we exemplify the very “elitism” at which they sneer.

We must quit playing the very role into which we have been cast by the opposition’s narrative.

 

THE AESTHETIC TURN

Actor Mike Daisey (2016) suggests that our inability to understand Trump’s popularity stems from a failure to understand how theatre works: “Trump’s popularity doesn’t erode when he lies because the people supporting him are supporting a lifelong performer. When they hear him say things that aren’t true, they don’t hear a trusted source betraying them any more than when Hamlet says he will die onstage we then demand our money back because the actor is alive at curtain call and didn’t actually die” (28).[8] Reminding us that a successful performance depends not on duping the audience but instead on engaging them, Daisey describes the contract between Trump and his supporters as follows:

They are playing the role of an audience, connecting with the image of the person onstage. The people who don’t care that Trump tells the truth aren’t idiots who don’t understand how the world works. . . . They know he is spinning a story, and they like the performance so much they have actively decided that they do not care. . . . He promises with each lie and boast that he will absolutely always be Donald Trump, and he delivers. . . . [I]t is through this unspoken contract of trust that Trump gains power. (28, emphasis mine)

Of course, this contract is dangerous when the principal actor is a demagogue. Nonetheless, if this theatrical rendering of our situation is plausible—and I think it is—we should take a moment to consider what, exactly, the Trump supporter “likes so much” about Trump’s performance. Why do some people “consent to be moved” (Sontag 1975) by political performances that others find offensive and crude? What are the “mobilizing passions” (Paxton 2005) that consolidate Trump support?

Daisey emphasizes that “we do not have to personally trust a performer to trust the integrity of their performance” (28). I would add to this that we can like a performance—and the performer—while simultaneously being disgusted with the actions of the character they portray. We can, for example, be enthralled with Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of Hannibal Lecter while continuing to find serial murder and cannibalism both morally and aesthetically repugnant. We are not moved by the film to become cannibals. Similarly, we may be delighted with Divine’s outrageous performance in John Waters’ Pink Flamingos without ourselves developing a taste for eating shit. So what moves us? And what are we moved to do? We may be moved to not give a shit; indeed, a generation of queers were inspired by Divine (and others) to be shameless about their non-normative desires and appetites. What we loved about Divine was that she was always divine, even as—indeed, precisely as—she and Waters pushed against the boundaries of good taste.[9] In parallel fashion, Trump supporters are freed to be shameless about their appetites and aspirations by Trump’s performance. What they love about Trump is that he, as Daisey notes, is always Trump—namely someone who unapologetically transgresses the boundaries of what is normatively acceptable. Trump is gross—indeed, super (hugely, bigly) gross. This fact is not lost on his supporters; it is precisely what mobilizes his base.

A central concern—perhaps the central concern—of Trump supporters is their loss of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986). If one listens to Trump supporters, one hears resentment directed at “cultural elites” that has less to do with an inability to achieve the American dream than it does with a perceived derision of the dream itself (Friedersdorf 2016; Lee et al. 2016; Altman 2017). Members of so-called rural America,[10] namely those living outside of major metropolitan areas on the East and West coasts, are tired of being treated as disgusting rubes, hicks, and rednecks because they don’t aspire to leave their hometowns, pursue advanced degrees, read the New York Times, travel internationally, or attend the theatre. What is wrong, they ask, with wanting nothing more (nor less) than to own a modest home, watch football, and go to church on Sunday, while living near family and carrying out family traditions? How did small town (and Christian) values become synonymous with being a shameful, uneducated bigot (Zito 2017)?

Trump’s promises to bring jobs back to rust-belt and coal-mining communities were no doubt one factor leading to his electoral success (material capital was not irrelevant); however, the larger success of his campaign was in positioning himself as an unlikely representative of middle American values, a putative “voice of the people.” Crudely put, Trump garnered support from middle America by encouraging them to tell their critics to eat shit. As Benjamin (1936) described in analyzing the “aestheticization of politics” under fascism, fascism gives the masses “a chance to express themselves” while preserving property relations as they are.[11] Trump’s “performance of everyman vernacular” (Masciotra 2016) combined with his unapologetic lack of self-censorship made the New York real estate mogul a cultural champion for “Cracker Barrel Americans” (Powers 2016). What we (“the intellectual elite”) ridiculed as rambling, incoherent speeches and ungrammatical tweets were applauded by those who found his spontaneity refreshing. What we (“the liberal elite”) pathologized as offensive, repugnant characterizations of women, people of color, disabled people and others was viewed by Trump voters as courageous speech. What we (“the coastal elite”) viewed as crass, vulgar behavior unbecoming a President solidified Trump’s “outsider status” among voters in middle America. In short, everything we found an unforgiveable gaffe (gross and repellant) was interpreted by Trump supporters as a sign of virtue.

Trump’s ongoing criticism, in both word and deed, of “elitism” and its perceived close-cousin, “political correctness,” had (and has) a strong affective appeal that “forged an unlikely but unshakable bond between a Manhattan billionaire who had manifestly lived a life of ‘New York values’ with conservative white Americans who feel under constant assault by a cultural elite that treats them with contempt” (Powers 2016). This sense of white victimhood is not new; Donald Trump did not create it nor is he the first politician to attempt to mobilize it. Sarah Palin invited ridicule for her folksy ways during the 2008 Presidential campaign and, for a while, successfully turned it into a narrative of victimization. This “politics of resentment” fueled the Tea Party movement who saw both financial and liberal elites as setting out to destroy white middle-class mores and virtues. Mike Huckabee complained that the powerful and arrogant elites also mocked God and attempted to stifle “biblical” views of marriage and homosexuality—a victim narrative that has been strengthened in the wake of the Obergefell decision (Kilgore 2015). Ted Cruz used Huckabee’s God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy strategy during the 2016 election season, deploying Duck Dynasty stars to appeal to rural and working-class Americans disenfranchised by U.S. liberal elites. It was Trump, however, who used the narrative most masterfully. Refusing to apologize for even the most outlandish and inappropriate criticisms of others—from “Lil Marco” and “low-energy Jeb” to “bleeding from everywhere” Megan and “nasty” Hillary—Trump positioned himself as a politician with the courage to “tell it like it was” and stand up to the forces of political correctness.[12] And in so doing, Trump also “inoculated himself against the very allegations that many believed would be his undoing: that he was a racist and misogynist who bragged of sexually assaulting women” (Powers 2016). Worse yet, as news host Rachel Maddow has noted, President Trump’s willingness to shamelessly break the “norms of decency,” his willingness to behave in ways that are not merely unpresidential but gross and repulsive, calls upon us—as “decent” people—to respond (Maddow 2017). But when we do, we refuel debates about political correctness while turning our focus (and the focus of Trump’s supporters) away from legislative agendas that may actively harm millions of people.

Where do we go from here? How can those who oppose Trump and his supporting cast of Republicans rewrite the script to mobilize a renewed passion for democracy? Put another way, how can the resistance become a more sympathetic character in the unfolding U.S. drama?

 

CULTIVATING DISGUST

There are no easy solutions to the predicament in which we find ourselves—a situation in which we face a neo-fascist regime[13] that has artfully cast racial, religious, sexual, and other minority populations as the fascists and the most privileged members of the population as their victims. If we shame the audience who applauds Trump’s demagoguery for their bad judgment, bad morals, or bad taste, we feed the narrative that disables us. This is true whether or not some of the members of that audience are deplorable. Making a commitment to “go high” when they “go low” will suffer the same fate. The assumption that we have, or even that we should take, “the moral high ground” suggests that we are or wish to become superior to those who are already convinced that we have a superiority complex.

We cannot wait for Trump to pivot. He will not. Nor will those who are enjoying the current torment of the left: techniques of rational persuasion will have little effect on those who are openly “ecstatic” about watching us (and the academic institutions we inhabit) “commit ritual suicide” (Schlicter 2017). In order to stay alive—the first order of business for any successful resistance—we are the ones who must pivot. To accept some advice from those who ridiculed us in the wake of Trump’s election and Hillary’s defeat, we cannot continue to gaze into the mirror and say to ourselves, “Well, you look terrific. No problem here. It must be that normal Americans are racist and stupid” (Schlicter 2017). As distasteful as it will be, we may need to look at ourselves through the eyes of our critics. (That is, after all, what a good actor does in order to improve her craft.) Through that opposing aesthetic lens, we may find that at least some parts of cultural liberalism are—like Trumpism—gross.[14] Are we (sometimes, often, ever) self-righteous? Paternalistic? Dangerous? Detached? Narcissistic? Uncritical? Lazy? Probably.

I am not suggesting that Trump resisters engage in self-flagellation (which is rarely useful). Nor am I suggesting that we cease direct action against policies and actions of the Trump regime (this would be a critical mistake). I am, however, suggesting that the size and the shape of the resistance matters. Continuing to grow the resistance is imperative, given the amount of work there is to do. This means that we need a big tent. We cannot afford to alienate those who may have good reason to revolt against “liberal elites.” The fact that someone isn’t well-versed in the languages of gender theory or decoloniality, for example, doesn’t make them a bad person; nor does it mean there is nothing we can learn from them. To assume that only those who read the same books, share the same tastes, and travel in the same circles that we do can be trustworthy allies is both disgusting and unnuanced—in a word, gross.

At the same time, size is not all that matters and we would do well to avoid becoming as fixated on matters of size as Donald Trump. As others have suggested, “we need to be attentive to the ways that injunctions to coalition and unity have historically been advanced by way of subordinating, excluding, or erasing the most radical critiques and transformative practices of black and indigenous traditions, among others” (Langstaff 2017). Arguably, Clinton’s loss was attributable, in part, to such failures of attentiveness.[15] To take but one example, the symbol of the pantsuit as a sign of feminist resistance (pantsuit nation) and of the white pantsuit in particular as evocative of women’s rights both elided the racist history of women’s suffrage and ignored the classist and culturally biased signification of the “suit” as an article of women’s liberation. This was a gross (obvious, large, and disgusting) error.

Finally, I am suggesting this: Instead of questioning the taste of others, we need to question our own matters of taste. I have two examples in mind. (You may have others.) The first concerns the twin images of “patriarchy unbuttoned” and “patriarchy buttoned” developed by Rebecca Solnit (2017) in her insightful essay, “From Lying to Leering: Donald Trump’s Fear of Women.” Describing the nightmare-producing, PTSD-eliciting debate performance of Trump wherein he “lurched around the stage gaslighting, discrediting, constantly interrupting, . . . sexually shaming, and threatening to throw [Hillary Clinton] in prison,” Solnit suggests that “Trump is patriarchy unbuttoned, paunchy, in a baggy suit, with his hair oozing and his lips flapping and his face squinching into clownish expressions of mockery and rage and self-congratulation.” This she both contrasts and likens to “buttoned-up patriarchy” in the personage of “the lean, crop-haired, perpetually tense Mike Pence, who actually has experience in government.” Although Solnit does not explicitly argue this, the two side-by-side images imply that working-class (“unbuttoned”) sexism is more distasteful than is white-collar (“buttoned up”) sexism. Paunchy bodies with oozing hair, flapping lips and clownish expressions are gross. Lean bodies with styled hair, tight lips, and experienced postures are not. Like many women, I too find Donald Trump more offensive, disgusting, and nightmare-producing than the many political examples of “buttoned up patriarchy”—including Mike Pence—that we could cite. But I am not at all certain that my affective sensibilities are warranted. Pence’s form of misogyny may be just as dangerous; if so, I should be just as repulsed by him. And, indeed, perhaps I would be, were it not for a set of implicit biases that cause me to align certain class markers (posture, haircuts, buttons, patience, etiquette) with morally superior conduct.

The second example, related to the first, concerns the felt distinction between the post-Trump era (neo-fascism) and the pre-Trump era (neo-liberalism). After Trump’s election, many Clinton supporters felt depressed and afraid. Since the election, many left-leaning white women also felt a much greater urgency about political activism than previously. This is not to say that none of us were activists previously; but it is to say that, for many, political resistance has felt more necessary, critical, and urgent in both its quantity and quality since November 10, 2016. Here too, it is less than clear that this shift in affective sensibilities is warranted. As some have argued, the reading of fascism (both historically and in its most recent incarnation) as “a radical deviation from or negation of the liberal democratic social contract” fails to recognize that it is liberalism’s social contract—steeped in coloniality—that sets the stage for fascism to emerge. In the U.S. context, “the mundane operations of U.S. national sovereignty have always comprised a state of emergency [for Black and American Indian peoples], and this officially undeclared state of emergency has been and continues to be the very ground upon which the liberal democratic state and the normative subject stand” (Langstaff 2017; see also Hartery 2016). My point is not that the present circumstance lacks urgency. It is rather that it may be a mark of privilege to feel this urgency (depression and fear) as new. Why didn’t I feel such urgency before? More importantly, how can I train myself to continue to feel it when (if) neo-liberalism resumes?

Tastes change and we can acquire new tastes and abandon old ones. One of the challenges before us at the present moment is resisting the normalization of the new (neo-fascist) regime while simultaneously learning to be disgusted with the old one (neo-liberalism) from which it arose.[16] Both are incredibly gross. Part of our training as members of a new resistance movement must be to cultivate our revulsion (and the revulsion of our children and grandchildren) at the normalization of all injustice—including that in which we ourselves may be implicated.

Shelley Park is Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, FL. She is the author of Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood: Resisting Monomaternalism in Adoptive, Lesbian, Blended and Polygamous Families (NY: SUNY Press, 2013), Co-editor of a special issue of Hypatia on “Women of Color and Third World Women, Feminisms and Geopolitics” (Volume 32:3, Summer 2017), and Associate Editor of Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture. Her current work focuses on how technology mediates caring relationships.

 

REFERENCES

Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge.

Altman, Sam. 2017. “I’m a Silicon Valley Liberal, and I Traveled across the Country To Interview 100 Trump Supporters—Here’s What I Learned.” Business Insider. February 23. http://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-interview-trump-supporters-2017-2.

American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 2016. 5th Ind Thm edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Anderson, L. V. 2016. “White Women Sold Out the Sisterhood and the World by Voting for Trump.” Slate, November 9. http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/11/09/white_women_sold_out_the_sisterhood_and_the_world_by_voting_for_trump.html.

Barbato, Lauren. 2016. “Donald Trump’s Victory Proves That Sexism in America Is Way Worse Than We Thought.” November 9. /articles/194210-donald-trumps-victory-proves-that-sexism-in-america-is-way-worse-than-we-thought.

Barrow, Josh. 2016. “The Core Question of the 2016 Election Is Stupidly Simple.” Business Insider. November 8. http://www.businessinsider.com/final-thoughts-on-the-2016-electoin-2016–11.

Benjamin, Walter. 1936. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm.

Blake, John. 2016. “This Is What ‘Whitelash’ Looks Like.” CNN. November 19. http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/11/us/obama-trump-white-backlash/index.html.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. 1st edition. London: Routledge.

Bordo, Susan. 2017. The Destruction of Hillary Clinton. S. L.: Melville House.

Brownstein, Michael, and Jennifer Saul, eds. 2016. Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Volumes 1 and 2: Metaphysics and Epistemology; Moral Responsibility, Structural Injustice, and Ethics. 1st edition. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 1st edition. New York: Routledge.

Caplan, Bryan. 2007. The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. Princeton, NJ; Woodstock: Princeton University Press.

Card. 2015. “The Lady Doth Protest Too Much.” US News & World Report. April 17. http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/opinion-blog/2015/04/17/hillary-clintons-2016-campaign-is-not-about-you.

Collinson, Stephen. 2016. “Trump Defends Himself against Allegations of Groping Women.” CNN. Accessed February 1. http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/13/politics/trump-defends-himself-against-allegations-of-groping-women/index.html.

Crouere, Jeff. 2017. “Hillary Clinton, Sorest Loser in History.” Townhall. May 6. https://townhall.com/columnists/jeffcrouere/2017/05/06/hillary-clinton-sorest-loser-in-history-n2323068.

Crowder, Steven. 2015. “5 Reasons Why Hillary Winning In ’16 Would Be American Women’s Worst Nightmare.” Western Journalism. April 17. http://www.westernjournalism.com/here-are-the-top-5-reasons-hillary-clinton-is-anti-woman/.

Daisey, Mike. 2016. “The Theatre of Trump: How Has This Unlikely Presidential Candidate Gotten so Far? By Setting the Stage and Giving the Performance of a Lifetime.” American Theatre 33 (7): 26–29.

Enten, Harry. 2016. “Americans’ Distaste for Both Trump and Clinton Is Record-Breaking.” FiveThirtyEight. May 5. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-distaste-for-both-trump-and-clinton-is-record-breaking/.

Fording, Richard, and Schram. n.d. “The Cognitive and Emotional Sources of Trump Support: The Case of Low-Information Voters.” Unpublished Paper. Accessed February 1, 2017. http://urban.hunter.cuny.edu/~schram/trumplowinformationvotersfinal.pdf

Fording, Richard, and Sanford Schram. 2016. “‘Low Information Voters’ Are a Crucial Part of Trump’s Support.” Washington Post. November 7. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/11/07/low-information-voters-are-a-crucial-part-of-trumps-support/.

Friedersdorf, Conor. 2015. “What Do Donald Trump Voters Actually Want?” The Atlantic, August 17. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/08/donald-trump-voters/401408/.

Gabler, Neal. 2017. “The 100 Days That Turned America Upside Down.” Moyers and Co. April 26. http://billmoyers.com/story/100-days-turned-america-upside/.

Hamilton, Marci. 2016. “Why Are White, Uneducated Voters Voting for Trump?” Newsweek. November 1. http://www.newsweek.com/why-are-white-uneducated-voters-voting-trump-515368.

Hartery, David. 2016. “Donald Trump Is the Michael Bay of Fascism.” March 14. http://www.davehartery.com/donald-trump-is-the-michael-bay-of-fascism/.

Havel, Vaclav. 2011. “Politics and Theatre.” Project Syndicate. December 18. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/politics-and-theatre-2012-12-18-10-01-54.

Hemon, Aleksandar. 2017. “Stop Making Sense, or How To Write in the Age of Trump.” Village Voice, January 17. https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/01/17/stop-making-sense-or-how-to-write-in-the-age-of-trump/.

“Hillary Clinton Tells Reporter She ‘Deserves’ To Be President.” 2014. Tea Party. June 23. http://www.teaparty.org/hillary-clinton-tells-reporter-deserves-president-45313/.

James, Aaron. 2016. Assholes: A Theory of Donald Trump. New York; London: Doubleday.

Johnston, David Cay. 2016. “Why Voters Elected President Donald J. Trump—and Why They’ll Regret It.” The Daily Beast. November 9. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/09/why-voters-elected-president-donald-j-trump-and-why-they-ll-regret-it.html.

Kant, Immanuel. 1951. Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard. New York: Hafner Press.

Kilgore, Ed. 2015. “How Mike Huckabee Became the New Sarah Palin.” March 1. https://www.thefreelibrary.com/How+Mike+Huckabee+became+the+new+Sarah+Palin%3A+St.+Joan+of+the+Tundra+…-a0404446909.

Krieg, Gregory. 2016. “How Did Trump Win? Here Are 24 Theories.” CNN. November 10. http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/10/politics/why-donald-trump-won/index.html.

Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. Reprint edition. New York: Columbia University Press.

Langstaff, David. 2017. “The Inauguration of Fascism? Thinking Violence and Resistance in the Age of Trump.” Abolition. January 28. https://abolitionjournal.org/the-inauguration-of-fascism-thinking-violence-and-resistance-in-the-age-of-trump/.

Lee, M. J., Sara Murray, Jeremy Diamond, Noah Gray, and Tal Kopan. 2016. “Why I’m Voting for Donald Trump.” CNN. January 28. http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/27/politics/donald-trump-voters-2016-election/index.html.

Lemon, Don. 2017. “CNN Tonight with Don Lemon.” CNN. June 30. http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2017/06/30/don-lemon-monologue-donald-trump-tweet-ashamed-disgusting-sot-ctn.cnn.

Maddow, Rachel. 2017. “The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC.” MSNBC. June 30. http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show.

Meyers, Seth. 2017. “Late Night with Seth Meyers.” NBC. June 30. http://www.nbc.com/late-night-with-seth-meyers/episodes.

Limbaugh, David. 2017. “Hillary Clinton: Endless Sore Loser.” World Net Daily, June 1. http://www.wnd.com/2017/06/hillary-clinton-endless-sore-loser/.

“Low Marks for Major Players in 2016 Election—Including the Winner.” 2016. Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. November 21. http://www.people-press.org/2016/11/21/low-marks-for-major-players-in-2016-election-including-the-winner/.

Lynch, Kevin. 2016. “Willful Ignorance and Self-Deception.” Philosophical Studies 173 (2): 505–23.

Maheshwari, Sapna. 2016. “How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study.” The New York Times, November 20. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/business/media/how-fake-news-spreads.html.

Martin, Jonathan, and Dalia Sussman. 2016. “Republicans Want Their Party To Unify Behind Donald Trump, Poll Shows.” The New York Times, May 19. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/20/us/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-poll.html.

Masciotra, David. 2016. “‘Real Americans’ vs. ‘coastal Elites’: What Right-Wing Sneers at City Dwellers Really Mean.” Salon. November 20. http://www.salon.com/2016/11/20/real-americans-vs-coastal-elites-what-right-wing-sneers-at-city-dwellers-really-mean/.

“Hardball with Chris Matthews.” 2016. Washington, DC: MSNBC, Nov 30.

McGill, Andrew. 2016. “Why Voters Hate Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.” The Atlantic, June 17. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/the-reasons-why-voters-hate-hillary-clinton-and-donald-trump/487418/.

Meyers, Scottie Lee. 2016. “Did Fake News on Social Media Affect the 2016 Election Results?” Wisconsin Public Radio. November 17. http://www.wpr.org/did-fake-news-social-media-affect-2016-election-results.

Montanaro, Domeneco. 2016. “7 Reasons Donald Trump Won the Presidential Election.” NPR.org. November 12. http://www.npr.org/2016/11/12/501848636/7reasons-donald-trump-won-the-presidential-election.

Morris, M. 2016. “10 Reasons Trump Won.” Listverse. November 9. http:// listverse.com/2016/11/09/10-reasons-trump-won/.

Palmer, Bill. 2016. “Fact Checkers Confirm Hillary Clinton Is More Honest than Any of Her 2016 Opponents.” Daily News Bin. March 20. http://www. dailynewsbin.com/news/fact-checkers-confirm-hillary-clinton-is-more-honestthan-any-of-her-2016-opponents/24196/.

Paxton, Robert O. 2005. The Anatomy of Fascism. Reprint edition. New York: Vintage.

Pohlhaus, Gaile. 2012. “Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance.” Hypatia 27 (4): 715–35.

Powers, Kirsten. 2016. “Trumping the Liberal Elite.” USA TODAY. November 10. http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/11/10/cracker-barrelamericans-elect-trump-cultural-worldview-kirsten-powers/93593088/.

“Questionnaire Design.” 2015. Pew Research Center. January 29. http://www. pewresearch.org/methodology/u-s-survey-research/questionnaire-design/.

Rappeport, Alan. 2016. “Donald Trump Keeps Playing ‘Woman’s Card’ Against Hillary Clinton.” The New York Times – First Draft. April 27. https://www. nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/04/27/donald-trump-keeps-playingwomans-card-against-hillary-clinton/.

Reilly, Katie. 2016. “Read Hillary Clinton’s ‘Basket of Deplorables’ Remarks on Trump Supporters.” Time. September 10. http://time.com/4486502/hillaryclinton-basket-of-deplorables-transcript/.

Ross, Janelle. 2015. “Donald Trump’s Surge Is All about Less-Educated Americans.” Washington Post. July 27. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ the-fix/wp/2015/07/27/donald-trumps-surge-is-heavily-reliant-on-less-educated-americans-heres-why/.

Ryan, Josiah. 2016. “‘This Was a Whitelash’: Van Jones’ Take on the Election Results.” CNN. November 9. http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/09/politics/vanjones-results-disappointment-cnntv/index.html.

Schlichter, Kurt. 2017. “America to the Liberal Elite: ‘New Phone—Who Dis?’” Townhall. January 23. http://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2017/01/23/america-to-the-liberal-elite-new-phone–who-dis-n2275381.

Schmid, Ulrich. 2005. “Style versus Ideology: Towards a Conceptualisation of Fascist Aesthetics.” Totalitarian Movements & Political Religions 6 (1): 127–40.

Schram, Sanford. 2016. “Willful Ignorance, Faustian Bargains, White Privilege and the End of Liberal Democracy.” Public Seminar. December 4. http:// www.publicseminar.org/2016/12/willful-ignorance-faustian-bargains-whiteprivilege-and-the-end-of-liberal-democracy/.

Scott-Heron, Gil. 1981. “B” Movie. Vinyl. Vol. Reflections. New York: Arista.

Shenkman, Rick. 2008. Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth About the American Voter. New York: Basic Books.

Solnit, Rebecca. 2017. “From Lying to Leering: Donald Trump’s Fear of Women.” The London Review of Books 9 (2): 3-7 https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n02/ rebecca-solnit/from-lying-to-leering

Sontag, Susan. 1975. “Fascinating Fascism.” The New York Review of Books. February 6. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/02/06/fascinating-fascism/.

“In Their Own Words: Why Voters Support—and Have Concerns About—Clinton and Trump.” 2016. Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. September 21. http://www.people-press.org/2016/09/21/in-their-own-wordswhy-voters-support-and-have-concerns-about-clinton-and-trump/.

Thomas. 2015. “A Woman Who Was Sexually Assaulted by Bill Clinton Drops a BOMB on Hillary (WHOA!).” The Political Insider. April 13. http://www. thepoliticalinsider.com/a-woman-who-was-sexually-assaulted-by-bill-clintondrops-a-bomb-on-hillary-whoa/.

Wolff, Michael. 2016. “Fake News Is a Real Pawn in Claims of Media . . .” USA Today, December. http://www.pressreader.com/ usa/usa-today-us-edition/20161212/ 281921657682266.

Zito, Salena. 2017. “Why Liberal Elites Are So Resentful of Middle America.” New York Post. January 12. http://nypost.com/2017/01/11/why-liberal-elitesare-so-resentful-of-middle-america/.

ENDNOTES

[1] There is a vast and growing literature on implicit (or unconscious) bias, namely the biases we hold that are not the end result of conscious reflection. See e.g. the essays collected in Brownstein and Saul (2016).

[2] My analysis here is influenced in part by Sara Ahmed’s (2004) analysis of emotions as “sticky.” See especially her analysis of disgust in Ch. 4.

[3] I am also influenced by Kristeva’s (1982) and Butler’s (1990) analyses of abjection here.

[4] “No past candidate [came] close to Clinton, and especially Trump, in terms of engendering strong dislike a little more than six months before the election.” Moreover, Clinton and Trump’s “strong favorability” ratings were far lower than those of any of their predecessors (Enten 2016).

[5] “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”

[6] This portrait of Clinton emerges clearly on right-wing social media feeds. Close-ended survey questions do not reveal these data, as they did not provide respondents an opportunity to provide such answers (“Questionnaire Design” 2015; McGill 2016).

[7] In the early post-election days and weeks, significant attention was also paid to mistakes made by the RNC, the DNC, Clinton, the media, third-party candidates, and third-party voters, FBI Director Comey, and others. (See e.g. Krieg 2016; Montanaro 2016; Morris 2016.) I agree there were variegated threads of responsibility for the 2016 election outcome. However, my focus here is on the widespread critiques of those who actively supported Trump.

[8] I am reminded here also of musician Gil Scott-Heron’s (1981) claim that “[w]e [were] starring in a B movie” after the election of Ronald Reagan. See also Havel (2011) on politics as theatre.

[9] Contra Kant (1951, §48), disgust may produce aesthetic satisfaction.

[10] Arguably, the urban/rural divide is more an imagined geography than an actual geographical division.

[11] While beyond the narrower scope of this paper, some have persuasively argued that fascism is as much an aesthetic as it is an ideology. See e.g. Schmid 2005; Sontag 1975.

[12] Even after several women testified that Trump had, in fact, assaulted them, Trump was able to position himself as the victim of a “liberal media” who were punishing him for leaving the “special club” of establishment insiders. Claiming the allegations were malicious and hurtful lies spread by a liberal elite, Trump stated that he was willing to take these vicious “slings and arrows” for his loyal supporters (Collinson 2016).

[13] Paxton (2005) defines fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion” (218).

[14] “The pustule of cultural liberalism must be popped . . . and it’s going to be messy” (Schlichter 2017).

[15] To say that her loss was attributable, in part, to such failures does not mean that such failures belong exclusively to her.

[16] The almost immediate nostalgic yearning for the Obama years after Trump’s election erases the complicity of Obama, Clinton, and others in furthering the formation of the neoliberal surveillance state that set the stage for the policies and practices of the current regime (e.g. Wall Street bailouts, approval of multiple pipeline projects, the privatization of prisons, deportations of undocumented immigrants, IMF restructuring programs, drone strikes, etc.). We cannot “Make America Great Again” by going back several decades or a single decade.

 

 

by Alison Reiheld

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I analyze multiple aspects of how gender norms pervaded the 2016 election, from the way Clinton and Trump announced their presidency to the way masculinity and femininity were policed throughout the election. Examples include Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Gary Johnson. I also consider how some women who support Trump reacted to allegations about sexual harassment. The difference between running for President as a man and running for President as a woman makes all the difference in the world.

 

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This image shows Donald Trump on the left and Hillary Clinton on the right. Trump’s eyes are narrowed, his brow furrowed. He looks serious, and there is no hint of a smile. On the right, Clinton has a composed look with a slight, close-mouthed smile, her eyes open to a typical degree. Both are white and have greying blonde hair.

The May 21, 2007 cover of TIME magazine showed a close-up image of Mitt Romney’s face with the cover tagline “. . . he looks like a President . . .”, the first of many such claims. In 2011, as Texas Governor Rick Perry geared up for a run at the presidency, Washington Post opinion writer Richard Cohen said that Perry “actually looks like a President” (Cohen 2011). The term, here, is used as praise. Yet the power of its use as an epithet when people fail to look adequately presidential cannot be understated. During the primaries for the 2016 election, while watching Republican candidate Carly Fiorina, Donald Trump said in front of a reporter, “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?!?! I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not s’posed to say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?” (Lawler 2015) Campaigning in Cleveland in early September, Trump said of Hillary Clinton, “Does she look presidential, fellas? Give me a break” (Nguyen 2016). It will not have escaped the reader’s notice that Romney and Perry are both men, while Fiorina and Clinton are both women. What difference does this difference make? And what difference did it make to the 2016 election? Rather a lot, as it turns out.

It would be folly to claim that the 2016 election involved more gender performance than previous elections. Indeed, the presence of Sarah Palin as the Republican nominee’s Vice Presidential Pick in 2008 and Hillary Clinton’s effort for the Democratic Presidential nomination at the time heightened attention to gender in politics. Saturday Night Live effectively lampooned this feature of the 2008 election in a skit featuring “Sarah Palin” and “Hillary Clinton” uniting to call the nation out on its attention to their appearance. However, it is the 2016 election on which I focus, and which presents us with ample opportunity for seeing gender in play. This is in part due to the very competitive Republican primary, the persona of the eventual Republican nominee (Donald Trump), and the presence of women candidates in the Republican primary (Carly Fiorina) and as the Democratic nominee (Hillary Clinton). I argue that gender as performed in this election makes crystal clear the role gender plays in American society. This is exemplified in the behaviors and treatment of candidates throughout the election. Let us begin at the official beginning: with the announcement of the major party candidates’ intentions to run for President.

On April 12, 2015, Hillary Clinton released the announcement video formally putting herself forth as candidate for President of the United States (TimesVideo 2015). In this short video, she featured the stories of a diverse group of Americans who are “getting ready” to plant their gardens (an older white woman), watch their kids start school (a young white woman), have a baby (an African–American couple), get a job after college (a young Asian woman), get married (a gay couple), and start a company (a burly white man). Clinton then appears and says she, too, is getting ready to do something:

I’m running for President. . . . Everyday Americans need a champion, and I wanna be that champion. So you can do more than just get by. You can get ahead, and stay ahead. Because when families are strong, America is strong. . . . I hope you’ll join me on this journey. (TimesVideo 2015)

The images that flash on the screen include a lesbian couple as well as some of the families seen earlier. The image is a clear image of inclusion, nurturing, and defending families. Indeed, Clinton’s campaign slogan for the next year and a half would be “Stronger Together.”

By contrast, on June 16, 2015, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President in a live speech in which he entered a packed lobby via escalator, waving and smiling, as Neil Young’s guitar-driven “Rockin’ in the Free World” blasts. Ivanka Trump then introduced her father, saying:

We don’t need talk, we need action. We need execution. We need someone who is bold, and independent. . . . I can tell you that there is no better person than my father to have in your corner when you are facing tough opponents or making hard decisions. He is battle-tested. (C-SPAN 2015)

Trump then proceeded to talk for over forty minutes about what he sees as the problems facing America. It is in this speech that he first positions Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, acknowledging that some may be good people. It is also in this speech that he introduces a theme he will repeat throughout the election and into his presidency: that America hasn’t been winning, but with his skills America will begin to do very well and start winning again. Indeed, Trump’s campaign slogan for the next year and a half would be “Make America Great Again.”

These two announcements set the tone for the remainder of the election. Clinton’s announcement performed key aspects of femininity: defense of family, preparation and planning, social and emotional labor, interdependence, asking rather than demanding, serving as a champion by advocating for people. As Marilyn Frye (1983) has argued, women are taken most seriously when they put themselves into traditionally masculine roles such as politics but only on behalf of traditionally feminine values and roles including advocacy for the family and concern for the welfare of others. These were themes on prominent display in Clinton’s announcement. However, the toolset we will need to make sense of the 2016 election goes beyond this and requires careful examination of the norms of both femininity and masculinity.

As the election wore on, Clinton was increasingly attacked for how she looked and comported herself: for her “masculine” pantsuits, for how she carried herself, for how she didn’t smile enough, for how old she looked. In short, she was critiqued for how she performed femininity. The key notion behind gender as performativity, as developed by Judith Butler in the influential Gender Trouble, is that gender is not natural but rather is manufactured through repeated acts. When people perform gender in ways that don’t fit into gender norms, their existence becomes socially unintelligible, and so we police their actions to bring them into conformity. The alternative would be to allow gender norms themselves to be disrupted. This would make their artifice, their nature as a performance, startlingly clear (Butler 1999). Such policing is precisely what happened to Hillary Clinton. The media and populace went on to demand behaviors of Clinton that we can see as clearly fitting into the double binds of femininity. Consider the following images:

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The first image shows a screen capture of a headline from the Washington Post which reads “Is she likable enough?” The second image shows a screen cap of an Opinion piece by Estelle Erasmus featuring a photo of Jennifer Lee’s book Love Her, Love Her Not: The Hillary Paradox with the title of Erasmus’s piece: “Hillary should play up her feminine side.” Finally, there is an image of Hillary Clinton’s Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe, released during the campaign.

Was Clinton too strong and independent and cold and not likable enough, not lovable enough? Would being more feminine help her, or cause her to be seen as too emotional and relational and domestic, playing right into sex-stereotyped comments by opponents about whether a woman could be trusted with “the red button” at certain times of the month? Frye discusses such double binds as a classic experience of oppressed people. These are “situations in which options are reduced to a very few and all of them expose one to penalty, censure or deprivation” (1983, 2). This is a textbook case.

Another classic, and related, double bind is revealed in the constant policing of women’s affect complete with injunctions to “smile” so as to be pleasing to others who find unsmiling women to be distressing. How can one be friendly without reinforcing gender norms? Frye provides us with an elegant elucidation of this particular double bind:

. . . it is often a requirement upon oppressed people that we smile and be cheerful. If we comply, we signal our docility and our acquiescence in our situation. We need not, then, be taken note of. We acquiesce in being made invisible, in occupying no space. We participate in our own erasure. On the other hand, anything but the sunniest countenance exposes us to being perceived as mean, bitter, angry, or dangerous. This means, at the least, that we may be found ‘difficult’ or unpleasant to work with, which is enough to cost one one’s livelihood; at worse, being seen as mean, bitter, angry or dangerous has been known to result in rape, arrest, beating and murder. One can only choose to risk one’s preferred form and rate of annihilation. (1983, 2–3)

Women’s comportment is also often policed via their literal voices. From picking on upspeak—ending statements with a higher pitch so that it sounds almost as if the speaker is asking a question—to volume and the way that one speaks about facts vs. narratives, gender is enforced in myriad ways by examining women’s voices. Alas that after decades of criticisms of such policing, they were still levied at Clinton. Consider the following images which embody the oft-levied critiques of Clinton’s affect as well as her voice and speaking style.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: We see here two screen caps of tweets. The first tweet, by Steve Clemons, is from July 28, 2016. In it, Clemons says [condensed twitter abbreviations replaced with full English words] “Instead of lecturing to citizens Hillary Clinton needs to have conversation with us. Modulate voice. Tell stories. Set hopes. Smile.” A hashtag reveals that this was in reference to her speech at the Democratic National Convention. The second tweet, by MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough of Morning Joe, is dated March 15, 2016 and reads “Smile. You just had a big night.” The hashtag reveals this is in reference to primary results.

To truly demonstrate the nature of affect policing, and smiling in particular as a double bind à la Frye (1983), it would be most useful if we had an example of another person critiquing Clinton for later beginning to smile too much. Consider:

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: We see here one screen cap of a tweet. It is by David Frum, dated September 26, 2016. It reads “Who told Hillary Clinton to keep smiling like she’s at her granddaughter’s birthday party?”

These critiques all fall on Clinton for the performance she gives the public; they are not simply about political efficacy. Rather, they both embody and rely on gender norms and sexism for their power. When these comments are made, they bring into play a whole host of prior beliefs and stereotypes in the mind of the audience. Without those, the critiques would seem silly: “doesn’t smile enough” is not a good criterion for President of the United States, after all.

Philosopher Sandra Bartky (1998) addresses precisely these kinds of critiques when she discusses femininity as a disciplinary regime. Bartky argues that there are three types of these disciplinary practices that create “styles of the flesh” (while these apply to both masculinity and femininity, Bartky focuses on the latter):

1. Practices which aim to produce a body of a certain size and general configuration (diet; weightlifting; not too heavy/large for women and not too small/slight for men);
2. Those that bring forth from this body a specific repertoire of gestures, postures, and movements (including “steering”: when someone puts their hand on another’s body to patronizingly guide them in where to go);
3. And those that are directed toward the display of this body as an ornamental surface (makeup, tattoos, jewelry, lotion, perfumes, hair dye, etc.) (Bartky 2010).

It is worth noting that on Bartky’s account, these disciplinary practices create a highly constrained and time-consuming femininity that literally weakens women relative to how strong they could be if they took up more space, lifted weights to get strong, and so forth. This dominant set of norms of femininity also literally makes women and feminine persons take up less space by urging them to make their bodies small, sit with knees crossed close together and elbows in, and so forth. By comparison, men and masculine persons are encouraged to take up space, both in sitting and in moving, and are encouraged to lift weights to grow larger and more muscular. In the image below, you can see these comportment norms on display. These are typical masculine and feminine postures. If a man were to position his body as is done on the right, he would be seen as feminine. If a woman were to position her body as is done on the left, she would be seen as masculine.

 

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: On the left a man with close-cropped hair sits on a chair. His feet and knees are spread shoulder-width apart and he leans forward, resting his elbows on his thighs with his hands clasped. Both feet are firmly planted on the floor. He is wearing a full-coverage long-sleeved olive sweater with a white t-shirt underneath, a pair of jeans, and brown sneakers. On the right, a woman with straight shoulder-length hair wears a white knee-length sundress with thin spaghetti straps, with knee-high black leather boots with a high heel. Her arms are bare. One leg is crossed tightly over the other, with her heel held in close to the other lower leg. Both her hands rest on her top knee. This brings her shoulders in, making them narrower than if she were sitting back with her arms at her side.

Even though masculinity can also be a disciplinary regime in that it requires one to be muscular, have thick hair, and avoid displaying emotion, these do not have the subordinating effect that femininity does. As Frye notes, for men, “a steely tough or laid-back demeanor (all are forms which suggest invulnerability) marks [a man] as a member of the male community [who] is esteemed by other men. Consequently, the maintenance of that demeanor contributes to the man’s self-esteem” and to the respect men receive from others (1983, 14). Echoing Bartky’s analysis, Frye goes on to say:

Like men’s emotional restraint, women’s physical restraint is required by men. But unlike the case of men’s emotional restraint, women’s physical restraint is not rewarded. What do we get for it? Respect and esteem and acceptance? No. They mock us and parody our mincing steps. We look silly, incompetent, weak, and generally contemptible. Our exercise of this discipline tends to low esteem and low self-esteem. . . . The woman’s restraint is part of a structure oppressive to women; the man’s restraint is part of a structure oppressive to women. (1983, 15)

Or as Bartky (2010) puts it, women cooperate in making themselves “object and prey” when they comply with the norms of femininity. Thus we see how complying with the comportment norms of femininity puts female candidates such as Hillary Clinton at a terrible disadvantage, while complying with the norms of masculinity puts male candidates at an advantage.

By contrast with the way that Hillary’s announcement embodied many of the norms of femininity, Trump’s announcement performs key aspects of masculinity: independence (including a lack of concern for others’ opinions), combativeness in defense of what is right, serving as a champion by winning, virility, and strength. Indeed, in a later appearance on Dr. Oz, Trump made sure to get Dr. Oz to discuss how high his testosterone is. This turned out to be a big applause line. Trump went on to say that when he looks in the mirror, he sees a 35-year old man and that when he plays golf with NFL player Tom Brady, “I feel the same age as him” (de Moraes 2016). Add to the previous list not only strength and aggressiveness and virility, which the general public strongly associates with testosterone, but also youth and general vitality. These are classic traits of what R. W. Connell, in a groundbreaking work on Western masculinities, termed “hegemonic masculinity.”

‘Hegemonic masculinity’ is not a fixed character type, always and everywhere the same. It is, rather, the masculinity that occupies the hegemonic position in a given pattern of gender relations, a position always contestable. (2010, 236)

An effective way of dropping a masculine person’s social status is by accusing them of not being masculine in the right way, but instead embodying one of what Connell calls the ‘subordinate masculinities.’ One can do this in many ways including accusing a man of being too like a woman, or accusing them of being homosexual.

Hegemonic masculinity is not only independent, heteronormative, aggressive, virile, and youthful, but also white. As Patricia Hill Collins argued, part of hegemonic masculinity is wealth and property, a set of social positions long closed off to black men. Thus, Collins argues, race is an important aspect of hegemonic masculinity (2004, 193). So important is it to approximate hegemonic masculinity as closely as possible, that gay men (Sanchez et al. 2009; Tattelman 2005; Wright 2005) and black men (Collins 2004, 190) can find themselves intensely embracing the aspects of hegemonic masculinity that are open to them: virility, youthfulness, aggressiveness, muscularity, independence, strength, and domination over women. Devising alternative masculinities may be a necessary step forward (Heasley 2005; Mutua 2006; Neal 2006), but it has its costs. Because of the need for men to position themselves within the hegemonic masculinity instead of within subordinate masculinities, violence and the language of violence are used to draw and enforce these boundaries, not only against women but also between men. As Connell notes, “violence can become a way of claiming or asserting masculinity in group struggles” (2010, 241). Trump’s insistence on Making America Great Again through economic domination rather than trade agreements, and through expanding America’s standing military and its array of military equipment, is precisely in this vein. Coupled with a “rich vocabulary of abuse” against men who are too feminine or gay (“sissy,” “wimp,” “candy ass,” “mama’s boy”) or who are black (“boy”), it is possible to police gender most effectively (Connell 2010, 238). Many of these terms derive their bite by accusing the man in question of being too like a woman. They thus reinforce the low value of women.

We can see this in the way that two prominent men responded to Trump publically: then-President Barack Obama, and then-rival Gary Johnson. Let us begin with Johnson. The astute reader will recall that in the waning days of the campaign, an audiotape was revealed of Trump discussing the liberties that he as a wealthy and famous man could take with attractive women: without waiting for permission, he could just “grab ’em by the pussy” (Farenthold 2016). But slang for female anatomy is not the only way this word is used. In fact, it has a second life as precisely the kind of “rich vocabulary of abuse” Connell discusses that is so often used to police masculinity. In that sense, the word “pussy” means a man who is not genuinely courageous, essentially an unmasculine man, a man who is like a woman’s sexual anatomy: to be used by others.

This is precisely the sense in which Gary Johnson, Libertarian Party nominee, deployed it. During his first debate, Johnson said “Donald Trump’s a pussy.” Later, given a chance to explain himself, Johnson said it was a “misfire” and then proceeded to reinforce his own masculinity over and against Trump’s with reference to a number of feats that also clearly reveal his wealth:

But you know what? I’ve climbed the highest mountain on each of the seven continents, I’m going to do a three-thousand mile mountain bike ride here, upcoming. Trump’s a pussy. . . . If it gets down to being in the presidential debates and he’s got anything to say about me, which I’m sure he will, I’ll just start off with the fact that he’s a pussy.

Reflecting on Johnson’s utterances, J. Wilson wrote at A Libertarian Future that

If people are looking for some machismo in their candidate, Johnson is a much better choice. . . . Donald Trump is a pampered, overweight, urbanite who’s driven around in limos and waited on hand and foot. . . . Gary Johnson is right to call him a pussy. (2016)

This rhetoric uncritically accepts hegemonic masculinity, and polices it in typical ways. In addition, Wilson’s affirmative response details a number of features about Trump that go against the norms of masculine persons as strong, independent, hard workers. The use of “urbanite” as an insult draws its power from its opposite, namely the image of a man who works with his hands and provides for himself and his family in an admirable, physical way. Having seen the gender mechanics of Johnson’s attack on Trump—who, himself, performs masculinity as a major part of his political persona—let’s take a look at Obama’s.

During late summer and early fall of 2016, Trump began working to lay the ground for contesting election results. He repeatedly tweeted, spoke at rallies, and said in interviews that if he loses the election it would be because it was “rigged,” and that there will be massive voter fraud. On October 18 of 2016, President Obama responded to these claims outside the White House, saying:

It doesn’t really show the kind of leadership and toughness that you’d want out of a president. You start whining before the game’s even over? If whenever things are going badly for you and you lose you start blaming somebody else? Then you don’t have what it takes to be in this job. (TimesVideo 2016)

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This image shows a screenshot of a New York Times video of Obama. He is frozen in mid-sentence, his close-cropped hair grey against his dark skin. He is wearing a black suit, white shirt, and patterned grey tie with an American flag pin on his lapel. The header says “Obama to Trump: Stop Whining”; the caption reads “Speaking at the White House with the Italian prime minister, President Obama responded to a journalist’s question about Donald J. Trump’s claims of a rigged election by saying Mr. Trump should “stop whining.” Image Credit: Al Drago/The New York Times.

Here Obama, like Johnson, uses language that is particularly telling against men. Part of being masculine is that one is supposed to be tough, not show vulnerability, and be stoic. Whining is precisely against these normative traits. And thus, to accuse a man of whining is to accuse him of not being masculine in much the same way that boys are told growing up to not be a “cry-baby.” This, too, is policing masculinity.

When directed at women, language also shows their subordinate status. Consider the term “bitch,” commonly directed at Hillary Clinton. As many have noted, “bitch” is almost always used to insult women who are too uppity, who refuse to cooperate, who don’t put others’ emotional and physical well-being always above their own. This is one way femininity is enforced and regulated, but it is inextricable from masculinity, for physical and other forms of violence against women also sustain hegemonic masculinity: “Intimidation of women ranges across the spectrum, from wolf-whistling in the street, to office harassment, to rape and domestic assault. . . . Most men do not attack or harass women; but those who do are unlikely to think themselves deviant” (Connell 2010, 238). For this reason, today’s hegemonic masculinity is often referred to as “toxic masculinity.”

Now, we almost have the tools we need to approach Trump’s own use of the word “pussy.” As I mentioned earlier, a recording was released of Donald Trump and entertainment host Billy Bush talking with each other in 2005. Just before they pull up in a bus to meet a soap opera star, the following conversation ensues (Fahrenthold 2016):

BUSH: “Sheesh, your girl’s hot as shit in the purple.”

TRUMP: “Whoa! I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. [nervous or hysterical laughter from Bush] Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.”

BUSH: “Whatever you want.”

TRUMP: “Grab them by the pussy. [brief pause, Bush laughing] You can do anything.”

Now, it might be argued charitably that this was 11 years prior to the election. So what was the modern Trump response to the release of the tape? He issued a statement saying “This was locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago. Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course—not even close. I apologize if anyone was offended” (Fahrenthold 2016). As many have noted, this is a very bad apology. Genuine apologies don’t put the onus on the listener for having been offended, but rather take responsibility for the utterance by the wrongdoer acknowledging the wrongdoing. As Nick Smith (2008) writes in I Was Wrong: The Meanings of Apologies, one may reasonably question whether admissions that “mistakes were made” or that the speaker “regrets if anyone took offense” qualify as apologies at all (Radzik 2015). At no point does Trump actually issue a genuine apology. Instead, he normalizes his behavior by saying that his opponent’s husband does worse, and that this is “locker room” talk. He apologizes that anyone was offended, not that he talked or thought about women in these ways. And why should he feel that he must?

Trump is enacting the norms of hegemonic masculinity: he takes what he wants, he is independent, he is aggressive, and he is sexually successful. And as Connell said, men who assault or harass women hardly think of themselves as deviant. Sociologist Michael Kimmel (2008), who studies masculinity, expands on hegemonic masculinity usefully. He describes the way in which dominant masculinity norms structure men’s social status so that it depends on how they are seen by other men, as Connell also acknowledged. It is no accident that Trump said this on a hot mic to Billy Bush, a younger and conventionally attractive man. Kimmel notes that a large part of men’s social status with other men depends on how good they are at “scoring,” which is to say, at collecting sexual conquests of women. This is not concerned with consent so much as with sexual access to women and posturing.

The time-honored way for a guy to prove that he is a real man is to score with a woman. It indicates both his desirability and his virility and proves that he’s succeeding in the often complicated task of attaining manhood. The problem, however, is that for guys, girls often feel like the primary obstacle to proving manhood. They are not nearly as compliant as guys say they would like them to be. By declining guys’ sexual advances and not allowing guys to use them as currency, they are often as much of a threat to masculinity as they are a booster. (Kimmel 2008, 170)

Trump’s 2005 claims play into exactly this sociological picture of ignoring consent and of the role of scoring, and posturing about scoring, in shoring up masculinity. But his justification of the behavior as locker room talk also plays into the sociological picture of masculinity. As Kimmel says, “What I learned in the locker rooms of my youth was ‘Tell her anything if it’ll get you laid.’ I can still hear my friend Billy. . . .‘The most important thing is to keep going. If she pushes your hand away, keep going. You only stop if she hits you’” (2008, 217). In interviews with men, Kimmel finds the same patterns again and again: fundamentally, this kind of sexual posturing is not about interest in the girl (2008, 219). It is about capturing the esteem of other men. Both Trump’s 2005 utterance and his 2016 publicity statement about it show a desire to perform and embody hegemonic masculinity.

We see how typical and dominant these attitudes about sex and locker room talk are not only by considering Kimmel’s work, but also by considering the reaction to Trump’s 2005 and 2016 statements. As much as men who assault and harass women may not think themselves deviant, observers also may not think them deviant. Indeed, while many people were outraged—a rallying cry of many women was “this pussy grabs back”—others considered it normal behavior and typical locker room talk. On his show Anderson Cooper 360, CNN’s Cooper interviewed Trump supporters on October 11, 2016, who had no problem with his behavior. Said one woman: “It was just a man being a man in a men’s world talking to men.” In response to the female interviewer asking “How many of you are willing to write this off as locker room banter. . .?” all of the ten women on camera raise their hands. One woman elaborates:

I have two brothers, my dad, military family. I’ve heard words worse. I’ve seen things worse. The word is a little derogatory. I wish if he had said it, he said it another way. But you know, he wasn’t saying it to females, he was saying it to men. Locker room, [is like the] bus. . . . (CNN 2016)

Another woman says she would have found it offensive if said around her, but again dismisses it as just locker room talk, the boys’ club (CNN 2016). All of the women in the video appear to be white.

The women interviewed here do not fully distinguish between the descriptive and the normative. By saying that it is normal locker room talk, and both adopting and confirming the language of Trump’s 2016 response to the tape, they are describing what they know to be true: that men are very often this way with each other. But that this is so does not make it right. That next normative, analytic step doesn’t take place in their discourse. And for many men and women in the United States for whom this is typical, and for women for whom sexual harassment is the cost of being around men in public, this is simply the way things are. As Judith Butler has noted, when gender is performed, it is “not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization” (1999, xv). Consistent performance of the norms of gender makes all other ways of being appear unintelligible, and makes the norms of gender seem intrinsic: “what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts . . . an hallucinatory effect of naturalized gestures” (Butler 1999, xv). The doing of gender produces gender, and that produced gender makes established ways of doing gender seem, well, both unalterable and right. It is no wonder at all that we refer to locker room behaviors as “just boys being boys” and sometimes despairingly describe them as incorrigible (literally, they cannot be corrected). In addition, as Frye (1983) has noted, it is a fundamental component of efficient exploitation that those being exploited buy into and adopt the norms that endorse their exploitation. Women’s locker room talk often consists of policing femininity according to norms that are not good for women. What’s more, as both de Beauvoir (1949) and Frye (1983)—both white women philosophers—acknowledge, white women often ally with white men, even against other women, as this represents their greatest chance of security. Perhaps we should be unsurprised that 53% of the white female voters in the United States voted for Trump (Lett 2016); by contrast, 94% of black women supported Hillary Clinton (Williams 2016). Given all of these considerations, it is no wonder at all that some substantial subset of women have adopted and live according to, and are unable or unwilling to critique, the inextricable norms of femininity and hegemonic masculinity.

These analytic tools are essential for understanding the 2016 election, and how gender norms have been directed at, and exploited by, the campaigns. Taking them together with Bartky’s discussion of comportment—the specific repertoire of gestures that makes people recognizably masculine or feminine—we can move on to analyze several telling images of how both Trump and Bernie Sanders navigated their physical interactions with Hillary Clinton.

Consider the following images depicting Trump’s behavior at the September 26, 2016 presidential debate, and Sanders’ during the primaries. Watch closely for steering behavior, in which a man patronizingly uses his hand—often on a woman’s back—to guide her body through space as though she cannot do so on her own. Look also for what Bartky describes as “the economy of touching,” which is out of balance in favor of men: men touch women more often and on more parts of the body than women touch men (2010, 408).

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: In all three images, we see variations of steering behavior and the economy of touch. The top images both show Trump and Clinton. Clinton is wearing a red pantsuit and Trump is wearing a dark suit with a blue tie. In the left image, Clinton is walking toward the front of the stage while Trump awkardly extends his arm to maintain contact with her lower back as she does so. In the right image, the photographer stands behind Trump and Clinton at the same event. Clinton and Trump are looking at each other and smiling. Trump has his arm extended to touch her upper back. In the lower image, we see Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton during the primaries on a stage. Clinton is wearing a dark blue suit with a white shell underneath, while Sanders is wearing a navy blue suit with a striped blue and pale blue tie. The two are smiling. Clinton is looking at Sanders and her mouth is wide open. Both face the camera and Clinton shakes Sanders’ hand, each using their right hands. Sanders’ left hand is behind Clinton’s back, touching her shoulder. This is almost exactly the same set of conditions we see in the top right photo with Trump where the photographer is behind the pair.

Careful reflection on these images shows recurring patterns with both of the men whom Clinton spent the most time debating in this campaign: both touch Clinton in addition to shaking her hand, on her back, and Trump engages in classic steering. These patterns will be familiar to most people who share mainstream American experiences with gender norms, steering, and the economy of touch. In addition, during one of the debates, Trump followed Clinton around the stage even when it was her turn to answer questions. While this was likely to ensure she never had screen time without him in the picture, it came across to many viewers as creepy and stalking. At a minimum, it reveals that he felt entitled to be present and visible during her designated time to be answering questions. He refused to yield attention to her. This, like the steering, is a dominance move and as such is entirely consistent with the interplay of masculinity and femininity as dominance and subordinance described by Connell, Bartky, and Frye. Femininity and masculinity are inextricable: to be truly masculine, one must not be seen as feminine and must exert dominance over those who are.

As we have seen, the campaign and its key performances are shot through with gender norms. Now, we see it all the way down to the level of positioning on stage.

I have considered what each candidate did to make themselves appear fit candidates for President, how they played upon gender norms or were undermined by them. There are many more theorists we could deploy in a longer-form analysis. Indeed, there are many more examples I could have drawn upon from this particular election including the internet rhetoric of “cuck” (cuckold) for men who buy into “social justice warrior” rhetoric, or from the treatment of Clinton and Palin in 2008, of Geraldine Ferraro in 1980, and of many other path-breaking politicians including Republican Olympia Snow. Campaigns for national office involve a level of scrutiny unlike any other for both candidates and their supporters. But what I have found most intriguing in writing this examination is how much it is like the daily scrutiny we all face for our gender performances. It is not that the candidates were running for President that makes the difference, but rather their gender and the mechanisms of gender. The difference between running for President as a man and running for President as a woman makes all the difference in the world.

 

Alison Reiheld, PhD, is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Women’s Studies at Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville, where she specializes in medical ethics and feminist theory. She has published on civility and on ethical issues in health promotion, medicalization, food, and treatment of miscarriage. Her current research interests lie in medical epistemology and ethical issues in the treatment of transgender patients. She is also working on the NASA grant to CosmoQuest on Diversity & Inclusion in STEM through citizen science.

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are due to Destiny Green for advice on intersectional analysis of masculinity and to the SIUE Women’s Studies Program for support in developing this paper.

 

REFERENCES

Bartky, Sandra. 1998. “Skin Deep: Femininity as a Disciplinary Regime.” In Daring To Be Good: Essays in Feminist Ethico-Politics, ed. Bat-Ami Bar On and Ann Ferguson, pp. 2–27. New York, NY: Routledge Press.

———. 2010. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” In Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, Second Edition, ed. Carole R. McCann and Seung-kyung Kim, pp. 404–18. New York, NY: Routledge Press.

Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York, NY: Routledge.

Cohen, Richard. 2011. “The Texas Gipper.” The Washington Post. August 15, 2011. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-texas-gipper/2011/08/15/gIQA2SQGHJ_story.html?utm_term=.b8ce7704ae32

Collins, Patricia Hill. 2004. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York, NY: Routledge.

Connell, R. W. 2010. “The Social Organization of Masculinity.” In Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, Second Edition, ed. Carole R. McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim. New York, NY: Routledge Press.

CNN. 2016. “Trump Supporters Standing by Their Man.” Anderson Cooper 360. October 11. Accessed February 27, 2017. https://www.facebook.com/AC360/videos/10157680223790533/

C-SPAN. 2015. “Donald Trump Presidential Campaign Announcement.” June 16, 2015. https://www.c-span.org/video/?326473-1/donald-trump-presidential-campaign-announcement&live

de Beauvoir, Simone. 1949. The Second Sex. Paris: Editions Gallimard.

de Moraes, Lisa. 2016. “Donald Trump’s Testosterone Level Gets Big Applause on ‘Dr. Oz’ Show.” Deadline Hollywood. September 15. Accessed February 27, 2017. http://deadline.com/2016/09/donald-trump-testosterone-level-applause-dr-oz-show-1201820359/

Fahrenthold, David A. 2016. “Trump Recorded Having Extremely Lewd Conversation about Women in 2005.” The Washington Post. October 8. Accessed February 27, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-recorded-having-extremely-lewd-conversation-about-women-in-2005/2016/10/07/3b9ce776-8cb4-11e6-bf8a-3d26847eeed4_story.html?utm_term=.70fb5545b4e1

Frye, Marilyn. 1983. The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press.

Heasley, Robert. 2005. “Queer Masculinities of Straight Men.” Men and Masculinities 7 (3): 310–20.

Kimmel, Michael. 2008. Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. New York: Harper.

Lawler, David. 2015. “Trump on Fiorina: ‘Look at that face. Would anyone vote for that?’” The Telegraph. September 10, 2015. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/donald-trump/11855165/Trump-on-Fiorina-Look-at-that-face.-Would-anyone-vote-for-that.html

Lett, Phoebe. 2016. “White Women Voted Trump. Now What?” The New York Times November 10. Accessed May 10, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/opinion/white-women-voted-trump-now-what.html?_r=0

Mutua, Athena. 2006. “Theorizing Progressive Black Masculinities.” In Progressive Black Masculinities, ed. Athena Mutua, pp. 3–42. New York, NY: Routledge.

Neal, Mark Anthony. 2006. New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity. New York: Routledge.

Nguyen, Tina. 2016. “Trump attacks Clinton for coughing, not having a ‘presidential look’.” Vanity Fair. September 6, 2016. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/09/trump-clinton-presidential-look

Radzik, Linda. 2015. “Reconciliation.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed February 25, 2017. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reconciliation/#Apo

Sanchez, Francisco, Stephanie Greenberg, William Ming Liu, and Eric Vilain. 2009. “Reported Effects of Masculine Ideals on Gay Men.” Psychology of Men and Masculinity 10 (1): 73–87.

Saturday Night Live. 2008. “A Nonpartisan Message from Governor Sarah Palin & Senator Hillary Clinton.” September 13, 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSOLz1YBFG0.

Smith, Nick. 2008. I Was Wrong: The Meanings of Apologies. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Tattelman, Ira. 2005. “Staging Sex and Masculinity at the Mineshaft.” Men and Masculinities 7(3): 300–09.

TIME. 2007. Cover May 21, 2007. http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20070521,00.html

TimesVideo. 2015. “Hillary Clinton’s Announcement Video.” The New York Times. April 12, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000003624500/hillary-clintons-announcement-video.html

TimesVideo. 2016. “Obama to Trump: Stop Whining.” The New York Times. October 18, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000004715581/obama-to-trump-stop-whining.html

Williams, Vanessa. 2016. “Black Women—Hillary Clinton’s Most Reliable Voting Bloc—Look Beyond Defeat.” November 12, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/black-women–hillary-clintons-most-reliable-voting-bloc–look-beyond-defeat/2016/11/12/86d9182a-a845-11e6-ba59-a7d93165c6d4_story.html?utm_term=.78e69f652662

Wilson, J. 2016. “Gary Johnson Called Donald Trump a Pussy Again.” A Libertarian Future. March 5, 2016. https://alibertarianfuture.com/2016-libertarian-party-primaries/gary-johnson-called-donald-trump-pussy/

Wright, Les. 2005. “Introduction to ‘Queer’ Masculinities.” Men and Masculinities 7 (3): 243–47.

by Regina Rini

ABSTRACT. This paper does four things: (1) It provides an analysis of the concept ‘fake news.’ (2) It identifies distinctive epistemic features of social media testimony. (3) It argues that partisanship-in-testimony-reception is not always epistemically vicious; in fact some forms of partisanship are consistent with individual epistemic virtue. (4) It argues that a solution to the problem of fake news will require changes to institutions, such as social media platforms, not just to individual epistemic practices.

Did you know that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS? Or that Mike Pence called Michelle Obama “the most vulgar First Lady we’ve ever had”? No, you didn’t know these things. You couldn’t know them, because these claims are false.[1] But many American voters believed them.

One of the most distinctive features of the 2016 campaign was the rise of “fake news,” factually false claims circulated on social media, usually via channels of partisan camaraderie. Media analysts and social scientists are still debating what role fake news played in Trump’s victory.[2] But whether or not it drove the outcome, fake news certainly affected the choices of some individual voters.

Why were people willing to believe easily dis-confirmable, often ridiculous, stories? In this paper I will suggest the following answer: people believe fake news because they acquire it through social media sharing, which is a peculiar sort of testimony. Social media sharing has features that reduce audience willingness to think critically or check facts. This effect is amplified when the testifier and audience share a partisan orientation. Shared partisan affiliation encourages testimony recipients to grant more credibility to testifiers than would otherwise be warranted.

So far these points may seem familiar. But the deeper aim of this paper is to normatively evaluate how fake news is transmitted, and here my answer may be less expected. I will argue that fake news transmission is often individually reasonable. That is, individual people typically act reasonably when they grant greater credibility to fellow partisans, even if this sometimes leads to the acquisition of false beliefs. This normative analysis generates a further claim about the remedy for fake news: it will not be solved by focusing on individual epistemic virtue. Rather, we must treat fake news as a tragedy of the epistemic commons, and its solution as a coordination problem. Fake news exploits otherwise reasonable practices of information transmission. Ending it will require institutional change.

This paper has four goals, corresponding to the following four parts. First, I give an analysis of the concept ‘fake news.’ Second, I identify the unusual epistemic features of news transmission via social media testimony. Third, I argue that partisanship in testimony is sometimes individually reasonable, and can be consistent with epistemic virtue despite predictably generating false beliefs. Fourth, I argue that we should treat the harms of partisan epistemology as an institutional, rather than individual, problem, and I offer an example of institutional improvement.

 

WHAT IS FAKE NEWS?

What is fake news? It is not merely false information conveyed by reportage. As the word ‘fake’ suggests, fake news requires intentional deception; honest reporting errors are not fake news.[3] When TIME journalist Zeke Miller falsely reported on Twitter that Donald Trump had removed a bust of MLK Jr. from the Oval Office, this was not fake news. Miller mistakenly believed that the bust had been removed, though in fact it was merely hidden behind a door (Gibbs 2017). Fake news is not merely false; it is deceptive.

But this is not yet sufficient to fully characterize fake news, because fake news involves a particular type of deception. It is more than mere lying. Suppose you ask me why I did not come to your Jeff Sessions Appreciation Party, and I falsely claim that I was doing the laundry. In fact, I was undergoing a superfluous root canal, an experience I deemed preferable to attending your party. This is not fake news, though obviously it is intentional deception. The ‘news’ part of ‘fake news’ implies that the deception is intended for an audience larger than the immediate recipient; fake news is meant to be shared and shared again.

The intentions behind fake news are also more complicated than in simple cases of lying. A moment ago I said that fake news requires intentional deception, but this may be too strong. Deception is not always the primary goal of fake news. Often the motive is financial rather than epistemic. Entire businesses, now infamously concentrated in Macedonia, exist to generate fake news headlines that attract fervent Internet clicking—and ad revenue (Silverman and Alexander 2016). The film studio 20th Century Fox recently created websites full of click-bait fake stories in order to attract social media attention to promote a new film (Rainey 2017). Presumably these entrepreneurial Macedonian teenagers and film producers did not care whether anyone ended up believing their fake news, so long as the clicks kept coming.

These examples show the complexity of motives for fake news; spreading false information is not the only goal. But deception does play some role, even in these cases. Fake news works as click-bait only if a large number of people choose to share links, and presumably this requires that at least some of them believe the story. People who make money from fake news are perfectly happy if nine-in-ten of their readers are not deceived, but they do need some percentage to be deceived long enough to convey the link to future clickers. So we can say that creators of fake news intend to deceive at least a part of their overall audience, even if this deception is merely instrumental and not the ultimate goal.

Of course, other fake news creators do intend to deceive as many people as possible. Committed partisans try to erode their opponents’ support by tricking persuadable voters. Foreign actors may be involved as well; some analysts claim that anti-Clinton fake news was manufactured by shady groups with links to Russian military intelligence.[4] For these creators, fake news needs to travel widely not only to generate clicks, but also to change epistemic states. We can call this aimed-at-deception form ‘pure’ fake news, while also keeping in mind the impure, deception-as-instrument form motivated by financial gain.

So, we can finally give a clear definition of fake news. A fake news story is one that purports to describe events in the real world, typically by mimicking the conventions of traditional media reportage, yet is known by its creators to be significantly false, and is transmitted with the two goals of being widely re-transmitted and of deceiving at least some of its audience.[5]

You’ll note that my definition of fake news does not specify how it is transmitted. In particular, I have not specified that it is spread through social media. Fake news can be spread other ways—email chains, posters on streetlamps, etc. But there is a strong contingent relationship between fake news and social media, especially in the 2016 election. I will therefore focus on social media fake news.

 

THE BENT TESTIMONY OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Why do people believe fake news? A first-pass answer is easy enough; they believe fake news because it is presented to them via testimony, and like most of us they typically accept testimony from others, all else equal. Fake news stories turn up in their social media feeds, evidently endorsed by people whom they trust (to some degree), and it’s natural to believe what trusted friends tell you.

The epistemology of testimony has received significant attention from philosophers in recent decades (e.g., Coady 1992; Lackey 2008; Goldberg 2010). A person counts as believing a proposition on the basis of testimony when she believes it because the proposition was presented to her by another person. This is typically an epistemically virtuous practice, as we rely upon others for our knowledge of many things distant from us in space or time. A community of people with a practice of accepting one another’s testimony will be able to learn far more than individuals who insist upon believing only what they discover on their own.

Of course, an epistemic practice of uncritically accepting testimony would be prime for abuse by liars and bullshitters.[6] Sensible use of testimony requires norms for blocking the acceptance of suspect cases. Some of these norms have to do with the identity of the testifier or features of her current motivation.[7] It is wise to suspend default acceptance of testimony from someone who wishes to sell you a used car. Other norms are about testimonial content; like all sources of evidence, it is reasonable to suspend confidence in a piece of testimony if it is radically at odds with what you already know about how the world works. If a new acquaintance tells me that she saw a squirrel steal a park-goer’s slice of pizza, I’m going to believe her. If she tells me that she saw a squirrel steal a police officer’s handgun and rob a bank, I’m going to require further evidence.

These are elementary points about the epistemology of testimony. But they allow us to see how peculiar the transmission of fake news is. I’m now going to argue that social media transmission of fake news is a form of testimony, but it’s a bent form of testimony.

Why is it a form of testimony at all? Look at an example. Suppose I believe that Donald Trump threatened to deport Lin-Manuel Miranda (though Miranda is an American citizen). My belief is false; Trump never said that.[8] But I believe it because I saw the headline circulating in my Facebook feed. My belief is therefore held on the basis of testimony; I believe it because it was presented as truth by another person.

Yet this is certainly not a standard case of testimony. For one thing, the relationship between the testifier and the content of her testimony is hard to categorize. In standard cases, the testifier makes an assertion. But when my friend posts a link to the story about Trump deporting Miranda, without further comment, is my friend asserting the content of that story?

Importantly, there is quite a lot of debate about this question, mostly in terms of whether people are rightly held accountable for posting or retweeting defective social media items. For example, in November 2015, Donald Trump himself posted to Twitter an infographic riddled with fake statistics, including the made-up claim that 81% of white homicide victims are killed by African–Americans (the actual figure is 15%) (Greenberg 2015). When challenged by Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly, Trump replied with a defense he has since given for other demonstrably false tweets: “Bill, am I gonna check every statistic? All it was is a retweet. It wasn’t from me” (Colvin 2016).

The “just a retweet” defense will be familiar to social media users. When called out for posting material that is false or offensive, people often insist (truthfully) that they are not the originator of the content—they only passed it along. They often insist that “a retweet is not an endorsement” and claim that they pass along content to encourage discussion, not necessarily to stand behind it.

Is a retweet an endorsement? When you post a news link to Facebook without comment, are you vouching for its truth? These are disputed norms of communication. Social media is a relatively new way of distributing information, and we have yet to settle on norms for how to interpret its use. We understand that a newspaper article with an embedded quotation isn’t necessarily affirming the content of the quote. But we don’t yet have a common understanding about social media shares.

Notice that where we do have established norms for older forms of communication, they can be quite nuanced. Consider this situation: a person on the streetcorner is handing out printed copies of a newsletter. Should you understand that this person believes most of the factual claims contained in the newsletter? It depends. If this person is taking payment, then probably not; newsagents don’t necessarily believe (or even read) much of what they sell. On the other hand, if the newsletter distributor isn’t being compensated, then it is reasonable to assume they believe the contents of what they are passing out. Why else would they bother doing so, unless they believe that they are communicating important truths?[9]

But, for now at least, social media sharing operates under unstable norms. People are happy to be understood as asserting the contents of shared news stories that turn out accurate (especially if they ‘scooped’ their friends) but insist that they meant no such assertion when trouble emerges. And, for now, our accountability conventions seem to tolerate this instability; we may roll our eyes at “a retweet is not an endorsement,” but we don’t (yet) place most embarrassed retweeters in the same category as outright liars or bullshitters.

The instability of these norms is one reason that I called social media sharing a bent form of testimony. The epistemic relationship between testifier and testimony is ambiguous, as we haven’t yet settled on a norm whereby sharing entails assertion.[10] Nevertheless, many of us treat social media sharing as if it were ordinary testimony, at least until something goes wrong. This is why the “a retweet is not an endorsement” mantra causes so much argument; many of us implicitly assume that our social media interlocutors do believe what they share, even though we are vaguely aware they may later disclaim it. This is part of what makes social media testimony aberrant.

There is a second reason that social media sharing of fake news is bent testimony: many fake news stories are ridiculous, seemingly violating a basic content-related norm of responsible testimony-reception, yet people accept the testimony anyway. Recall the earlier point that the reasonableness of default acceptance of testimony requires that we suspend confidence when a piece of testimony is radically at odds with what we know about the world. This norm seems to be routinely violated by social media users, who accept extraordinary stories about political enemies on mere say-so.

For example, consider the fiasco surrounding a Washington, DC, pizza parlor. For several weeks in 2016, social media posts circulated claiming that the restaurant’s basement was being used as a hub for child sexual abuse by a Satanic cult including Hillary Clinton and several of her senior staff. On December 4, 28-year-old Edgar Welch allegedly drove from North Carolina to Washington, with a loaded AR-15 rifle at his side, in order to “self-investigate” the allegations. Welch was reportedly shocked to discover no evidence of child sex trafficking in the pizza parlor, and thankfully was arrested without harming anyone (Goldman 2016).

This story is a truly bizarre thing to believe, even if you think Clinton and her staff are evil. If a cabal of extremely powerful individuals wished to conduct vile and criminal activities, why would they choose to do so in the basement of a pizza parlor? Wouldn’t their money and influence give them access to far more secure locations? The story is inconsistent with basic facts about human behavior, even assuming the worst of Clinton. Sensible employment of testimonial norms ought to filter out this sort of ridiculous story.

Yet Welch was not the only one who believed the pizza parlor story. According to a survey by YouGov and The Economist, 46% of Trump voters continued to believe the underlying conspiracy theory, even after the media attention focused on Welch’s folly (Frankovic 2016).

There is something about social media sharing that seems to deaden people’s normal application of consistency-with-the-world filtering on testimony. Before the era of social media, the pizza parlor story might have circulated by word of mouth among a particular paranoid sub-population (just as lurid urban legends have always surrounded the Clintons). But something about Facebook, etc. allowed a ridiculous story to build testimonial momentum to the point of acceptance by more than the furthest fringe.

I suspect that the two bent features of social media testimony are related to one another. Perhaps people are less inclined to subject ridiculous stories to scrutiny because we have unstable testimonial norms on social media. A friend posts a ridiculous story, without comment, and maybe they don’t really mean it. But then other friends ‘like’ the story, or comment with earnest revulsion, or share it themselves. Each of these individual communicative acts involves some ambiguity in the speaker’s testimonial intentions. But, when all appear summed together, this ambiguity seems to wash away. Perhaps the implicit thought is like this: could it really be that all these people aren’t really testifying to this? A thought like that might overwhelm ordinary skepticism about ridiculous testimony.

I am not sure that I’ve got this mechanism quite right. Clearly, this is an empirical hypothesis for social scientific investigation. But however the details go, it seems plausible that the bent aspects of social media testimony play a role in the transmission of fake news.

 

THE (INDIVIDUAL) EPISTEMIC VIRTUE OF PARTISANSHIP

So far I have tried to explain what fake news is and how it passes through testimony. These have been descriptive analyses. I’ll now turn to normative evaluation of social media transmission of fake news. I will defend a surprising conclusion: even though fake news is false and damaging, the testimonial practices propelling it are consistent with individual epistemic virtue. Specifically, I will argue it is partisanship that makes some fake-news-conveying practices reasonable, and partisanship is consistent with epistemic virtue.[11]

Before giving this argument I need to stress what I am not claiming. I am not claiming that it is good, full stop, for fake news to circulate and affect our collective political choices. That is obviously not a good thing. Nor am I claiming that partisanship is good in itself. What I am claiming is something more nuanced: given the realities of human psychology and politics, certain forms of epistemic partisanship are individually reasonable in the world as we actually confront it. This would not be the case in an ideal world, but that is not where we live. In effect, I am defending a form of non-ideal political–epistemic theory. Accordingly, I will argue that our normative focus should be on identifying realistic structural changes, rather than specifying idealized individual practice.

My first claim, then, is that partisanship-in-testimony-reception is sometimes compatible with epistemic virtue. That is, sometimes it makes sense to assign greater credibility to a testifier because you know you share a political affiliation with her.

The word ‘sometimes’ is important. I doubt that we should always assign greater credibility to co-partisans. If two people are testifying to the spectrometer-observed molecular mass of a particular carbon sample, it is probably not reasonable to trust the Democrat over the Republican, or vice versa. Rather, I mean to defend partisan epistemology within specific domains.

Which domains? The domain of politically normative claims, certainly, such as ‘equality of opportunity is more important than equality of outcome.’ I include also many morally normative claims. And I include some claims that are seemingly purely descriptive when these are relevant to political decisions. Most importantly, I include characterological judgments about particular political candidates. I will call all of these politically relevant claims. My position, then, is that partisanship in testimony reception is reasonable with regard to politically relevant claims.

Let me start with testimony about obviously normative matters, political and moral. Here I will simply assume that it is sometimes good practice to accept normative testimony from others, though some philosophers dispute this.[12] Allowing this assumption, I am now adding the further claim that it is sometimes reasonable to be differentially receptive to normative testimony from others, depending on their partisan affiliation.

Why? Consider what partisan affiliation involves. Though we sometimes bemoan it as mere tribalism, this is an exaggeration. Partisan affiliation reflects a person’s value commitments. Political parties are partly defined by common views on the normatively appropriate shape of society. When I learn a person’s partisan affiliation, I learn something about the political and moral values she endorses.

Of course, it is foolish to take partisan affiliation as signaling a monolithic set of values. Parties have significant normative diversity within them, as shown by recent confrontations between Bernie Sanders and establishment Democrats, or Trump and traditional Republicans. But we can still treat partisan affiliation as a reliable indicator of broad categories of values; that’s why many people are hesitant to declare their partisan affiliation in conflict-averse social contexts.

So, when I learn that another person shares my partisan affiliation, I learn that she and I share at least some significant number of normative values. Or, to put it another way, I learn that she tends to get normative questions right (by my normative lights). She establishes herself as a more reliable normative judge than I would take her to be by default, or especially if she were affiliated to an opposed party.

Another way to make the point is to think about whether another person is my epistemic peer in normative domains. Typically, I should accept testimony only from those who are (reasonably assumed to be) at least as good as I am at making judgments in the domain about which they testify. Regarding sensory judgments (e.g., “Look over there, that’s Lenny Kravitz!”), part of the motivation for default acceptance of testimony is that we assume others’ perceptual systems are similar to ours (Foley 2001). However, if a person makes repeated perceptual errors, then I should cease regarding her as a peer and discount her perceptual testimony.

Presumably something similar applies to normative testimony. If a person repeatedly makes normatively suspect claims, I should begin to doubt that she is my normative peer, and eventually I should discount her normative testimony. Adam Elga suggests that in normative domains, our only epistemic peers are those who agree with us on a broad swath of claims. He offers the following case:

[C]onsider Ann and Beth, two friends who stand at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Consider the claim that abortion is morally permissible. Does Ann consider Beth a peer with respect to this claim? That is: setting aside her own reasoning about the abortion claim (and Beth’s contrary view about it), does Ann think Beth would be just as likely as her to get things right? (Elga 2007, 492–3)

According to Elga, the answer is no. He reasons that, if Ann and Beth have discussed related issues, then Ann will know that Beth has (according to Ann) many mistaken views about such things as “whether human beings have souls, whether it is permissible to withhold treatment from certain terminally ill infants, and whether rights figure prominently in a correct ethical theory” (Elga 2007, 493). Since Beth is wrong about these issues, it would be reasonable for Ann to treat her moral testimony about abortion as less than that of a peer. On the other hand, Elga says, if they agreed about these other issues, then Ann could reasonably regard Beth as a peer on the abortion question. The upshot, says Elga, is that “with respect to many controversial issues, the associates who one counts as peers tend to have views that are similar to one’s own” (Elga 2007, 494).[13]

We can infer many of a person’s normative beliefs from her partisan affiliation, so partisan affiliation is a reasonable proxy for epistemic peerhood in political and moral normative domains. And social media participants tend to group themselves into partisan networks (Bakshy et al. 2015). People often know the partisan affiliation of their social media contacts, especially those who regularly post links to political news. Social media users treat these partisan signals as indicators of whom they can regard as normative peers, and this allows them to decide which testimony to receive.

So far I have been talking about testimony that is overtly normative—claims about how we should live together. But much of fake news is ostensibly descriptive. It claims that such-and-such happened, or that so-and-so said something. These are not normative claims. Is it reasonable to use partisan affiliation, which I’ve claimed is an indicator of normative peerhood, to assess testimony about descriptive claims?

I think so, at least when the testimony is politically related. This is because the act of transmitting political news implicates normative decisions on the part of the testifier. Often these are decisions about what is politically important. Our audience has only so much time to spend reading about politics, so we need to avoid wasting this time on trivialities. Political importance is a value-laden notion; the set of topics that are important to a political conservative will not be identical with those important to a progressive. Importance also plays a role in weighing the degree of confidence one must have before relaying an uncertain news report. Typically, the need to be confident scales with the importance of the subject matter (though this can be complicated in cases that require urgent response).

My point: trusting a testifier regarding political news requires trusting her judgments about political importance, and this means believing that she has, by and large, the right political values. Partisan affiliation provides this information.

This is especially true when testifiers offer characterological evidence about particular political candidates. Characterological evidence is dangerous because it can be easily biased through selective reporting. Everyone (political candidate or not) has some negative traits and has made some bad choices. If I choose to report only negative information, deliberately excluding redeeming characteristics, then relying on my testimony could lead you to a harsh assessment of anyone’s character. Hence, if you are going to rely on my testimony about events related to a candidate’s character, you need to trust that I have good judgment about the representativeness of particular stories, whether additional details might be exculpatory, and so forth. You need to trust that you and I share values relevant to these judgments—and partisan affiliation is a good indicator.

I’ve argued, then, that partisanship can be relevant to assessing the trustworthiness of testifiers on politically relevant claims—not just openly normative claims, but also some related descriptive claims about events, especially those that are meant to provide characterological evidence about candidates. If I am right, then some degree of partisanship-in-testimony-reception is indeed compatible with epistemic virtue.

Of course, the ‘some degree’ qualifier is important. Many epistemic virtues can become vicious in excess. Skepticism is “healthy” in moderation, but becomes destructive as it grows. One form of epistemic injustice is ‘credibility excess,’ in which we grant inappropriately high testimonial credibility on the basis of a testifier’s demography.[14] These are types of epistemic vice that come from overextending virtuous practice. Similarly, it is obviously possible to make an epistemic vice of partisanship. One can overextend the credibility granted to co-partisans, either by simply assigning too much credibility or by allowing it to intrude into non-politically-relevant domains.[15]

Hence, my claim is obviously not that one should always believe whatever testimony is given by one’s co-partisans. That is false. But, generally speaking, one may (and perhaps should) attribute greater credibility to co-partisan testifiers than to others. This is simply reasonable, given that shared partisan affiliation points to shared normative values.

And this, finally, allows to us to see why it is individually reasonable to accept the bent testimony of social media sharing. Recall the core ambiguity of bent testimony: people who share stories on social media may or may not be lending their epistemic imprimatur (“a retweet is not an endorsement”—unless it is), yet we tend to treat what they share as if it were unambiguous testimony anyway. I suggest that we do this because the reasonable credibility boost we give to co-partisans overcomes the hesitancy we feel about bent testimony.

The model is like this: I read a story on social media, shared by one or two of my co-partisan friends. The story is shocking, and I am vaguely aware that my friends’ communicative intentions are ambiguous. Maybe they aren’t really putting their imprimatur on this story. But I know that these friends share my partisan affiliation, hence many of my normative values. They wouldn’t lie to me, right? They would exercise reasonable judgment about balancing confidence in important information, right? They wouldn’t be confused about the relevance of this information to assessing a candidate’s character, right?

Not always right, of course. But right often enough that trusting my co-partisans is reasonable. Hence, despite some qualms over the bent ambiguity of their testimony, I find myself starting to believe the stories they transmit.

Of course, if we were epistemic angels, we’d be more careful to check our testifiers’ sources, to look for independent verification, to ask questions. But all that is true about accepting any testimony, not just on social media or among partisans. We take others’ words for it when we just don’t have the time to go out and investigate claims for ourselves. Social media sharing is the same. There is so much information available, and only so much time to conduct inquiries. In an epistemically non-ideal world, given our temporal and cognitive limitations, it simply makes sense to trust others, even when we antecedently know that this will sometimes lead us astray.[16]

Fake news, then, is a bad side effect of an individually reasonable epistemic practice. If we want to solve the problem of fake news, we’re unlikely to find it in demanding revision to individual epistemic choices. Yes, we could insist that everyone become a far savvier user of social media testimony. But most people won’t, and in our epistemically non-ideal world, most are reasonable not to bother.

If we want to solve the problem of fake news, we need to look beyond individual epistemic practices—we need to look at institutions.

 

INSTITUTIONS FOR ACCOUNTABILITY

I’ve argued that fake news is transmitted through a bent form of testimony and benefits from credibility gained through partisan affiliation. I’ve also argued that the problem is not likely to be addressed by focusing on partisanship, which had seemed the likely target. Instead, I’ll now suggest, the best place to focus is on institutional arrangements that reduce the bentness of social media testimony.

Recall the core bent property of social media testimony: we have an unstable set of norms for assigning testimonial intentions to social media shares. We tend to treat them as conveying our interlocutors’ testimonial approval, yet we also sometimes accept that “a retweet is not an endorsement.”

It’s this ambiguity that allows fake news to slip through. Resolving our ambiguous norms would greatly reduce the effectiveness of fake news. If we firmly established the norm that social media sharers are understood as conveying testimonial endorsement, then people would be less likely to share unverified stories, to avoid later being held responsible for errors. Alternatively, if we firmly established the norm that social media shares (without further comment) communicate no testimonial endorsement whatsoever, then people would be less likely to come to believe fake news on the basis of their friends’ transmissions.

Which of these norms should we aim to establish? I think we must disqualify the second option on grounds of irreality; it is very unlikely that we will be able to convince people to begin treating social media sharing as communicating no testimonial endorsement whatsoever. After all, people use social media to communicate facts about themselves and their friends: so-and-so had a baby; my partner got a new job; look at these amazing photos of this place I could afford to travel to! It is reasonable to expect these reports to be truthful (allowing for self-promotional burnishing). A norm that required us to selectively withhold trust from a subset of ostensibly factual stories (those that are politically related) transmitted via a medium we usually trust seems unlikely to be psychologically efficacious.

A norm of accountability seems preferable then; we should aim for a norm that denies “a retweet is not an endorsement.” People who share news should be unambiguously understood to lend their testimonial endorsement (barring explicit disclaimer), and should be held accountable if their claims are later shown false, in just the same way that a person spreading false rumors about an acquaintance may be held accountable. ‘Holding accountable,’ of course, needn’t involve punishment or even condemnation. It may be simply a loss of testimonial reputation, such that repeated offenses lead to one’s justified discredit as a participant in testimonial exchange.

How do we replace our ambiguous social media testimonial norms with a clear norm of accountability? Unfortunately, this may not be easily accomplished by individuals. It would require that we each keep track of where we learned every piece of purported political news, track later revelations about their accuracy, and trace debunked stories back to specific social media interlocutors. Sometimes days or weeks pass between the initial promotion of fake news and later debunking. It’s not likely at all that many of us could put in the cognitive effort needed to sustain this norm.

This is why institutions matter. When the sustenance of a norm demands unrealistic resources from individual adherents, we can offload these demands to institutions. For a simple example, consider how pedestrians and cyclists interact on busy pathways. Generally, it is best for the pathway to be split—but which side is for pedestrians and which for cyclists? This can vary from place to place, and we cannot assume everyone will remember which is the pedestrian side in every place they visit. A simple institutional solution offloads the demand from memory: paint a line down the middle of the pathway and draw pedestrian and cycle icons on the appropriate sides. The paint facilitates adherence to the norm and makes accountability unambiguous.

We need something similar for social media testimony. The obvious source of infrastructure is the social media platforms themselves. If we could offload onto them the demands of keeping track of who-testified-to-what, then we could sustain a norm of holding people accountable for sharing fake news.

This may sound worrisomely as if I am calling for social media platforms to arbitrate the veracity of news stories and then censor their own users. Social media platforms will certainly refuse to do these things, and we probably would not want them to anyway. But there are milder solutions. I will conclude by describing one—though probably a better solution can be devised by professional technology and communication specialists.

We can start with something social media platforms are already doing. On December 16, 2016, Facebook announced that it will implement new measures against the distribution of fake news.[17] Users will be able to report stories they believe are false. Facebook will not determine veracity itself; instead it will refer frequently reported stories to independent fact-checking organizations such as Snopes.com. If these organizations judge a story false, Facebook’s system will flag it as ‘disputed,’ and this flag will be visible to viewers, along with a link to the fact-checker’s debunking. Anyone subsequently attempting to share the story will be confronted with a prompt informing them of its disputed status. They can still choose to share the story, but it will be auto-flagged as disputed, and Facebook may weight its algorithm to display other posts ahead of disputed stories.

This set of measures is a good idea, and will certainly help to sustain an accountability norm. A story that has been flagged as disputed is, presumably, less likely to be trusted on the basis of testimony, and people who persist in sharing disputed stories may suffer reputational consequences. But there are limitations to these measures. Most importantly, they may move too slowly. Many social media stories are ephemeral; everyone is talking about the latest outrage today, but by tomorrow they have moved on to the next (especially amid the perpetual chaos of the Trump administration). Facebook’s reporting-and-referral-to-Snopes method will take time to catch up with individual fake news stories. By the time a story has been flagged disputed, much of the audience will have already seen it. Of course, it is good to take measures that reduce the durability of fake news by warning latecomers. But it would be better still to get ahead of the next fake story.

Hence, I suggest that social media platforms provide the infrastructure for tracking the testimonial reputation of individual users. Facebook already knows exactly what each user chooses to share. It will also soon have a database of disputed stories, courtesy of the measures it began implementing in December. It would be computationally simple, then, for Facebook to calculate a Reputation Score for individual users, based upon the frequency with which each user chose to share disputed stories. Reputation Scores could be displayed in a subtle way, perhaps with a colored icon beside user photos.[18]

Note that this proposal does not involve censorship. Facebook would not prevent anyone from sharing or receiving any story. Individual users could choose to ignore Reputation Scores. Facebook could provide optional settings for users’ News Feeds, allowing them to deprioritize posts from those with low Reputation Scores, but this need not be the default.

The key advantage of this system is that it offloads memory resources for testimonial track records from individual users to institutional infrastructure. Doing so would encourage a norm of accountability for social media sharing; people could easily identify those who routinely share debunked stories, and the “retweet is not an endorsement” line would become increasingly implausible as track records tabulated. Gradually, our ambiguous testimonial norm could be displaced by a norm expecting genuine endorsement from unadorned sharing.

There are some problems with this proposal, of course. One is the danger of diluting the viewpoint neutrality of social media platforms. Some people continue to insist that fake news stories are true, even after repeated debunking. Months after the pizza parlor debacle, it is still possible to find new blog posts exploring the “conspiracy” and denouncing social media platforms for “censoring” discussion. My proposal would surely result in such people being assigned very unfavorable Reputation Scores by Facebook, and presumably the platform would prefer not to alienate any users. But I think that this problem is unavoidable for any serious institutional response to fake news. Notice that Facebook’s new measures already depart from viewpoint neutrality by tagging stories as disputed.

A more particular problem with my proposal is that it sets a worrisome precedent for social media platforms ‘ranking’ their users. Dystopic speculative fiction regularly imagines that we will spend much of our future struggling to secure positive ratings for our social media personae—see Gary Shteyngart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story, or the Black Mirror episode “Nosedive.” This anxiety becomes especially pressing with repressive governments; recently, some local authorities in China began calculating a ‘social-credit score’ for citizens, which determines access to some government services and allegedly may include politically related social media behavior (The Economist 2016). Perhaps the danger of such possibilities is severe enough that we should avoid any possible precedent, including the Reputation Score of my proposal.

I am sure there is a better, subtler, solution than my specific proposal. My fundamental point is only that we should start thinking in institutional terms. We need to resolve the ambiguous norms that make social media testimony so bent. Proposals addressing partisanship or other aspects of individual epistemic virtues are unlikely to work—partly because, as I’ve argued, some partisanship in testimony is individually reasonable. The most plausible solutions will be institutional, and social media platforms must do something to provide infrastructure for an accountability norm. Better norms, facilitated by wise institutions, are what will stop fake news exploiting gaps in otherwise reasonable norms of communication and belief.

 

Regina Rini teaches Bioethics at New York University. Her research focuses on the cognitive science of morality and the social significance of moral diversity. She is currently working on two books: one about the ethics of microaggression and the other about moral agency and disagreement.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to the editor and an anonymous referee for helpful suggestions on this paper.

 

REFERENCES

Allcott, Hunt, and Matthew Gentzkow. 2017. “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 31 (2): 211–236.

Bakshy, Eytan, Solomon Messing, and Lada A. Adamic. 2015. “Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook.” Science 348 (6239): 1130–1132.

Brayton, Ed. 2016. “Please Stop Sharing Links to These Sites.” Patheos. September 18. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2016/09/18/please-stop-sharing-links-to-these-sites/.

Coady, C. A. J. 1992. Testimony: A Philosophical Study. Oxford University Press.

Colvin, Jill. 2016. “Donald Trump’s Favorite Excuse? It Was Just a ‘Retweet’.” Associated Press. February 22. http://elections.ap.org/content/donald-trumps-favorite-excuse-it-was-just-retweet.

Davis, Emmalon. 2016. “Typecasts, Tokens, and Spokespersons: A Case for Credibility Excess as Testimonial Injustice.” Hypatia 31 (3): 485–501.

The Economist. 2016. “China Invents the Digital Totalitarian State.” December 16. http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21711902-worrying-implications-its-social-credit-project-china-invents-digital-totalitarian.

Elga, Adam. 2007. “Reflection and Disagreement.” Nous 41 (3): 478–502.

Foley, Richard. 2001. Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Frankfurt, Harry. 2005. On Bullshit. Princeton University Press.

Frankovic, Kathy. 2016. “Belief in Conspiracies Largely Depends on Political Identity.” YouGov. December 17–20. https://today.yougov.com/news/2016/12/27/belief-conspiracies-largely-depends-political-iden/.

Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press.

Gibbs, Nancy. 2017. “A Note to Our Readers.” TIME. January 24. http://time.com/4645541/donald-trump-white-house-oval-office/.

Goldberg, Sanford. 2010. Relying on Others: An Essay in Epistemology. Oxford University Press.

Goldman, Adam. 2016. “The Comet Ping Pong Gunman Answers Our Reporter’s Questions.” The New York Times. December 7. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/us/edgar-welch-comet-pizza-fake-news.html.

Greenberg, Jon. 2015. “Trump’s Pants on Fire Tweet that Blacks Killed 81% of White Homicide Victims.” Politifact. November 23. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/nov/23/donald-trump/trump-tweet-blacks-white-homicide-victims/.

Hills, Alison. 2009. “Moral Testimony and Moral Epistemology.” Ethics 120 (1): 94–127.

Kruger, Justin, and David Dunning. 1999. “Unskilled and Unaware of it: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77 (6): 1121–34.

Lackey, Jennifer. 2008. Learning from Words: Testimony as a Source of Knowledge. Oxford University Press.

Lynch, Michael Patrick. 2016. The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data. New York: Liveright Publishing.

McGrath, Sarah. 2007. “Moral Disagreement and Moral Expertise.” In Oxford Studies in Metaethics Vol. 4, edited by Russ Shafer-Landau, 87–108. Oxford University Press.

Medina, José. 2011. “The Relevance of Credibility Excess in a Proportional View of Epistemic Injustice: Differential Epistemic Authority and the Social Imaginary.” Social Epistemology 25 (1): 15–35.

Mosseri, Adam. 2016. “News Feed FYI: Addressing Hoaxes and Fake News.” Facebook Newsroom. December 15. http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/12/news-feed-fyi-addressing-hoaxes-and-fake-news/.

Norton, Ben, and Glenn Greenwald. 2016. “Washington Post Disgracefully Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist From a New, Hidden, and Very Shady Group.” The Intercept. November 26. https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/washington-post-disgracefully-promotes-a-mccarthyite-blacklist-from-a-new-hidden-and-very-shady-group/.

Pronin, Emily, Daniel Y. Lin, and Lee Ross. 2002. “The Bias Blind Spot: Perceptions of Bias in Self Versus Others.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28 (3): 369–381.

Rainey, James. 2017. “20th Century Fox Apologizes for ‘A Cure for Wellness’ Fake News Promos.” Variety. February 16. http://variety.com/2017/film/news/cure-for-wellness-fake-news-promos-studio-apologizes-1201990634/.

Silverman, Craig. 2016. “This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake News Stories Outperformed Real News on Facebook.” BuzzFeed. November 16. https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook.

Silverman, Craig, and Lawrence Alexander. 2016. “How Teens in The Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters With Fake News.” BuzzFeed. November 3. https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo.

Sliwa, Paulina. 2012. “In Defense of Moral Testimony.” Philosophical Studies 158 (2): 175–195.

Snopes.com. 2016a. “Shots Hired.” October 14. http://www.snopes.com/wikileaks-cofirms-hillary-clinton-sold-weapons-to-isis/.

Snopes.com. 2016b. “A ‘Vulgar’ Lie. October 15. http://www.snopes.com/mike-pence-calls-michelle-obama-vulgar/.

Snopes.com. 2016c. “Puerto Rico Suave.” November 4. http://www.snopes.com/trump-to-deport-lin-manuel-miranda/.

Timberg, Craig. 2016. “Russian Propaganda Effort Helped Spread ‘Fake News’ During Election, Experts Say.” The Washington Post. November 24. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-propaganda-effort-helped-spread-fake-news-during-election-experts-say/2016/11/24/793903b6-8a40-4ca9-b712-716af66098fe_story.html.

Zimdars, Melissa. 2016. “False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and Satirical ‘News’ Sources.” http://d279m997dpfwgl.cloudfront.net/wp/2016/11/Resource-False-Misleading-Clickbait-y-and-Satirical-%E2%80%9CNews%E2%80%9

 

ENDNOTES

[1] For the Clinton story, see Snopes.com (2016a). For the Pence story, see Snopes.com (2016b).

[2] Silverman (2016) claims that the top 20 fake news headlines of the 2016 election cycle generated more Facebook engagement than the top 20 headlines from reputable news sources. Allcott and Gentzkow (2017), however, argue that fake news was unlikely to have been the determining factor in Trump’s victory.

[3] Addendum, July 2017: This paper was written in January and February 2017. Since that time, the term ‘fake news’ has acquired an additional use, especially in tweets by President Trump. In this new usage, ‘fake news’ seems to mean any form of reportage that the speaker disagrees with. For example, on February 6 2017 President Trump tweeted: “Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election. Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting.” (https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/828574430800539648) A further innovation is the extension of the term from particular news stories to entire news organizations. We can see this evolution in Trump tweets like “Mainstream (FAKE) media refuses to state our long list of achievements, including 28 legislative signings, strong borders & great optimism!” (April 29 2017, https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/858375278686613504) and “The Fake News Media works hard at disparaging & demeaning my use of social media because they don’t want America to hear the real story!” (May 28 2017, https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/868985285207629825). However, this seems to be an idiosyncratic use of the term among Trump and his affiliates. This paper will persist with analysis of the original use of ‘fake news’, as it emerged during the 2016 campaign.

[4] In November, the Washington Post described claims by anonymous “experts” at the website PropOrNot that many fabricated anti-Clinton stories were amplified by Russian propaganda organs (Timberg 2016). But other journalists dispute the reliability of these claims (Norton and Greenwald 2016).

[5] Note that this definition excludes satirical news of the sort featured in The Daily Show or The Onion. Satire does not typically aim to deceive; its comedic effect relies upon the audience appreciating that it is engaged in exaggeration or parody. There is, however, a peculiar genre of Internet pseudo-satire, one that is carefully designed to trick some but not all readers. The joke is on gullible people, who are meant to earnestly share dross and then be snickered at by their savvier social media friends. The goal of pseudo-satire, splitting the audience into savvy jokers and gullible butts-of-jokes, distinguishes it from typical fake news. Typical fake news does not require that any of the audience see through the deception, and of course is usually intended to be believed by as many as possible.

[6] A bullshitter, in the sense identified by Harry Frankfurt (2005), is distinct from a liar. A liar makes claims she knows to be false. A bullshitter makes claims that may or may not be true; she is indifferent to whether they turn out right, though she wants others to believe her regardless. Some creators of fake news, especially those with a commercial motive, are technically bullshitters rather than liars.

[7] Our existing practices for filtering testifiers are defective in a number of ways. One important way is that we tend to allow a person’s apparent race or gender to affect the degree of credibility we assign them. This is epistemically non-ideal and a form of injustice (Fricker 2007).

[8] Snopes.com (2016c).

[9] Of course, this does not mean that you should believe the contents of their newsletter. A reliable imperative of city living is to avoid accepting any piece of paper handed out on streetcorners.

[10] Technically, a communicative act isn’t testimony at all if the ‘speaker’ does not intend to imply the truthfulness of what they communicate. So, if “a retweet is not an endorsement” is right, then purportedly factual retweets and shares cannot be testimony. But I will stick with talking about ‘testimony,’ since we don’t yet have another word for ambiguous speech acts that may or may not be testimony depending on as-yet-unsettled communicative norms.

[11] A brief autobiographical digression: I imagine some readers will assume my position is motivated by personal inclination. They will assume that I am a dedicated partisan seeking to vindicate my own opposition-flaying practices. But the truth is the opposite. My own inclinations are anti-partisan; I tend to irritate comrades by policing their insufficient interpretive charity toward our opponents. I am perhaps less inclined than most to engage in partisan epistemic filtering. (One should, of course, be extremely cautious about introspectively attributing exceptional epistemic practices to oneself (Kruger and Dunning 1999; Pronin et al. 2002). What I claim here is based upon others’ frustrated descriptions of my disappointingly unpartisan responses.) In fact, I argue elsewhere that we have strong moral duties to aim to understand, and even empathize with, those with whom we disagree on moral and political topics. Hence the position I defend here is not a natural one for me to take. My motivation for adopting it is a second-order extension of my commitment to empathizing with those with whom I disagree; here I am trying to empathize with those who disagree with me about the practice of political disagreement!

[12] See Hills (2009) for challenges to moral testimony, and Sliwa (2012) for a defense.

[13] Sarah McGrath (2007) challenges Elga on this point: she notes that even if Ann and Beth disagree on issues adjacent to abortion, they probably agree on many background moral beliefs about e.g., lying, murder, slavery, etc. Given the great frequency with which they do agree, Ann should regard Beth as a peer after all. For my part, I’m not sure. It’s not clear that we have guidelines for which or how many topics should count as “related” when we assess peerhood with respect to a particular judgment. I can’t settle that here.

[14] The term ‘credibility excess’ comes from Fricker (2007), though Fricker herself argues that epistemic injustice is primarily a problem of credibility deficit. But see Medina (2011) and Davis (2016) for different views.

[15] At extremes, partisan fragmentation risks undermining the sharing of normative reasons that is essential to democratic citizenship. See Lynch (2016, chapter 3) for worries about the Internet’s role in accelerating this trend.

[16] I am not denying that individual people can improve their personal practices for using social media. One easy improvement is to discredit links to news sources with a history of misleading or false reporting. Two prominent lists of these sources are available from Zimdars (2016) and Brayton (2016).

[17] See Mosseri (2016).

[18] A complication: what if I want to share a story that I know is false, precisely in order to explicitly alert my audience to its falseness? How would the Reputation Score algorithm avoid counting this against me? One solution might be to allow me to attach a disputed flag to a link myself as I post it, thus explicitly signaling that I am not endorsing the story. Such pre-tagged disputed stories would not count against one’s Reputation Score.

by Thomas Wilk 

ABSTRACT. During the 2016 US Presidential campaign and in the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump, many of us have tried to hold friends, family, and acquaintances accountable for their support of a candidate and campaign that we judged to be racist, xenophobic, sexist, transphobic, ableist, and authoritarian. Even when our friends and family avowed, for example, anti-racist norms, our attempts to hold them to those norms were often met with rejections of our standing to do so: What gives you the right to call me out for my vote? In this paper, I argue for the regrettable conclusion that these challenges to our standing to hold are, in at least some cases, justified on the grounds that the targets of our holdings have little evidence that we would allow ourselves to be reciprocally held accountable. As such, recognizing our standing to hold them accountable would be a threat to their agency. I conclude by arguing that we now ought to engage in a project of rebuilding the kinds of communities in which the mutual trust that is foundational to our moral practices can be rebuilt.

 

INTRODUCTION

Who are you to tell me what I should do? What gives you the right to order me around? How dare you call me a racist!? Many of us have heard these refrains over the course of the 2016 US Presidential campaign and since the election of Donald Trump. We try talk to Trump supporters—family, former classmates, hometown friends, and online acquaintances—about the racism, xenophobia, sexism, transphobia, ableism, and authoritarianism that some of us have judged to be endemic to his campaign and nascent administration. We try to hold them accountable for supporting him, and, almost inevitably, we meet with responses like these.

In this essay, I aim to develop an understanding of these encounters by framing them as attempts to use speech acts to hold others accountable to deontic moral norms that they themselves espouse. I am not concerned with attempts to hold avowed white nationalists to anti-racist moral norms but rather with attempts to hold those who avow anti-racism to those very norms. Even in these cases, we often meet with the above refrains. In this paper, I treat these challenges as attempts to reject our standing felicitously pull off the speech acts in question and so to hold our targets accountable.

My central aim will be to determine whether these challenges to our standing to hold are justified in such cases or whether these refrains are merely ploys to evade accepting responsibility for one’s actions. In what follows, I argue that there is good reason to think that these challenges are justified in some cases, even if this is a regrettable result. I examine a variety of ways in which the standing to hold can be undermined, and conclude that in the kinds of one-dimensional, thin relationships in which these sorts of challenges often arise, recognizing the standing of another to hold one to one’s antecedent moral obligations presents a significant threat to one’s agency. If this is right, then one is justified in rejecting another’s standing to hold in these instances.

I begin developing my account of these challenges by presenting a prima facie case for differentiation in the standing to hold accountable. I then shift my focus to identifying a species of holding—second-personal speech acts of holding to deontic moral norms—by way of a topography of the terrain of holding responsible. Focusing on this species, I turn to the question of who, if anyone, has the requisite standing to felicitously pull off these speech acts by examining how these holdings are related to the more familiar act of issuing an order. I argue that, like orders, alethic holdings have agent-relative normative inputs, i.e., the standing to felicitously issue them is indexed to particular individuals by virtue of their position in some social-normative space, but unlike orders, the standing to issue an alethic holding is not a matter of broadly institutional norms but of second-personal recognition. In the final sections, I turn to the work of Linda Radzik to argue that standing to hold can be undermined when recognizing such standing would present a threat to someone’s agency. One can justifiably reject the standing of another to hold one accountable when one cannot trust the other to recognize one’s reciprocal standing. Recognition of standing in such a case subsumes the target of holding in a hierarchy where one did not previously exist. I conclude by drawing some lessons from this account for our fraught attempts to hold our fellow citizens to account for their support of what many of us perceive to be a racist, xenophobic, sexist, transphobic, ableist, authoritarian administration.

 

NORMS OF HOLDING RESPONSIBLE

Human beings have hit on a variety of practices for holding ourselves and one another accountable to our own commitments, prudential norms, etiquette, laws, and moral norms. Some of these practices are coercive, others merely suggestive. Some are broadly effective, others only mildly so. The mechanisms of enforcement are varied. Some practices rely on the threat of pain, imprisonment, or death, others on social sanctions such as distancing or banishment. Still others leverage psychological mechanisms such as shame, guilt, and embarrassment. In each case, accompanying the norms to which we are accountable—the norms of prudence, morality, and the like—there are norms that govern the practices of holding others accountable to those first-order norms. These norms of holding determine when one has the standing to hold another accountable as well as the appropriate methods of doing so. It is not my business, for example, if you, dear reader, are ordering a decadent brownie sundae in violation of the norms of prudence, and even if it were my business—say, if you were my partner—it would certainly be out of line for me to enforce the norm by ripping the sundae from your hands and throwing it on the floor. This essay is about these second-order norms as they apply to cases of holding to deontic moral norms.

Beginning with Strawson’s influential paper “Freedom and Resentment,” there is a rich literature that examines what it is to take someone to responsible. Much of this inquiry is endeavored on the way to answering questions about what it is to be responsible or as part of some other broader project (Strawson 1962; Korsgaard 1992; Darwall 2006; Wallace 1994; Watson 1996; Oakley 1991; Smith 2007; Maher 2010). More recently, however, greater attention has been paid both to taking someone to be responsible and, importantly for us, to holding someone responsible. Examining some of this literature, we can see a prima facie case that the standing to hold is not universal.

1. A. Cohen has examined the challenges posed by hypocrisy and complicity to one’s standing to hold another accountable. Focusing on the case of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, he argues that both parties face a “powerful tu quoque challenge” that undermines each side’s standing “to point the finger at the other with no comment on his own glass house” (2006, 110–11). Cohen argues that Israel lacks the standing to condemn Palestinian acts of terror without first examining its own role in causing the grievances to which terrorist acts are a response and in creating the conditions under which the terrorist response is the only one available (2006, 114–15). By Cohen’s lights, not just anyone has the standing to hold someone else responsible. Hypocrisy and complicity potentially undermine such standing.
2. A. Duff has similarly argued that standing to hold accountable can be undermined if one has previously wronged the person one is trying to blame or if one incited the wrongdoing for which one is leveling blame (2010, 129). Linda Radzik has advanced this line of inquiry proposing three principles that she claims underwrite the norms of standing to hold responsible. She has argued that “the importance of liberty in self-regarding behavior, the moral significance of special interpersonal relationships, and the interests victims have in asserting their own authority” can each give rise to reasons that undermine one’s standing to hold in particular cases (2011, 597).

These authors lend credence to the thought that the standing to hold accountable is differentiated rather than universal. As we’ll see, such standing is the product of its recognition by others, and there are a variety of reasons such recognition might be withheld. Our question is whether the “Who are you to tell me . . . ?” challenges that have been issued by our Trump-supporting friends, family, and acquaintances legitimately undermine our standing to hold. Further on, I’ll develop and extend Radzik’s account to argue that these challenges to standing are legitimate, but first I want to step back and sketch some of the contours of the broader domain of holding accountable. In quickly canvassing the literature on the standing conditions for holding, I haven’t yet provided an account of what it is to hold accountable. Is it merely judging one to be so? Is it having a certain constellation of reactive attitudes with respect to them? Or does it require specific action toward them in the form of rebuke, sanction, or some other speech or physical act? How does holding responsible work? How does the act of holding responsible—whatever it is—function as the act that it is? To begin sketching answers to these questions, we first need a picture of the broad terrain of treating others as responsible. A good place to start is with Colleen Macnamara’s account (2011).

 

THE TOPOGRAPHY OF HOLDING ACCOUNTABLE

Macnamara offers a picture that aims to capture the ways in which the complex attitudes and activities of taking others to be responsible fit together in what she dubs the participant stance, i.e., the orientation we take toward other normatively bound beings.[1] Her picture is one of three concentric circles that together represent the participant stance with all the attitudes and activities that are constitutive of it. In the outermost circle but excluded from the other two are attitudes and activities involved in treating another as a person other than those involved in appraising her conduct or holding her responsible. The examples are multitudinous and varied: making pacts with another, telling her secrets, expecting her to avoid emotional pain, regarding her with suspicion, falling head over heels for her. In the middle ring but excluded from the center circle we find attitudes and activities that are not yet appraisals or judgments of conduct but that engage another regarding her actual or potential conduct. Offering advice to another on how she should proceed, consulting with her about her potential actions, asking her for her reasons, and engaging in soul-searching moral inquiry all fall into this space. Finally, the innermost circle contains only those attitudes and activities constitutive of holding others responsible for their conduct. Here we can include both participant reactive attitudes involved in holding oneself and others accountable—shame, disgust, disappointment, etc.—as well as acts of rebuke, condemnation, cajoling, and demanding (Macnamara 2011, 97–98; also see Wanderer 2014, 64–65).[2] These communicative acts often take the form of speech, but we also hold others accountable through things like protest, direct action, boycott, and sanctions. These all would fall within Macnamara’s inner circle, but my focus in this paper is on second-personal speech acts, i.e., attempts to directly address another through speech regarding her actual or potential behavior.[3]

Within the inner circle of the participant stance, Macnamara identifies “two faces of holding others responsible” (2011, 89). The first of these faces encompasses attitudes and activities of appraisal. These are “forms of emotional reaction that mark the moral meaning of others’ morally significant actions” (2011, 89). Such responses are evaluative, but not necessarily within the deontic realm. Our emotional reactions to others may but need not necessarily indicate their adherence to or violation of deontic norms but often mark their exhibiting some virtues or vices or causing some pleasures or pains for themselves or others. Activities of the accountability face, on the other hand, are always responses to violations of deontic norms. This is the face of holding others to their obligations or, as Macnamara puts it, “of holding someone to the oughts that bind them” (2011, 90). There is a second distinction between the two faces that is more important for our inquiry. The accountability face but not the appraisal face always involves some kind of communicative expression. In order to hold someone to the oughts that bind her, i.e., to enforce the norms that are in place, one must by some means communicatively engage her. A judgment or appraisal that remains unexpressed in word or deed is normatively inert. It necessarily fails to hold its target to anything at all.[4]

What we see in the two faces are two distinct senses of “holding responsible.” In the appraisal face sense one takes one to be responsible. Suppose you happen upon two children. Fatima is crying, while Anika is sitting happily playing with a toy truck. Having just seen Fatima playing with the truck, one surmises that Anika has taken it from Fatima, eliciting her tears. One takes Anika to be responsible for upsetting Fatima. This taking to be responsible might involve feeling that Anika has evinced some disregard for Fatima, harboring some resentment toward Anika, and, perhaps, judging that Anika ought not to have taken Fatima’s toy without permission. Being merely a bystander, however, one might feel it is not one’s place to correct Anika or to return the toy to Fatima. In fact, one might go along in one’s business without any sort of behavioral expression of one’s reactive attitudes and judgments regarding Anika. This is holding responsible as merely taking to be responsible. Now contrast Anika’s father, who has also happened upon the scene. Judging Anika to be responsible for Fatima’s tears, her father goes a step further. He reproaches Anika for taking the truck, tells her to apologize, and returns the truck to Fatima. Anika’s father has held her responsible in a sense stronger than merely taking her to be responsible. He has enforced a norm by holding her to account for her actions, and he has done so by way of a set of communicative acts. Rather than merely taking her to be responsible, Anika’s father has held her accountable for her actions.

The accountability face differs from the appraisal face, then, in that it encompasses only those takings to be responsible that are communicatively expressed with the aim of holding others to deontic norms. Jeremy Wanderer has pointed out that the requirement of communicative expression makes the accountability face “voluntary” (2014, 65). His idea seems to be that while we cannot control our reactive attitudes, we are in control when we communicatively express those attitudes “with the intent of rebuking” (2014, 65). In forming the intention to rebuke another, we judge that the communicative act will at least potentially be effective, that it “is a worthwhile undertaking” (2014, 65). A nice result of this would be that the case for norms of holding would be bolstered by the idea that we are voluntarily responsive to such norms, but I want to caution against moving too quickly in this direction. My reason for hesitation is some reticence over the role of intention in the communicative act. Consider a variant on the foregoing example. Anika’s father happens upon the scene described above and immediately and without intending to rebuke, takes the toy from Anika and returns it to Fatima. This act communicates something to Anika, all the same. She has been corrected. Given the context, she comes to understand that she ought not have taken the toy from Fatima even if it is not her father’s intention to communicate this. It is not clear to me that this differs in any significant way from our earlier case in which Anika’s father did intend to rebuke her. In fact, I think that much of our behavior around holding others to deontic norms takes this form: our reactive attitudes seep out whether or not we intend to express them. This doesn’t make their expression any less communicative, for, as I see things, it is not the intent but the pragmatic structure of the act that defines it. Even when “unintentional,” communicative acts seek certain kinds of uptake from their targets and function as communicative acts when they achieve such uptake, regardless of intention.

Communicative acts have “a distinct internal aim, mode of achieving it, and success conditions” (Macnamara 2011, 90). Sanctioning behaviors like rebukes, for example, have as their aim what Macnamara calls “first-personal practical uptake of the ought-violation” by the individuals toward whom they are directed. They aim “to get the wrongdoer to acknowledge her wrongdoing [as a violation of the relevant norm], feel remorse, apologize, make amends, and commit to doing right in the future” (Macnamara 2011, 90). This is achieved through the imposition of burdens on the one being rebuked. The burdens, in this case, are emotional. She feels “the sting of reproof” (Macnamara 2011, 90). Finally, the rebuke is successful when “it is met with full first-personal practical uptake of the ought-violation” (Macnamara 2011, 90). It is this constellation of internal aim, mode, and success conditions that makes a communicative act of rebuke the act that it is. It matters not whether the person doing the rebuking does so with intention or merely as a result of reactive attitudes that have seeped out in behavior. It does matter, though, whether expression is given to the attitudes at all. If it is not, no rebuke has occurred.

This result does not undermine the case for standing conditions for holding accountable. I have argued that holdings need not be intentional, but this does not place them beyond one’s control. So long as it is possible for one to suppress an unintentional seeping out of reactive attitudes it seems reasonable to think there may be norms governing when one ought to do that. Compare, for example, the ability to suppress or contain unintentional outbursts of joy or anger.

Following Macnamara and Wanderer, I have rendered a picture of the terrain of holding others accountable, and I can now more clearly identify the target of my inquiry. I am interested in the innermost circle of the participant stance: those attitudes and activities that serve to hold others responsible. Of those attitudes and activities, I am particularly concerned with the activities of holding others accountable rather than merely taking them to be responsible. Acts of holding others accountable are communicative acts. Of these communicative acts, I am concerned with speech acts addressed second-personally to those whose obligations or commitments are under consideration. It is the standing conditions of such acts that I take up in what follows. To know whether my Trump-supporting friends and family are justified in their challenges to my standing I need to answer a pair of questions. Who, if anyone, has the requisite standing to felicitously carry out acts of holding, and what, if anything, can undercut such standing?

 

WHO HAS THE STANDING TO HOLD?

Who, if anyone, has the standing to hold another to deontic moral norms? There are clear-cut cases of standing conditions for other kinds of holdings, but the deontic moral case seems at least a little more complicated. Consider a prudential case. It would, we can assume, be better for you to skip dessert. All things considered, eating dessert amounts to the consumption of calories you don’t need that would be stored as fat and, in the long run, be a detriment to your health. Yes, you’d enjoy desert, but the long-term ill effects are a high price to pay for that small pleasure. Suppose this is your own assessment, and, given your interests, it is a correct assessment. You really ought not to eat dessert. Even so, it would be out of line for me, a stranger sitting at the next table, to lean over and whisper “You shouldn’t have dessert tonight,” when the waiter comes offering. Even if I’m a mind reader and somehow know with full certainty your interests and what they dictate, I would be terribly out of line if I chastised you as you considered the dessert menu. It’s just not my place. Someone else—your best friend, for example—might be able to hold you to your prudential obligation to refrain from dessert, but a stranger at the next table simply lacks the standing to do so.

The judgment that it’s not my place could originate from my own laziness or the fear that my own judgment about the situation is mistaken. It might be that I worry that interjecting will require me to follow through in ways for which I am not prepared. Sometimes, though, the judgment that it’s none of my business, that I ought to refrain from holding you to account, is a judgment “that it would be wrong to” do so (Radzik 2011, 582). In the previous case, it seems a matter of respect for privacy that I refrain from interfering in your dessert choices. It would needlessly complicate our lives to have strangers assuming they know our preferences and reminding us of how we ought to fulfill them. It would foster anxiety and interfere with all sorts of everyday social interactions. This seems a good reason to maintain that it’s not the case that just anyone has the standing to hold you to prudential oughts.

Still, one might think that the moral case and the prudential case differ quite dramatically. Darwall seems to defend the universal standing to hold in arguing that “the moral perspective [is] an impartially disciplined version of the second-person standpoint” (2006, 102). His idea is that when we take up the mantle of morality, we speak not as a particular individual but “as an equal participant in the first-person plural (“we”) of the moral community” (2006, 102). We address another as an equal member of this community and on its behalf. In doing so, we are not claiming any special authority for ourselves, we are merely claiming standing as part of the “we” (Radzik 2011, 584–88). I think, however, that this argument follows from a confusion between the standing to issue moral judgments and the standing to hold. To make this case, I want to examine a parallel between deontic holdings and another speech act with a similar pragmatic structure.

Orders come with clear-cut standing conditions. As your professor, I can order you to stow your laptop away during class, but should a passerby in the hall poke her head in the door and token the very same utterance, her speech act will be infelicitous. She lacks the standing—the authority—requisite for carrying out this speech act. Similarly, to use a well-trod example, if I am walking by a parade ground and overhear the drill instructor’s order to her cadets to drop and give her twenty, I am under no obligation to begin doing pushups. She has the authority to order her cadets to do so, but I, as a civilian, am beyond the reach of that authority.

In these cases, there is a defined structure of authority—a hierarchy—that is known and recognized by the relevant parties and that is the product of broadly institutional relationships between them. This structure defines the standing conditions for issuing the speech acts in question. As a professor, I have the standing to issue an order regarding the use of laptops in class, but this authority does not extend to orders about your time spent on Snapchat outside of class. These examples differ from the cases under investigation in at least two key respects. First, in the case of holding to deontic norms there is not, in general, a well-defined, institutional, and widely recognized structure of authority. There may be such a structure in special cases such as a parent issuing a holding to a child, a teacher to a student, or clergy to a parishioner, but, in general, our cases are messier and, often, negotiable. One dear friend might have the standing to hold me to quitting smoking, for example, while I may count it as an insult if another reminds me of my commitment when she sees me at the corner store. Second, orders are what Kukla and Lance call constative holdings (2009, 111–12). These speech acts create new normative statuses rather than call attention to and enforce already existing ones. Before the drill instructor gives the order to do push-ups, there is no sense in which the cadets were already obligated to do them. The status of one required to do push-ups is newly created in the act of ordering. Deontic moral holdings do not, by their very nature, create new normative statuses but rather have as their aim enforcing already existing commitments. They are alethic holdings. I ought to quit smoking, and my friend telling me so only aims to enforce this true prescription (Kukla and Lance 2009, chap. 5; Wanderer 2014).[5]

Though alethic holdings are grounded in already existing commitments, while constative holdings create new ones, they still share important structural features. Following Kukla and Lance, we can think of speech acts as functions on normative statuses. They take normative statuses as inputs, and their outputs are alterations of normative statuses. These statuses can be either agent-relative or agent-neutral. The former are indexed to individuals on the basis of their position in some social-normative space. The latter are, in principle, universal (2009, chap. 1). Both have agent-relative normative inputs. For both orders and alethic holdings it’s not the case that just anyone has the requisite authority, i.e., normative status or standing, to successfully pull off the speech act. Contrast this to declarative speech acts. Declaratives—run of the mill fact-stating speech acts—have agent neutral inputs. In principle, anyone can become entitled to utter a declarative. There are epistemic constraints on such entitlement, but there are no institutional barriers that make it the case that one particular person or class of people is entitled to a declarative while another is not.

 

Standing To Hold vs. Standing To Assert

Darwall’s universal standing position follows in part from a conflation of standing to hold and standing to issue a moral assertion. The assertion, (1) “Tom ought not to belittle his partner” is one to which, in principle, anyone could be entitled. It is, of course, true that I ought not to belittle my partner, and anyone who can produce the reasons why secures entitlement to this utterance. Such reasons as she may have, however, do not necessarily entitle her to tell me (2) “Tom! Don’t belittle Kate!”

(1) is a speech act that Kukla and Lance call a prescriptive. Prescriptives have agent-neutral entitlement conditions and agent-relative outputs. That is, they are speech acts to which, in principle, anyone can become entitled and which have as their constitutive aim uptake by one (or a few) specific individual(s) for whom first-personal uptake of the utterance has particular practical significance. When Ryan hears, “Tom ought not to belittle his partner,” his uptake of this speech act involves becoming himself entitled to the assertion, barring its defeat by other claims to which he is committed. My uptake of that same speech act, however, involves my recognition that it is me who is committed to not belittling my partner. My uptake involves recognition of the practical significance of the normative status ascribed to me by the assertion. It is the recognition that I am obligated to act accordingly.

Speech act (2), however, is not a prescriptive, but an imperative. It has agent-relative inputs as well as agent-relative outputs. Like constative holdings, this imperative cannot be uttered felicitously by just anyone even though just anyone could be entitled to (1), the prescriptive that underwrites it. Entitlement to (1) is necessary but not sufficient for entitlement to (2). We saw this already in the case of counsels of prudence discussed above. In that case, though it is clear that any observer, in principle, could have justifiably made the judgment and asserted the prescriptive “S should not order the cake,” it would still be infelicitous to issue a second-personal holding directed at S. The reason, I claimed, has to do with a presumption of privacy. It would be treacherous to navigate a world in which just anyone would be entitled to render second-personal just any prudential obligation that one might have. Why, one might wonder, should my own interests be twisted in such a way that I now owe it to a stranger to ensure their fulfillment? It is only those to whom we’ve entrusted our interests or with whose interests our own are intertwined who might hold us to fulfilling them. Of course, unlike the case of orders within well-defined, institutionalized structures of authority, exactly who has this standing is always negotiable, but one can see one’s way to the sorts of reasons that might be relevant to such negotiation. I see no reasons for thinking that the moral case should be treated differently than this prudential case. The standing to assert a moral prescriptive is, in principle, universally available, but the standing to issue an alethic holding to a deontic moral norm accrues to particular agents on the basis of their positions in normative space.

 

AGENCY AND CLAIMS AGAINST STANDING TO HOLD

The challenge now is to see our way to the sorts of reasons that might legitimately undermine one’s standing to hold in the moral case as privacy does in the prudential case. Linda Radzik’s work on differentiating the standing to sanction provides a promising point of departure. Following Darwall, Radzik begins from the assumption that the standing to hold to deontic moral norms is universal but then argues that this entitlement is defeasible by other moral reasons so that the target of an attempted holding might have a justifiable claim against one exercising her standing to hold (2011, 592). If this is right, then one might find oneself with “an obligation to refrain from sanctioning a particular kind of wrong” even when one is entitled to the concomitant moral prescriptive (2011, 590). A target of holding might have a justifiable, second-personal claim against the prospective sanctioner that undermines her standing to hold. Our question, then, is whether such reasons might be available to our Trump-supporting friends and family who reject our standing to hold them to anti-racist, anti-xenophobic, anti-sexist, anti-ableist moral norms. Could the case be made that they have a second-personal claim against us that undermines our standing to hold? To show that they might, I begin with an examination of three cases that Radzik develops in which one’s standing to hold accountable is defeated by considerations having to do with respect for agency (2011, 592–93).

Radzik’s first case is self-regarding behavior. She argues that holding a person with respect to her purely self-regarding behavior interferes with “the agent’s ability to develop trust in her own judgment,” which has the effect of undermining her agency (2011, 593). Agents need space to develop their decision-making capacities and shape their identities. Introducing too much noise in the form of external voices aiming to guide behavior threatens to derail the process and, as such, is an affront to agency itself. If this is right, then the agent has a claim against the would-be holder or sanctioner that she refrain from holding or sanctioning. Such a claim is defeasible, of course, as there may be reasons that do, in some cases, justify a degree of paternalism, but the presumption is against such interference.

A second case Radzik explores is that of wrongs within what she calls “special relationships.” Within the bounds of romantic relationships, friendships, family, and activist groups, for example, outsiders lack standing to hold or sanction insiders with regard to behavior internal to the relationship. Such relationships are central to our self-conceptions and vital for our well-being, but they function well only when they are afforded “degrees of privacy, intimacy, and trust” (2011, 593). Outside interference can undermine their constitutive bonds. As such, the parties to such relationships have a claim against would be interveners that they refrain from holding or sanctioning with respect their behavior vis-à-vis one another. As with the previous case, such a claim is defeasible. Intervention might be justified in the protection of the physical well-being of the parties or in cases that involve children, for example (2011, 594).

Finally, Radzik’s third case is that in which bystander sanction interferes with “the victim’s ability to find vindication in the aftermath of wrongdoing” (2011, 597). Here again we find a reason that has to do with respect for agency, but in this case it’s that of the victim rather than the target of the holding. Were a third-party to come to the rescue, the victim may find herself further marginalized. She is interpellated as one who cannot stand up for herself. Her standing as a moral agent is weakened, and the likelihood that the pattern of wronging will be replicated is heightened because of her diminished standing.

Radzik’s cases demonstrate that a variety of moral reasons might undermine one’s standing to hold. What unifies these reasons is that in each case recognition of someone’s standing to hold would in some way threaten the agency of some relevant party. Since the protection of agency is a central moral concern, these seem the right sorts of reasons for challenging the standing to hold in moral cases just as privacy is in prudential cases. Can this model be extended to fit other cases where one’s standing might be challenged? It seems difficult to see how hypocrisy, for example, threatens someone’s agency or how an attempt to hold her to her own avowed anti-racist commitments threatens the agency of your Trump-voting aunt. One response to such cases would be to dismiss these as cases in which standing to hold is not really undermined. One might argue that the common reaction to hypocrisy cannot be grounded in a principled challenge to another’s standing to hold and that your aunt’s attempt to reject your standing is merely a ploy to evade being held responsible. I think such a retreat uncalled-for. Instead, I argue that we can extend Radzik’s account. Challenges of hypocrisy and “Who are you to tell me . . . ?” can be justified insofar as they threaten the agency of the target of the holding. The way in which they threaten her agency has to do with a particular kind of trust.

 

TRUST AND THE STANDING TO HOLD

When one party tries to blame another for a violation of deontic moral norms of which the first party herself is also guilty we hear challenges like “look who’s talking” or “that’s the pot calling the kettle black” (Cohen 2006, 108). “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” we are reminded in scripture. It is argued sometimes that the root of this tu quoque challenge is that in practicing hypocrisy, one is making an exception for oneself. Moral rules apply equally to all, but if I am guilty of a moral wrong and then blame you for a wrong of the same kind, I have tried to claim for myself some elevated status, to carve out an exception such that my action was acceptable while yours was condemnable. This challenges a deep Kantian commitment that the same rules must apply universally.

This explanation misses the mark. After all, one need not be a moral saint to hold others accountable. We can begin to see our way both to how it misses the mark and to how hypocrisy undermines standing by way of an example. Damon and Ella are out for a stroll. As they walk, Ella picks up a stone. Damon can see that she’s about to send it sailing at a squirrel. “Ella, stop!” he yells, in an attempt to hold her to her already existing obligation to refrain from doing unnecessary harm to other living creatures. Ella looks at him and asks, “Who are you to tell me to stop? Just last week I saw you clock a squirrel with a stone.” Damon’s past misdeed, according to Ella, undermines his standing to hold her to the same norm that he previously violated. On what grounds could she claim this?

Damon made an exception for himself. But how does this differ from the case in which Damon commits the act but does not try to hold Ella to the norm? It seems all he has done in the present case is make evident the exception he has already granted himself. The act of holding is not the site of his violation, it is merely a reminder of it. But why should this past violation undermine his standing to hold now that it has been brought to our attention? His standing would not be undermined, after all, if we were to recall that he has a penchant for shoplifting rather than for harming small critters. So it is not merely that he has excepted himself from moral norms in the past that undermines his standing to hold.

To see how hypocrisy undermines standing to hold, we need to recognize that Damon has also claimed authority over Ella in taking himself to be in a position to hold her to account. If, in response to Ella’s charge of hypocrisy, Damon fails to recognize his past wrongdoing, then he fails to reciprocally grant this authority to Ella. He does not recognize her standing to hold him to account. It is in this point that we begin to see how hypocrisy can undermine the standing to hold. Ella can justifiably reject Damon’s claim to authority, I urge, because it grants him influence over her behavior that she does not have, reciprocally, over his. In Ella’s recognition of Damon’s authority, a hierarchy is instituted where none previously existed. With her recognition, Damon assumes a position not unlike that of the drill instructor or the parent whose hierarchical role is institutionally defined. This puts Ella in a precarious position in their relationship, as Damon now wields some control over her behavior.

Ella has reason to reject Damon’s claimed authority. Accepting a hierarchical relationship with Damon by recognizing authority that he does not grant to her in return opens Ella up to potential manipulation in a way that significantly threatens her agency. Recognizing the standing to hold where it is not reciprocally recognized, would also undermine Ella’s ability to challenge Damon’s attempts to hold her. Successfully challenging Damon’s moral judgment requires his recognition of her standing to hold him to epistemic norms. His refusal to recognize her standing to hold him accountable, however, means that in recognizing his standing, Ella grants Damon fairly broad authority in judging and shaping her behavior. She cannot now claim for herself the standing to challenge Damon’s attempts at holding her when she finds them to be inappropriate. Unless Damon will recognize that she has the standing to hold him to the same norms to which he is attempting to hold her, Ella ought not recognize Damon’s standing to hold.

To put this another way, hypocrisy undermines trust. I will not recognize your authority to hold me if I have no reason to trust that you will recognize my authority to hold you to your commitments or to challenge your attempts to hold me. I am justified in withholding my recognition of standing insofar as recognizing your standing would undermine my agency. Your refusal to allow me to hold you accountable for your past violation is evidence that you do not recognize my standing to hold. As such, I have reason not to trust that you will recognize my standing to hold you accountable to any norms at all.

I claimed earlier that hypocrisy sometimes undermines the standing to hold, and I can say now why it does not do so universally. Hypocrisy does not always undermine trust. I’ll note two kinds of cases in which it does not. First, trust may be restored when, in response to the charge of hypocrisy, one takes responsibility for the wrong one has done and tries to make amends. In recognizing that one has committed a wrong and attempting, if possible, to correct for that wrong, one demonstrates to one’s interlocutor that one will allow oneself to be held to account by them. This is a step in restoring a trusting relationship with members of one’s moral community. They come to see that you take yourself to be beholden to moral oughts and that you recognize their standing to hold you to them. This is, to be sure, no guarantee that attempts to hold you to your moral commitments will be successful, but it is a reassurance that you will recognize their standing to hold. With this reassurance, recognizing your standing to hold them accountable no longer threatens their agency, as they can hold you in return.

The second kind of case in which trust and standing can be maintained even in the face of hypocrisy comes into view when we consider what I will call deep or layered relationships. Philosophers feed too often on a diet of under-described, impoverished examples, but real-life cases in which individuals attempt to hold others to moral obligations are rarely so one-dimensional. These acts are usually embedded in deep and long-tenured relationships between individuals as well as within communities that are bound together in varied and complex ways. We are not merely strangers passing in the night or even merely classmates or colleagues. In our communities, we may be related to some one individual as colleague, cycling partner, bowling buddy, and fellow Rotarian. Our relationships, that is to say, are usually multi-dimensional and normatively saturated. We engage across diverse normative environments that present many opportunities for normative holding in different settings. I might, for example, hold my cycling partner to account for slacking on his training and my fellow Rotarian to account for failing to pay dues. Trust is built in these varied, low-stakes incidences of holding, and this trust is called on when one claims the standing to hold in the moral context. This means that when Damon tries to hold Ella to her commitment not to harm other living creatures, his single past misdeed may not be sufficient to undermine his standing to hold. If their relationship is normatively rich in the ways just described then Ella has many reasons to trust that Damon will be responsive to her attempts to hold and so has reason to recognize his standing to hold her to deontic moral norms.

 

TRUST AND OUR DIVIDED COMMUNITIES

Now let’s return to the sorts of cases with which we began. During the campaign and since the election, many of us have thought about how to reach out to those who voted for Donald Trump. We tried, before the election, to hold prospective Trump voters to their own avowed anti-racist, anti-xenophobic, anti-sexist, anti-ableist, etc., moral commitments, and since the election, many of us have tried to hold to account those who did vote for him for enabling and emboldening his deeply troubling agenda. Such attempts have often been met with challenges to our standing to hold these folks accountable, even when they are old friends or family. We are often met with refrains of “Who are you to tell me . . . ?” or “What gives you the right . . . ?”

The response we receive is often predicated on a disagreement about whether the action in question was racist, xenophobic, etc. This is no different from most cases of successfully holding or blaming someone. In the standard successful case, the person one is trying to hold to her commitments or blame for her wrongdoing does not, at first, agree with one’s assessment of the situation. Holding has an epistemic dimension. The target needs to be brought around to one’s own way of seeing things morally through a conversation. When an attempt to hold is met with a challenge to one’s standing, however, it is just this sort of conversation that is preempted. Such a challenge is an attempt to end the discussion by denying one the authority to hold or blame even if the reasons one could give would be good ones. One could be entitled to the attendant prescriptive yet not be entitled to issue the holding.

Are such challenges to standing justified? I argue that, at least in some cases, they are on grounds that recognizing the holder’s standing undermines the agency of the target by granting the holder authority that is not reciprocal, i.e., by subsuming her in a hierarchy. Of course, these might not be the grounds that the target herself would give for rejecting standing. My aim, though, is to give a rational reconstruction of this sort of rejection that tries to understand it as a legitimate rejection of standing rather than merely a defense mechanism with no normative import.

In the “Who are you to tell me . . . ?” sort of case, the target is being held or blamed by someone who is nominally part of her community. She is a fellow citizen. She accepts many of the same moral principles that the target accepts and aims to live by. In the cases we’ve imagined, she is also more intimately related to the target. The holder may be a family member, an old friend, a college roommate, or a co-worker. Many of these relationships, though, are rather thin or one-dimensional. In my own experiences, I have met such responses when trying to talk to family and friends who I only see a few times a year or interact with only on social media. These are relationships that were once more robust, but as I’ve moved from my rural hometown to a metropolitan area, and visits have become fewer and farther between, these relationships have become much less normatively rich than they once were. These are not deep, trusting relationships, as we lack the varied interactions that present numerous low-stakes opportunities to hold one another accountable or to witness one another acting out our moral commitments. These are precisely the sorts of cases where I think “Who are you to tell me . . . ?” challenges to standing are most plausibly justified.

Consider the case of a family member. Here you may think of someone in your extended family with whom you have only minimal common interests and projects, if any. If you were to try to hold some such family member to a jointly espoused moral norm, you may find yourself met with a rejection of your standing to do so. Such a rejection, I claim, is warranted on the grounds that, in such thin, one-dimensional relationships, the target of the holding has little reason to trust that you would recognize her standing to hold you to your commitments, including the commitment to take seriously the moral reasons she presents in response to your moral judgments. Her claim against you that you not hold her to account is justified on the grounds of a lack of trust like that in the case of hypocrisy. In this case, however, the target has not been given evidence that you are likely to reject attempts to hold you to moral oughts. Instead, she lacks evidence to the contrary. The lack of a layered or multi-dimensional relationship between you and the target of your holding means that a fabric of trust has not been built up between you. She has little or no experience of holding you to account in low-stakes settings, so she has little or no evidence that you will recognize her standing to do so. She has no reason to trust you. In this situation, she would rightfully be concerned that if she were to grant you such authority over her, it would not be reciprocal and would undermine her agency. Her recognition of your standing would subsume her in a kind of hierarchical relationship where you are granted undue authority to enforce her existing moral obligations as you see fit, while she would lack the standing to do so reciprocally or to challenge your attempts to do so. If this is right, then I think that the case has been made that, in at least some instances, one’s standing to hold can be justifiably challenged by one’s Trump-voting friends and family. This seems a regrettable but unavoidable conclusion.

One might accept that lack of reason to trust undermines standing in cases in which the parties are moral equals, but object that this is not one of those cases. There are many instances of legitimate asymmetric holding relationships: child/parent, teacher/student, expert/novice. By continuing to support Trump in the face of all that he has said and done, one might think our friends and family have shown themselves to lack moral expertise. Perhaps one would be aiding the development of their agency by holding them to their moral commitments, even though it would clearly be a mistake for one to recognize their standing in return. This would be a kind of training relationship in which one helps them to see how their moral commitments ought to manifest in their actions. This objection cannot be lightly dismissed, though it seems to me that the evidence that someone is a moral neophyte would have to be substantial before it could override the presumption that we ought to treat other adult human beings as fellow, full-fledged moral agents. It could not be enough that we disagree only on the candidate they ought to have supported. It would not even be enough if we disagreed on a wide variety of moral judgments so long as they manage to make reasonable judgments and live out their moral commitments in much of their conduct, i.e., they warranted our taking up the participant stance toward them. What is important to see is that mutual recognition of the standing to hold is not predicated on agreement. We can morally disagree on a great many particular cases yet still recognize one another’s standing to push each other to defend or reconsider our judgments and correct each other when we’ve gone astray. Mutual recognition is where moral debate begins, not its culmination.[6]

 

CONCLUSION

Two things follow from this analysis. The first is that communities in which varied, multi-dimensional relationships exist and are cultivated are central to our moral practices. Such communities institute the conditions under which recognizing another’s standing to hold is reasonable. In these communities, patterns of holding accountable are built up in organic ways in lower-stake situations. Interacting in these contexts, members of the community develop the mutual trust that is the foundation on which reciprocal authority to hold can reasonably be recognized. A thick, multi-dimensional relationship in which such trust is developed is precisely what is lacking when we try to hold mere acquaintances, old friends, and distant family members to the anti-racist, anti-xenophobic, anti-sexist, ant-transphobic, anti-ableist oughts that bind them.

The second thing that follows is more hopeful. The analysis I have given provides the outlines of a recipe for building the trust that has gone missing. We are isolated to a high degree both in our physical and virtual communities. The recent election provided stark examples of just how much this is the case ranging from online phenomena like Blue Feed, Red Feed to election maps that displayed the concentration of Clinton voters in urban centers separated by vast seas of red. As our communities have become ever more politically homogeneous, the opportunities for building deep, multi-dimensional relationships with those with whom we politically disagree have become ever more rare. But it is just these sorts of relationships that we need to build should we want to hold those with whom we disagree to shared moral standards. This necessitates joining organizations, clubs, and leagues in which we have the opportunity to interact, in low-stakes environments, with those on the opposite side of the political spectrum. It involves re-engaging in our physical communities, for such multi-faceted relationships cannot evolve if we retreat into our well-curated virtual ones. It requires that we go back out into the world and rebuild those organizations that once anchored our communities.

In entering into our communities and developing deep, multi-dimensional relationships with others, we are also making ourselves vulnerable, of course. The trust that develops as multi-dimensional relationships evolve must be mutual and the standing to hold that is granted on the foundation of that trust cuts both ways. As such, what will result is not a clear imposition of one’s own preferred interpretation of moral norms but a conversation in which those norms and their interpretation is contested in the space of reasons. But isn’t this what we want in the end: a functioning moral dialogue across political divides?

 

Thomas Wilk is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and an adjunct instructor at various colleges and universities in and around Washington, DC. His research interests lie primarily in metaethics, philosophy of language, and epistemology from a neo-pragmatist perspective, but he also does work in applied ethics and has a growing interest in public philosophy. Tom’s recent publications include “Inferences, Experiences, and the Myth of the Given” in Logos and Episteme and “The Right Way to Win Over Posterity” in Hamilton and Philosophy.

 

REFERENCES

Cohen, G. A. 2006. “Casting the First Stone: Who Can, and Who Can’t, Condemn the Terrorists?” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 81 (58): 113–36.

Darwall, Stephen. 2006. The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Duff, R. A. 2010. “Blame, Moral Standing and the Legitimacy of the Criminal Trial.” Ratio 23 (2): 123–40.

Korsgaard, Christine M. 1992. “Creating the Kingdom of Ends: Reciprocity and Responsibility in Personal Relations.” Philosophical Perspectives 6: 305–32.

Kukla, Rebecca, and Mark Lance. 2009. “Yo!” and “Lo!”: The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons. Boston: Harvard University Press.

Macnamara, Coleen. 2011. “Holding Others Responsible.” Philosophical Studies 152 (1): 81–102.

Maher, Chauncey. 2010. “On Being and Holding Responsible.” Philosophical Explorations 13 (2): 129–40.

Oakley, Justin. 1991. Morality and the Emotions. London; New York: Routledge.

Radzik, Linda. 2011. “On Minding Your Own Business: Differentiating Accountability Relations Within the Moral Community.” Social Theory and Practice 37 (4): 574–98.

Smith, Angela M. 2007. “On Being Responsible and Holding Responsible.” The Journal of Ethics 11 (4): 465–84.

———. 2008. “Control, Responsibility, and Moral Assessment.” Philosophical Studies 138 (3): 367–92.

Strawson, Peter F. 1962. “Freedom and Resentment.” Proceedings of the British Academy 48: 1–25.

Wallace, R. Jay. 1994. Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Wanderer, Jeremy. 2014. “Alethic Holdings.” Philosophical Topics 42 (1): 63–84.

Watson, Gary. 1996. “Two Faces of Responsibility.” Philosophical Topics 24 (2): 227–48.

 

ENDNOTES

[1] The “participant stance” is Macnamara’s label for a concept that she finds implicit in Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment.” It is, she says, “the complex mental orientation we take toward another which modulates our patterns of salience, presumptive interpretations, and leaves us susceptible to certain emotions and types of interactions” (2011, 83n1). The “participant stance” is defined in opposition to the “objective stance,” which is the way we comport ourselves toward inanimate objects and those we deem “incapacitated in some or all respects for ordinary interpersonal relationships” (Macnamara 2011, 84, citing Strawson [1962]), as well as in relation to “participant reactive attitudes,” which “are those distinct emotional states we are susceptible to when we adopt the participant stance” (2011, 83n1).

[2] It is disputed whether this inner circle is comprised only of acts of negative judgment and sanction or whether praise also has a place here. For discussion, see (Macnamara 2011, 92–93; cf. Smith 2008, 381).

[3] Since my focus is on second-personal speech acts of holding others to deontic moral norms, the arguments of this paper are intended only to identify potential challenges to one’s standing to felicitously pull off such acts. The norms governing other ways of holding accountable will inevitably differ from those identified here. Boycotts and protests enforce moral norms in very different ways than do second-personal speech acts of holding. For instance, they do not necessarily require that their targets recognize the standing of their originators in order to be effective. Furthermore, and as will become clear later in the paper, the standing conditions for what we could call third-personal speech acts, i.e., speech acts about the obligations of S that are not directly addressed to S, will differ from those of second-personal address. I thank Mark Lance for helping me to think more clearly about these distinctions.

[4] Within the accountability face, we can make a further distinction between those holdings that are forward-looking and those that are backward-looking, i.e., between pre-emptively holding and blaming. Holding stands to blaming “as preventative medicine stands to curative medicine” (Wanderer 2014, 66). While this is an important distinction in some settings, I will not differentiate between the two in what follows. The sorts of reasons that undermine one’s standing to hold in the cases that interest me in this paper are also reasons that undermine one’s standing to blame.

[5] There’s an interesting and important question about how exactly alethic holdings function to normatively hold their targets to already existing commitments. Kukla and Lance (2009) and Wanderer (2014) each offer accounts of how they achieve their function. In general, we can say that alethic holdings both elicit first-personal practical uptake of the relevant norm and render that norm more salient by making it the case that the target of the holding is beholden not just to the norm but also to the originator of the holding. If I light up even after hearing my dear friend’s reminder I have violated a norm, but I have also, in some sense, violated her and our relationship.

[6] I thank an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to consider this objection.

by Rebecca Kukla 

I’m extraordinarily proud and excited to present this special issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, which focuses on ethical, social, and political reflections on the 2016 U.S. election and the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency. It is rare for a philosophy journal to take up such a current and pressing topic. When I decided to put together this issue, I was not sure what sort of submissions I would receive, or how many. I was moved and elated to receive dozens of excellent submissions on a wide range of topics. In making difficult choices about which ones to publish, I eliminated any that took an abstract or distanced approach to the material. Plenty of good-quality philosophical work uses this sort of abstract methodology, but I wanted to publish only papers that captured and grappled with the immediacy and the practical enormity of the changes and challenges that this last election posed. I also eliminated papers that were more like op-ed pieces than scholarly articles. I chose only papers that offered rigorous and deep conceptual analysis, as I wanted this issue to continue the journal’s hallmark tradition of combining philosophical sophistication with practical engagement. The submissions that made the final cut – both those that appear in the special issue itself, and those that appear in the supplement to the issue on the journal’s blog – are, in my opinion, more than just examples of excellent and ethically relevant scholarship; they are also brave.

The topics represented in this issue, including the supplement, span a wide range of the controversies raised by Trump’s victory. Some of them concern large-scale political issues such as climate change and immigration policy (see for instance the articles by Frisch, Hedahl and Rieder, and Gotlib). Others explore difficult questions concerning the emergence or at least the uncovering of an angry political climate in the United States, from the specter of authoritarianism to the apparent rise of hate-based political speech and decision-making (Corvino, Reiheld, Pierce). Some of the papers examine the visual and symbolic iconography of the election, including the role that gender and embodiment play in how we respond to political figures (Reiheld, Park). Regina Rini’s paper takes on the important epistemological question of how we should consume and disseminate information in the age of the internet and in the face of the rise of ‘fake news.’ A final group of papers excavates the difficult topic of second-personal communication and relationships between individuals across painful political divides (Golden, Bennett, Wilk).

I tried hard to include a representative span of voices and topics in this special issue. I am delighted with the spread of topics. I am also delighted with the mix of scholars from different career stages and disciplines, and the mix of genders. In two respects, however, I am disappointed.

Although the essays are grounded in different political perspectives and approaches, I was hoping to include at least some contributions that presented a positive message about or view of the election and presidency, so as to achieve a certain kind of broad-strokes political inclusivity. But despite my actively encouraging some likely authors to submit such papers, I received no appropriate submissions that argued in support of Trump’s policies or election.

More pressingly, in my view, I received no submissions appropriate to the journal from people of color. Race is absolutely fundamental to many of the issues that are most at the center of Trump’s election and presidency. His views (and his vocal supporters’ views) on immigration, refugees, the Mexican border, Islam, and policing spring immediately to mind. But his views on climate change, health insurance, public education, and other such topics also have deeply racialized dimensions and repercussions. Global warming and environmental destabilization will have a dramatically disproportionate impact on economically and racially disadvantaged nations and groups. Weakening our public education and insurance infrastructures directly harms socially vulnerable and stigmatized Americans. Our collective ability to think critically and well about Trump’s proposed policies and professed goals in all of these areas essentially requires that we hear from people in the groups most targeted and disadvantaged by them.

For these reasons, as well as because of my general commitment to creating an inclusive forum, I wanted a racially diverse set of perspectives represented in this issue, but I failed to achieve it. I reached out to some scholars of color working on relevant topics and I disseminated the call for papers in places where I thought it would reach diverse scholars. I am sure there are all sorts of ways in which I could have done better, and I take responsibility for this deficit. But also, Sean Valles has been generous enough to write a powerful and emotionally difficult meta-commentary (published here in the blog supplement), which examines the important reasons why scholars of color may be disinclined to submit to an issue such as this. As proud as I am of this issue, I strongly encourage all its readers to think about the challenges that Valles’s essay makes vivid for those of us who want to build a more inclusive philosophical and political community of discourse.

 

by Sean A. Valles

ABSTRACT. This special issue conspicuously lacks work by Philosophers of Color (with the exception of this commentary). I have been given this opportunity to discuss the impediments that kept me from submitting my relevant work, offered as a small step toward recognizing the impediments faced by other Philosophers of Color. I highlight factors including direct and indirect consequences of a disproportionately White community of US philosophers, and some underrecognized risk-reward calculations that Philosophers of Color face when choosing an article project. I urge further discussion of the topic, starting with an exhortation to choose the right phenomenon and accordingly frame the right question: Why are White philosophers deliberating the “ethical and social issues arising out of the 2016 US presidential election” in a prestigious journal, while Philosophers of Color are deliberating the same issues in tense classrooms, closed offices, and on-/off-campus forums?

This is not a real article. But in this special issue on the 2016 US election and Trump it is, to my knowledge, the only contribution written by a Philosopher of Color. It is a commentary about the fact that it is the only contribution written by a Philosopher of Color.

After Editor-in-Chief Rebecca Kukla expressed consternation that the issue was full of excellent papers, but written by a roster of White philosophers, I offered to say something about why I didn’t submit any of my relevant philosophical work (on nativism, racism, health policy, Latinx health, etc.), and why it didn’t surprise me that almost none of the other well-qualified Philosophers of Color did either. Whether or not you, reader, agree with my account here, I contend that it is at least worth addressing these professional issues directly and explicitly. Though, to be clear, I am only willing to write this contribution to the issue because I believe Kukla made sincere and diligent efforts to recruit Philosophers of Color and that she was genuinely dismayed at having not succeeded.

This special issue is about a US election and I am a US philosopher, so I will constrain my comments to the US professional philosophy community. But, I am not a spokesperson for Philosophers of Color (reader: you know that’s not a thing, right?). I am a millennial Jewish-Chicano-Irish-Alsatian-Purépecha Indian applied philosopher of population health, happily employed as a tenured Associate Professor. But, I have the privilege of being relatively free to speak up since I happen to be ensconced in two wonderfully supportive academic units (I have the dual privileges of working in Michigan State’s Lyman Briggs College and its Department of Philosophy). In other words, I am at relatively low career risk compared to many of my Philosopher of Color colleagues, and risk is the first of several reasons why this issue ended up without any articles by Philosophers of Color.

Deciding to write and submit an article to a special issue requires a risk-reward calculation. For contributors to this particular special issue, it was a case of high risk and high potential reward. It is a prestigious venue, and publishing in it constitutes a major career success—if one’s article is accepted. Yet, applying to a narrow special issue like this one is an especially large risk since the more idiosyncratic a special issue is, the more it requires one to tailor an article to it. By contrast, a run-of-the-mill philosophy paper, if rejected, can usually be adapted with minor alterations for submission to any of several alternative journals. Early in my career, I reluctantly transformed a talk into an article and submitted it to another such relatively narrow special issue, after being persuaded by two senior colleagues editing the special issue. As I had originally suspected, the talk did not translate well into an article, so it was rightly rejected and I never found a good way to repurpose it. Writing and submitting that article was probably the most costly research failure of my career, and it happened during the pivotal period soon after I was hired for a faculty position. Every contributor to this issue took a risk by writing and submitting an of-the-moment article in a field that generally prizes timelessness over timeliness. But, Philosophers of Color must enter into each new risk-reward calculation while already weighed down by a disproportionate burden of career risks.

Philosophers of Color must make an unending series of risk management decisions on top of the ones faced by White philosophers. Philosophy is a hard profession, but things are different for Philosophers of Color. We are, to use the terminology of Frohlich and Potvin, “vulnerable” in the sense that we are “at risk of risks” (Frohlich and Potvin 2008, 216). Academics of color tend to get assigned to more committees and miscellaneous departmental service tasks, particularly being asked to “diversify” committees with our presence (Matthew 2016). Whether we like it or not, our days get filled with work other than the research output that is valued above all else by Academia. Perhaps most importantly, we disproportionately occupy untenured positions (Finkelstein, Conley, and Schuster 2016). Academics of color working without the protection of tenure (whether employed on short-term contracts or in pre-tenure positions on the track to tenure) are very much “at risk of risks.” Any new risk, from a vindictive department head to a racist tenure letter-writer can derail the career of a tenure-track Philosopher of Color; a displeased university donor or vocal parent of a student can lead to a contingently-employed Philosopher of Color getting laid off. Philosophers of Color can indeed have thriving careers, but our paths to success are narrow at best, and always beset by known and unknown pitfalls.

The plethora of risks facing Philosophers of Color have the additional cumulative effect of making us rather rare—there are just not that many article-writing Philosophers of Color out there, thanks in part to being forced to traverse a career gauntlet set on ‘hard’ mode. Rather infamously, Philosophers of Color remain vastly underrepresented at even the early stage of doctoral completion (Schwitzgebel 2016). The passage of time is not kind. For example, of 2,906 Regular Members of the American Philosophical Association (non-student, non-emeritus, etc.) who report their race/ethnicity, only 0.6% report being American Indian or Alaska Native (I am one of seventeen people in that category), but we make up 1.7% of the US population (Humes, Jones, and Ramirez 2011; American Philosophical Association 2016). It is hard to find article submissions from Philosophers of Color when around 85% of US philosophy PhDs are going to non-Hispanic White philosophers (Schwitzgebel 2016).

The underrepresentation of Philosophers of Color also has subtle psychological effects. Our small cohort works inside a profession permeated with racist and ethnocentrist inequities. I, for one, find it requires some serious mental exertion to get excited about the prospect of any endeavor officially or unofficially positioned as the effort of philosophers-in-solidarity against [insert social problem here]. I and other Philosophers of Color can and do routinely look out into the world and confront the covert and overt inequities in it. But I’m pretty sure almost all of us are acutely aware that we must do this—and all things—while looking over our shoulders in constant vigilance for misdeeds by our fellow philosophers. Our profession perpetuates many of the same explicit and implicit racist structures/biases that I and others critique in the Trump era (adulation of White men of dubious merit, dog whistle invocations of Western culture, blindness to structural racism/sexism/heterosexism, etc.). That makes it feel…different…to critique the Trump era from the position of a Philosopher of Color. My career has been at least as benign and charmed as that of any Philosopher of Color whom I’ve talked to about career matters, but even mine includes a string of macro- and micro-aggressions from my fellow philosophers, including: outrageous defamatory peer reviews of my (non-anonymous) submitted work, condescending White-splaining of basic points during Q&As, flat refusals to believe that I know even a little about topics in which I have well-documented expertise, and many other incidents I can’t even safely mention.

In this milieu, the prospect of banding together with fellow philosophers to boldly stand together and critique the Trump era for its faults is not tantamount to hypocrisy, but it makes it a hell of a lot harder to feel the team spirit. I even get (often unfairly) frustrated when I see my White colleagues appear to overestimate the novelty of Trump era inequities, since it reinforces my perception that they still vastly underestimate the breadth and depth of inequities before the rise of Trump. It can grow frustrating, as a Philosopher of Color, to be surrounded by White colleagues getting “woke,” even though their waking up to social inequities is obviously a change for the better. Much is new about the Trump-era rhetoric, policies, and zeitgeist, but much is not.

Taking stock, even if a Philosopher of Color were to be: 1) able to spare the time to write a paper for this special issue, 2) willing to risk dedicating that block of time to writing an article for the special issue, and 3) able to muster sufficient enthusiasm to complete the project in the allotted time, there are yet more obstacles. To put it bluntly, overt racist intimidation has become more normalized. I am a husband and a new father, and since the election I need to be all the more careful to filter my ‘Come at me, bro!’ instincts through the reality of my responsibilities. Most of my work deals directly with contemporary politics and policies (as a shorthand, I say that I research and teach exclusively offensive content). In the Trump era, I need to ask myself much more regularly, and more carefully, whether that day’s article/interview/blog is going to be the one that gets a swastika spray-painted on my door. I don’t pretend to know how many of my fellow Philosophers of Color have been effectively dissuaded from submitting to this issue by such considerations, but contributing to this special issue would be a pretty quick way of transforming oneself from a hate crime target into a hate crime prime target. (Note: if this commentary is the work that finally gets a swastika spray-painted on my door that would seriously add insult to injury—I don’t even get to count this as a peer-reviewed article in my annual review!)

None of the above factors was individually sufficient to dissuade me from submitting an article to this special issue. Rather, the net effect of all of them was that they dampened my resolve enough that I just let inertia carry me along on my current path. Like most professional philosophers, I lead a pretty busy life. I could have spared the time without sacrificing my book manuscript deadline and my various article revisions, but I’ve got plenty to do.

None of this is meant to downplay the risks and disincentives faced by other philosophers due to their identities, experiences, or social positions. Female philosophers entering into public sociopolitical discourse encounter dual threats, from the public at large (horrifyingly, rape threats are par for the course) and from the profession (female philosophers navigate career perils that are, in many ways, similar to those facing Philosophers of Color). Philosophers who are sexual and/or gender minorities live with not only de facto bigotry inside and outside the professional community, but also legalized discrimination (threats of dismissal by certain religiously-affiliated schools, etc.). Philosophers with a range of physical or cognitive conditions or disabilities face various impediments to contributing to this issue (e.g., a philosopher living with trauma after a sexual assault confronts the daunting task of commenting on the election of a man accused of multiple sexual assaults). Philosophers with fragile immigration statuses run into the unique risk of critiquing the very executive branch that has broad discretionary enforcement powers over immigration law (ojalá and inshallah, the judicial branch will protect my colleagues from executive abuses). The list goes on. Moreover, there are additional (but non-additive) intersectional dynamics between these factors for some philosophers, such as an undocumented queer philosopher imperiled by multilateral legal hazards. This commentary does not presume to speak expertly about the range of risks facing philosophers. Instead, I offer this rather personal commentary from my position as a Philosopher of Color and Ambiguously Swarthy American™.

So, I and my Philosopher of Color colleagues almost all let this opportunity pass by. But, it is absolutely vital that readers of this issue understand that Philosophers of Color are most definitely doing more than our fair share of untangling and addressing the “ethical and social issues arising out of the 2016 US presidential election and the transition to the Trump administration” (to use the language of the special issue’s advertisement). The difference is how we do it. As others have expounded at length, the job of an academic of color is filled with invisible labor (Matthew 2016). Philosophers of Color counsel the terrified students of color who pull us aside in hallways to whisper into (what they hope will be) an empathetic and wise ear. We share survival tips with fellow Philosophers of Color. We sacrifice our evenings to planning and participating in election-inspired campus panels, student organization meetings, and solidarity rallies. We serve as go-to resources for our well-intentioned White colleagues who seek a Philosopher of Color’s advice on whether/how to address the Trump era tragedy of the day. We do these things while knowing—somewhere between the backs and the fronts of our minds—that the next time we open the car/office/home door there might be a swastika and/or “TRUMP” painted on it.

The net result of the above reasons (and the many others I failed to mention) is that this special issue, which I indeed look forward to reading, only features White authors. In light of the preceding paragraph, I caution against trying to explain the whiteness of this special issue as an isolated phenomenon. In my previous research, I have argued that explanations hinge more than one might think on “phenomenon choice” and the corresponding questions they engender—we must be exceedingly careful when deciding exactly what ought to be explained (Valles 2010; 2016). In this case, I urge readers of this issue to not get sidetracked by a misleading question (Why is this issue so White when the concerns of/about people of color are especially relevant?). The question that needs answering is: Why are White philosophers deliberating the “ethical and social issues arising out of the 2016 US presidential election” in a prestigious journal while Philosophers of Color are deliberating the same issues in tense classrooms, closed offices, and on-/off-campus forums? Publishing an article in KIEJ garners praise from promotion committees; those other activities, not so much. Let’s please discuss the right question. I have tried to articulate what I think are some ‘upstream’ social and professional structures that allowed an outpouring of excellent work by White philosophers, yet failed to channel work by Philosophers of Color into the same pool. For philosophers to forcefully and effectively critique the Trump era, we must simultaneously do the hard work of addressing our own profession’s inequities.

 

Sean Valles is an Associate Professor with a dual appointment in the Michigan State University Lyman Briggs College and the Department of Philosophy. His research spans a range of topics in the philosophy of population health, from the use of evidence in medical genetics to the roles played by race concepts in epidemiology. He is currently completing a book on Philosophy of population health science.

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I owe immeasurable thanks to my wife, Margot Valles, for her comments on the text and most of all for fearlessly sharing the risks of my choices. I am grateful to Rebecca Kukla for the opportunity to write this, and for the feedback on the content.

 

REFERENCES

American Philosophical Association. 2016. “Demographic Statistics on the APA Membership, FY2014 to FY2016.” https://c.ymcdn.com/sites/apaonline.site-ym.com/resource/resmgr/data_on_profession/Member_Demo_Chart_FY2016_rev.pdf.

Finkelstein, Martin J., Valerie Martin Conley, and Jack H. Schuster. 2016. “Taking the Measure of Faculty Diversity.” TIAA Institute. https://www.tiaainstitute.org/publication/taking-measure-faculty-diversity.

Frohlich, Katherine L., and Louise Potvin. 2008. “Transcending the Known in Public Health Practice—the Inequality Paradox: The Population Approach and Vulnerable Populations.” American Journal of Public Health 98 (2): 216-221.

Humes, Karen R., Nicholas A. Jones, and Roberto R. Ramirez. 2011. “Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin: 2010.” Washington, D.C.: United States Census Bureau.

Matthew, Patricia A. 2016. “What is Faculty Diversity Worth to a University?” The Atlantic. November 23. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/11/what-is-faculty-diversity-worth-to-a-university/508334/.

Schwitzgebel, Eric. 2016. “Percentages of U.S. Doctorates in Philosophy Given to Women and to Minorities, 1973-2014.” The Splintered Mind, January 13. http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/percentages-of-us-doctorates-in.html.

Valles, Sean A. 2010. “The Mystery of the Mystery of Common Genetic Diseases.” Biology and Philosophy 25 (2): 183-201.

Valles, Sean A. 2016. “The Challenges of Choosing and Explaining a Phenomenon in Epidemiological Research on the ‘Hispanic Paradox’.” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 37 (2): 129-148.

by Andrew J. Pierce

ABSTRACT. In this essay, I provide an analysis of the much-discussed authoritarian aspects of Donald Trump’s campaign and early administration. Drawing from both philosophical analyses of authoritarianism and recent work in social science, I focus on three elements of authoritarianism in particular: the authoritarian predispositions of Trump supporters, the scapegoating of racial minorities as a means of redirecting economic anxiety, and the administration’s strategic use of misinformation. While I offer no ultimate prediction as to whether a Trump administration will collapse into authoritarianism, I do identify key developments that would represent moves in that direction.

The unorthodox campaign and unexpected election of Donald Trump has ignited intense speculation about the possibility of an authoritarian turn in American politics. In some ways, this is not surprising. The divisive political climate in the United States is fertile soil for the demonization of political opponents. George W. Bush was regularly characterized as an authoritarian by his left opposition, as was Barack Obama by his own detractors. Yet in Trump’s case, echoes of earlier forms of authoritarianism, from his xenophobic brand of nationalism and reliance on a near mythological revisionist history, to his vilification of the press and seemingly strategic use of falsehoods, appear too numerous to ignore. In this essay, I attempt to provide a sober evaluation of the authoritarian prospects of a Trump administration. As presidential agendas inevitably differ from campaign platforms, much of this analysis will be unavoidably speculative. However, the nature of Trump’s carefully studied campaign, the early actions of his administration, and the wealth of philosophical reflections on earlier forms of authoritarianism provide ample resources to inform such speculation. I focus on three elements of authoritarianism in particular: the authoritarian predispositions of Trump supporters, the scapegoating of racial minorities as a means of redirecting economic anxiety, and the administration’s strategic use of misinformation. While these elements are sometimes thought of as competing causal explanations for the rise of authoritarian regimes, my analysis here has no such explanatory pretensions. I assume that the rise of Trump is attributable to a complex causal network of social forces, including those mentioned here and perhaps others besides.[1] Moreover, I will argue that these elements are not mutually exclusive; that, for example, the authoritarian predispositions emphasized by some political analysts are closely linked to xenophobia and racial intolerance, and that the strategic use of misinformation plays a role in “activating” authoritarian predispositions. In short, my view is that identifying the most statistically significant predictor of supporting authoritarian regimes, or their single most salient causal factor, is less important than attaining a wide-ranging view of their central attributes, thus developing the outlines of a standard by which to judge the Trump and other administrations. Accordingly, while I offer no ultimate prediction as to whether a Trump administration will collapse into authoritarianism, I do identify key developments that would represent moves in that direction.

 

AUTHORITARIANISM AMONG TRUMP SUPPORTERS

If Trump is an authoritarian, then his is a populist authoritarianism, a form of rule in which “a strong, charismatic, manipulative leader rules through a coalition involving key lower-class groups” (Gasiorowski 2006, 111). Thus any study of Trump’s alleged authoritarianism cannot neglect the nature of his appeal to his core supporters, nor the fact that he was propelled to power by a groundswell of support that was largely unanticipated by the Republican establishment that ultimately – though with great initial reservation – nominated him as their party’s presidential candidate. Fortunately, scholarship on authoritarianism has historically emphasized the importance of understanding its psychological appeal, and thereby focused on not just authoritarian rulers and governments themselves, but on their core supporters. Adorno et al.’s study on The Authoritarian Personality (1950) provided the model for this sort of approach, and offers a more general definition of authoritarianism. Adorno et al. identified a number of personality traits that were correlated to ethnocentrism, anti-Semitism, and “anti-democratic” attitudes. Grounded in Freudian psychology, these researchers ultimately located support for authoritarian regimes and policies in childhood pathologies that resulted in rigid adherence to simplified worldviews, strict obedience to authority figures, and fear and distrust of those who do not share this same orientation to the world. And while this particular study has been criticized both for its reliance on empirically questionable Freudian presuppositions and for methodological errors (Stenner 2005; Hetherington and Weiler 2009; Christie and Jahoda 1954), the core idea of an authoritarian personality type remains influential, and continues to be developed and refined by social scientists.[2]

Matthew MacWilliams has recently utilized such a revised authoritarian personality measure to study Trump supporters, and claims as a result of his study that a predisposition to authoritarianism is the single most statistically significant predictor of support for Trump, more significant than race, income, level of education, or other commonly cited correlates (2016). MacWillams used a serious of questions about childrearing that have been shown to capture not only active authoritarian views, but the predisposition to having such views “activated” by threat (Stenner, 2005). High scores on this measure of authoritarian predisposition corresponded to a greater likelihood of supporting Trump over the other contenders for the Republication party nomination.

MacWilliams’ results have been challenged by Wendy Rahn and Eric Oliver (2016), whose own research showed greater predispositions to authoritarianism among supporters of Ted Cruz than among Trump supporters. They claim that anti-elitist populism, manifested in distrust of experts and political elites is the more significant factor that distinguished Trump supporters from supporters of other Republican contenders. But even if Cruz was the preferred candidate of those predisposed to authoritarianism, their study still revealed high levels of authoritarianism in Trump supporters as well. It is thus quite likely that most Cruz supporters turned to Trump supporters when Cruz dropped out of the race, a claim supported by evidence that evangelical Christians overwhelmingly voted for Trump in the general election (Smith and Martinez 2016). But more importantly, anti-elitism is not necessarily opposed to authoritarianism. One might expect authoritarians to submit to the authority of political and other elites, but this misses the fact that authoritarians do not view all forms of authority equally. As MacWilliams puts it:

authoritarians’ sense of order is not necessarily or sole­ly defined by worldly powers. To authoritarians, there are higher powers that delineate right from wrong and good from evil. There are transcendent ways of behaving and being that are enduring, everlasting, and the root of balance and order. These authorities are “morally and ontologically superior” to state or institutional authority and must be obeyed. (2016, 14)

If the actions of social and political elites are viewed as being inconsistent with these higher sources of authority, if they are viewed as unconventional outsiders aiming to upend traditional values, and so on, there is no inconsistency in authoritarians resisting them or their claims to authority. This is precisely the reason that “populist authoritarianism” is not a contradiction in terms, and part of the reason that I have identified that variety of authoritarianism as the relevant one for evaluating Trump’s rise.

Still, Oliver and Rahn’s study might be taken to suggest that support for conservative candidates in general is marked by authoritarian predispositions, such that these predispositions do not uniquely explain support for Trump. Indeed, the study of authoritarianism has historically been plagued by difficulties in disentangling it from conservative political ideologies. This is partly why some scholars of authoritarianism have refined authoritarian personality measures to focus specifically on “Right Wing Authoritarianism” (Altemeyer 1981). Yet one of the advantages of approaches that focus on child-rearing is that they are supposed to get behind ideological commitments and political beliefs. As MacWilliams claims, “authoritarianism is a predisposition that arises causally prior to the political attitudes and behavior that it affects” (2016, 25). In principle then, it should be able to identify latent authoritarian tendencies as well as explicit authoritarian beliefs, as expressed, for example, in some varieties of conservative ideology. Nothing in Oliver and Rahn’s study suggests that the measure fails to do that, but it does perhaps suggest that, in order to understand the distinctiveness of a Trump presidency, we must look at the actions and ideologies of Trump himself, and of his campaign and administration, in addition to the psychological predispositions of his supporters. With this in mind, I now turn to one such tendency of Trump’s governing strategy: the tendency toward racial scapegoating.

 

RACIAL SCAPEGOATING

While MacWilliams presents authoritarianism as an alternative to explanations that focus specifically on race and the alleged racial resentment of many Trump supporters, it is clear that the two factors are not mutually exclusive. In fact, one of the key features of authoritarianism is its fear and suspicion of those who are different, as Adorno’s general definition suggests, and racial difference is one of the most visible and, in the United States, historically salient forms of such difference. It is not necessary here to decide on conceptual grounds whether the manipulation of racial attitudes is a necessary feature of authoritarianism. It is enough to note that, empirically, authoritarian regimes often employ this strategy. Including an analysis of this sort also helps especially to clarify how exactly populist authoritarian leaders manipulate “key lower class groups.” Trump’s campaign certainly employed this strategy, effectively playing upon the anxieties of the white working class regarding their perceived cultural marginalization in the face of the increasing racial diversity of the United States. Yet analyses of Trump’s rise that focus specifically on racial resentment often neglect the economic dimension of Trump’s support among the white working classes. The geographical locations where Trump found the most support are areas where traditional sources of employment have been rendered obsolete or moved overseas, where free trade agreements like NAFTA are viewed with suspicion, and where the social effects of economic marginalization manifested in things like drug addiction have wreaked havoc.[3] These two features – economic marginalization and racial resentment – are not unrelated. The economic marginalization of a subset of the white working class provides fertile ground for racial scapegoating. Here again, the analyses of those writing in the wake of earlier forms of authoritarianism is instructive.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno aimed to show that German anti-Semitism was intentionally cultivated as a means of redirecting discontent arising from economic exploitation. In their words, German anti-Semitism served a specific purpose: “to conceal domination in production” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 142). While European Jews had historically been excluded from ownership of major industries, they had, according to Horkheimer, Adorno, and other social theorists of the time including Hannah Arendt (1976), achieved some success integrating the “circulation sphere,” including what we would now call the financial sector, as well as small business ownership. This social position made the Jew an easy scapegoat for the most basic injustice of capitalism, the extraction of surplus value, i.e. profit, from the wage-laborer. This is allegedly because the workers “find out the true nature of the exchange only when they see what they can buy with [their wages]” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 142). Thus the injustice of capitalist wage labor is projected onto the merchant and the banker, and “the economic injustice of the whole class is attributed to him” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 142). This produces what Horkheimer and Adorno call a “socially necessary illusion” (necessary, presumably, for the maintenance of the economic status quo, not in any ultimate sense), that “the circulation sphere is responsible for exploitation” (2002, 143). This form of scapegoating is expressed finally in their claim that “in the image of the Jew which the racial nationalists hold up before the world they express their own essence” (2002, 137). The exploitation that they attribute to the Jew is really a projection of their own exploitative nature, and in unleashing violence against these substitute exploiters, the masses feel a false sense of emancipation, while remaining within the established “reality principle” of capitalist exploitation.

Interestingly, Horkheimer and Adorno’s theory also describes the way that this form of scapegoating relied on what contemporary race theorists call “racialization” – the transformation of a social group into a racial group (Omi and Winant 2014). Prior to the early twentieth century, and even in the earlier writings of critical theorists (Horkheimer 1989), the “Jewish question” was primarily considered to be a matter of cultural and religious difference. As Marx put it, “the most stubborn form of the opposition between the Jew and the Christian is the religious opposition” (1978, 28). In contrast to this view, Horkheimer and Adorno point out, German fascism understood Jewishness first and foremost in racial terms, thus distancing itself from the “liberal thesis” which held that “the Jews, free of national or racial features, form a group through religious belief and tradition and nothing else” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 137). The Nazis thus attributed to Jews a shared biological essence, solidified in both law and social practice. The Nuremburg Laws, for example, like the so-called “one drop rule” in the United States, included precise specifications of who was to count as a Jew, in order to eliminate any element of voluntary self-identification (or, perhaps more to the point, dis-identification). In this way, the group targeted for scapegoating is identified and fixed in a more or less stable form.

The psychoanalytic foundations of Horkheimer and Adorno’s scapegoat theory are as apparent here as they are in Adorno’s theory of the “authoritarian personality.” But as with Adorno’s reflections on authoritarianism, the observation that authoritarian forms of rule tend to rely on this sort of scapegoating does not rise or fall with one’s acceptance of the psychoanalytic framework.[4] Nor must one accept the Marxist framework upon which their theory of capitalist exploitation draws. The key idea is simply that scapegoating occurs as a response to a real economic crisis, which results in political dissent of a sort that threatens the vested interests of those who hold economic power, which is then redirected toward vulnerable minority groups. Scapegoating of this sort has certainly played some role in Trump’s rise to power. White working class communities that have experienced the loss of low-skill manufacturing jobs, decreasing tax revenue, crumbling infrastructure, and general social anomie have proven incredibly responsive to explanations that link these phenomena to the (perceived) influx of immigrants from the south. Growing white anxiety about misleading reports that whites will soon become a minority in the United States due to increased immigration from non-European nations compounds these economic fears (Passel and Cohn 2008; Pierce 2015). This shows that it is not immigration per se that worries Trump supporters, but a racialized immigration that challenges white control over power and resources. While such racial anxiety is in some form as old as the United States itself, it was manipulated masterfully by the Trump campaign.

Again, the link between this sort of scapegoating and the authoritarian character of Trump’s appeal must be emphasized. Debates about which factor has greater explanatory salience can easily miss the ways in which they are closely intertwined. Authoritarian predispositions are “activated” by threat, and scapegoating represents targeted groups as both economic and existential threats. Mexicans not only threaten “our” jobs, but are also represented as murderers, rapists and all around “bad hombres,” responsible for (fictional) increases in crime and disorder. Their perceived threat to law and order is surpassed only by those from the Arab world, who are equated with terrorism and “radical Islam.” Such threats must be rooted out by any means necessary, and so racial profiling and increasingly invasive police practices are tolerated within our borders, and broadly restrictive immigration measures, physical barriers, and other imprecise responses are promoted as a means of fortifying them.

While it is true that these forms of scapegoating target minority identities that are not technically racial (at least not by the United States’ own official system of racial classification[5]), there is a gap between “official” and popular understandings of race when it comes to Arabic Muslims and “Hispanic” groups. For example, the myriad reports of impending white minority almost always focus on non-Hispanic whites as the relevant demographic for measuring when whites will fall beneath fifty percent of the overall population. And even if Trump supporters’ aversions to Arabs or Muslims appear to be primarily cultural or religious aversions, the rarity of distinguishing between culture, region, and religion in the discourses surrounding immigration from the Middle East demonstrate the increasing racialization of this group (Sheth 2009). These examples show that the folk understanding of race may not match up with official racial categories – that Hispanics and Arabs are commonly thought of as being racially distinct from non-Hispanic, non-Arab whites. As tools like the Census are integral to defining and categorizing populations as “racial,” it will be interesting to see how a Trump administration approaches the 2020 Census, and in particular whether some effort is made to distinguish Arabs and Middle-Eastern populations from “whites.”

Finally, new research suggests that it is not just economic marginalization, but economic inequality in general that contributes to authoritarian attitudes, which in turn make their possessors amenable to racial scapegoating. The “relative power” theory of Frederick Solt holds that economic inequality leads to inequality in power and thereby produces hierarchy. This hierarchy in turn “mak[es] experiences that reinforce vertical notions of authority more common and so authoritarianism more widespread” (Solt 2012, 703). In short, if the economic structure of a society requires or rewards submission to the authority of employers, benefactors, and those with more economic power, this sort of subservience is likely to be seen as normal, and thereby transferred to the sphere of political (or familial) authority, where it can be exploited to support xenophobic policies that purport to address complex social and economic issues.

Combining the insights of the scapegoat theory and the relative power theory then, one can say that societies with a high degree of economic inequality will produce heightened levels of authoritarian predispositions, and that these heightened authoritarian predispositions are more easily activated in times of economic or political crisis, or among economically marginalized populations. Given that capitalism is prone to both extreme inequality and frequent crisis, it is fair to say that it will reliably produce such authoritarian attitudes, especially in those that become economically marginalized. Scapegoating will thus appear as an easy solution to any legitimation crisis that might arise. Trump’s campaign and early administration has relied heavily on this ready solution, and one can expect that it will rely on it even more heavily in the case that crises within the administration and within the United States itself deepen.

 

TRUTH, POWER, AND PROPHESY

A final, much discussed feature of Trump’s alleged authoritarianism is his seeming indifference to truth. Trump is by no means the first politician to employ a strategy of deceit and falsehood. But generally, politicians lie through omission, or in ways that can be easily retracted or reinterpreted. Trump’s cavalier and easily repudiated use of falsehoods regarding matters large and small has struck many observers as unique. Here many analysts have referred to Arendt’s comments on the matter in Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt claims that authoritarian regimes are marked by their “extreme contempt for facts as such” (1976, 350).[6] Moreover, she explains, “the chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error” (1976, 348–49). Yet the authoritarian orientation to the truth is misunderstood, she claims, if it is viewed as an attempt at factual accuracy. Rather, the “propaganda effect” of such pronunciations consists in their “habit of announcing their political intentions in the form of prophesy” (Arendt 1976, 349). Once authoritarian rulers attain power, “all debate about the truth or falsity of a … prediction is as weird as arguing with a potential murderer about whether his future victim is dead or alive” (1976, 350). Among the examples she discusses are both predictions (Hitler’s claim that if “Jewish Financiers” brought about a second world war, the result would be their annihilation) and factual claims (the USSR’s claim that Moscow possessed the world’s only subway system), which she characterizes also as kinds of “prophesy,” since such assertions are lies “only so long as the Bolsheviks have not the power to destroy all the others” (1976, 350).

Some of the falsehoods that the Trump administration traffics in could be understood in this way. The baseless claim that three-to-five million undocumented immigrants voted illegally in the general election, for example, was taken by some as “telegraphing his administration’s intent to provide cover for longstanding efforts by Republicans to suppress minority voters by purging voting rolls, imposing onerous identification requirements and curtailing early voting” (New York Times Editorial Board 2017). Trump also claimed that the U.S. murder rate was at a 47 year high when it was actually at a 45 year low, and his Attorney General Jeff Sessions repeated similarly false claims about increasing crime rates, calling the increase a “dangerous, permanent trend” (Beckett 2017; FBI 2017). Recalling the importance of threat to activating authoritarian predispositions, these claims serve both to shore up obedience in general and to signal an intent to “get tough” on crime, continuing the legacy of criminalization that undergirds the repression of minority groups.[7]

But perhaps most troubling, and less discussed, are the claims that look more like “prophesy” than assertion. For example, when a federal judge issued a stay on his Executive Order temporarily banning travel from seven Muslim-majority countries, Trump tweeted “just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!” (Trump 2017). While the claim that people were “pouring in” could be disputed on factual grounds, the more important aspect of this message is found in its prophetic character, and the precedent it sets for blaming the judiciary for any future attack that might occur. Given the high likelihood of some act of terrorism occurring at some point in Trump’s presidency, this message sets the groundwork for consolidating power in a truly authoritarian fashion. Despite recent increases (likely due to the generalized, post-victory optimism of Trump supporters) public approval ratings of Congress remain at historic lows. This demonstrates a lack of faith in the effectiveness of the legislative branch of government. If faith in the judiciary were similarly undermined, the stage would be set for reigning in its powers, and undermining the system of checks and balances designed to prevent autocracy.

Understanding this strategy provides a basis for responding to an important objection to characterizations of Trump’s administration as authoritarian. One might identify as key features of authoritarianism (as a political system, as opposed to a psychological predisposition) the consolidation of executive power, the elimination of effective checks on that power from legislatures, judiciaries, and the press, repression of opposition parties, and repression of political opposition more broadly. Trump’s early administration does not seem to have consolidated power or repressed dissent in this way. To the contrary, his actions appear to have produced levels of dissent, protest, and pushback, from citizens, from the media, from opposing political parties, and in some cases even from the Republican Party itself, not seen in the United States in some time. Perhaps this indicates that worries about Trump ushering in an era of authoritarian repression and control are exaggerated.

It does seem unlikely that a Trump administration will succeed in outlawing the Democratic Party, disbanding Congress, or replacing independent journalism with state-sponsored channels of propaganda. For this reason, it seems premature to declare the Trump administration definitively authoritarian. However, it is equally unwise to ignore Trump’s clear pretensions to authoritarianism: his disdain for judges and legislators alike, his attempts to delegitimize protest and resistance with conspiratorial fantasies of shadowy puppet masters, paid operatives, and terrorist infiltrators, and his attempts to exclude certain news media from White House press briefings, to bypass journalistic channels entirely, communicating with the public through Twitter, and to create his own news organization. If some of Trump’s intentions and preferred methods of rule are indeed authoritarian, this is reason enough to pay close attention to changes in the political environment that might create possibilities to introduce such methods.

For example, Trump has already flirted with the dangerous possibility of simply disregarding judicial review of his policies. When the first federal judges issued a temporary stay on Trump’s January 27th travel ban, the Department of Homeland Security originally announced its intention to continue to enforce the provisions of the order in spite of the early rulings. Thankfully, the administration changed course as public outrage grew and additional decisions reinforced and expanded the initial rulings. But it is easy to imagine that if public opinion turned against the judiciary (perhaps as a result of acts of terrorism as prophesied by Trump’s tweet), such a strategy of disregard might appear more feasible to Trump’s administration. A major terrorist attack on the United States would also provide a convenient premise for expanding executive power and restricting the constitutional rights of citizens, following precedents set in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

In short then, while it is premature to conclude that the Trump administration is an authoritarian regime, I have identified three authoritarian elements of his campaign and early administration that should be carefully monitored, and shown how these elements are inter-related. Authoritarian regimes appeal to the authoritarian inclinations of their supporters, and such inclinations do appear to be present at significant levels among Trump’s supporters. These inclinations make Trump supporters amenable to policies and explanations that scapegoat vulnerable racial minorities (as well as contribute to the “racialization” of groups that were previously not thought to be racially distinct), and that redirect attention away from the structural economic causes of their increasing marginalization. And finally, Trump’s strategic use of falsehoods points to their “prophetic” character as predictions rather than truth claims, intended to construct ideological grounds for rationalizing future actions, as Arendt describes. Citizens and political analysts alike should continue to monitor these elements of the Trump administration, and to guard against their expanded use and exploitation.

 

Andrew J. Pierce is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Director of Justice Education at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, IN. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Loyola University Chicago. His specialization is social and political philosophy broadly conceived, with interests in critical theory and the philosophy of race. He is the author of several articles in these areas, as well as a recent book: Collective Identity, Oppression, and the Right to Self-Ascription.

 

REFERENCES

Adorno, Theodor W., Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford. 1950. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper.

Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press.

Altemeyer, Bob. 1981. Right-Wing Authoritarianism. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.

Arendt, Hannah. 1976. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt.

Beckett, Lois. 2017. “Experts Dispute Jeff Sessions’ Claim that Crime Rise is a ‘Permanent Trend’.” The Guardian, February 10.

Case, Anne and Angus Deaton. 2015. “Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century,” PNAS, December 8, 112(49): 15078−83.

Christie, Richard and Marie Jahoda, eds. 1954. Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian Personality”: Continuities in Social Research. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Executive Order 13769 of January 27, 2017, Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States. Code of Federal Regulations, title 3 (2017): 8977−80.

FBI Uniform Crime Reports. 2017. Accessed February 23, 2017. https://www.ucrdatatool.gov/

Gasiorowski, Mark J. 2006. “The Political Regimes Project.” In On Measuring Democracy: Its Consequences and Concomitants, edited by Alex Inketes, pp. 105−23. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

Girard, Rene. 1977. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Hibbing, John R. and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse. “A Surprising Number of Americans Dislike How Messy Democracy Is. They Like Trump.” Washington Post. May 2, 2016.

Hetherington, Marc and Jonathan Weiler. 2009. Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

———. “The Jews and Europe.” 1989. In Critical Theory and Society, edited by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner, pp. 77−94. New York: Routledge.

MacWilliams, Matthew C. 2016. The Rise of Trump: America’s Authoritarian Spring. Amherst: Amherst College Press.

Marx, Karl. 1978. “On the Jewish Question.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, pp. 26−53. New York: Norton.

New York Times Editorial Board. 2017. “The Voter Fraud Fantasy.” New York Times, January 27. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/opinion/the-voter-fraud-fantasy.html?_r=0

Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. 2014. Racial Formation in the United States. 3^rd edition. New York: Routledge.

Passel, Jeffery and D’Vera Cohn. 2008. “U.S. Population Projections: 2005-2050.” Washington D.C. Pew Hispanic Center.

Pierce, Andrew. 2015. “The Myth of the White Minority.” Critical Philosophy of Race. 3 (2): 305−23.

Rahn, Wendy and Eric Oliver. 2016. “Rise of the Trumpenvolk: Populism in the 2016 election.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 667 (1): 189−206.

Sheth, Falguni. 2009. Toward a Political Philosophy of Race. Albany: SUNY Press.

Smith, Gregory A., and Jessica Martínez. 2016. “How the Faithful Voted: A Preliminary 2016 Analysis.” Pew Research Center.

Solt, Frederick. 2012. “The Social Origins of Authoritarianism.” Political Research Quarterly. 65 (4): 703−13.

Stenner, Karen. 2005. The Authoritarian Dynamic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Trump, Donald. 2017. Twitter Post. February 5, 2017. 12:39 PM. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/828342202174668800.

Wayne, Carly, Nicholas Valentino and Marzia Oceno. 2016. “How Sexism Drives Support for Donald Trump.” Washington Post. October 23. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/10/23/how-sexism-drives-support-for-donald-trump/?utm_term=.147c75c7355e

 

ENDNOTES

[1] See for example Wayne 2016 and Hibbing 2016.

[2] Methodological criticisms of Adorno et al. gave rise to decades-long debates in the social sciences about the proper way to measure authoritarian attitudes, and the crucial difference between authoritarian predispositions and authoritarian behaviors. Yet the existence of these measurement problems does not fundamentally challenge the underlying conception of the authoritarian personality, and the fact that the method that is widely considered to avoid such problems returns to questions about childrearing lends some evidence to Adorno’s original emphasis on childhood experience.

[3] See for example the discussion of what have come to be called “deaths of despair” among this demographic in Case and Deaton 2015.

[4] Neither is it necessary for the present analysis to identify the deep anthropological origins of the “scapegoat mechanism” as, for example Rene Girard 1977 does. Whatever role (if any) scapegoating plays in human culture generally, it is clear that this feature takes on a particularly intense and specific form in authoritarian regimes.

[5] According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Hispanic is an “ethnicity” rather than a racial identity. Thus, respondents are asked whether they are Hispanic or non-Hispanic, and then must answer an additional question about race. The racial category “white” explicitly includes people from the Middle East and Arabs.

[6] Arendt’s analysis is focused on “totalitarianism,” which she understands as an extreme version of authoritarianism that aims to extend its sphere of control beyond opposing parties and branches of government and into the fabric of everyday social life, demanding not just obedience, but assent to the dominant ideology of the State. The differences between authoritarianism and what Arendt calls totalitarianism are interesting, but can be set aside here for the present purpose of an analysis of authoritarianism, since it is not clear that this particular feature – the strategic use of falsehoods – is one that distinguishes the two forms of rule.

[7] On the link between criminalization and race, see Alexander 2010.

by Marcus Hedahl and Travis N. Rieder

ABSTRACT. In trying to motivate climate action, many of those concerned about altering the status quo focus on trying to convince climate deniers of the error of their ways. In the wake of the  2016 Election, one might believe that now, more than ever, it is tremendously important to convince those who deny the reality of climate science of the well-established facts. We argue, however, that the time has come to revisit this line of reasoning.  With a significant majority of voters supporting taxing or regulating greenhouse gases, those who want to spur climate action ought to focus instead on getting a critical mass of climate believers to be appropriately alarmed. Doing so, we contend, may prove more useful in creating the political will necessary to spur bold climate action than would engaging directly with climate deniers.

Less than a month after the 2016 presidential election, incoming White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus stated that climate change denialism would be the “default position” of the Trump administration (Meyjes 2016). In March 2017, Scott Pruit, President Trump’s choice to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, expressed his belief—contrary to the estabilished scientific consensus—that carbon dioxide was not one of the primary contributors of climate change (Davenport 2107). Given this existence of climate denialism at the highest reaches of U.S. government, one might believe that, now more than ever, it is tremendously important to convince those who deny the reality of climate science of the well-established facts.[1] Surely, with truth on our side, we must trumpet the evidence, making deniers our primary target and acceptance of the truth of climate change our primary goal.

The time has come, however, to revisit this line of reasoning. We’ve spent too much time and energy trying to convince climate deniers of the obvious facts,[2] and false optimism has been too friendly to our entrenched inaction.[3] Arguing the science against the deep-rooted climate denial of a small but influential portion of American society has failed to achieve even modest climate action. The election of Donald Trump is, sadly, almost assuredly going to make the task more difficult, given his appointments of prominent climate deniers and fossil fuel advocates to every climate-relevant cabinet position (Sidahmed 2016). If successful climate action depended on convincing the radical deniers, we would justifiably despair at the task before us.

Fortunately, there is another strategy for motivating climate action, and it does not rely on convincing those hopelessly incalcitrant to being swayed by scientific evidence. New public opinion polling data on climate change beliefs suggest another way forward for cultivating the will to enact climate policy: In short, we need to focus on getting a critical mass of the believers to be appropriately alarmed. Doing so, we contend, may prove significantly more useful in creating the political will necessary to spur bold climate action than by engaging directly with climate deniers.

 

MORAL DENIAL VS. SCIENTIFIC DENIAL

To better understand climate denialism, it will be helpful to consider one particularly vivid example: Senator Jim Inhofe, author of The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future. In 2015, Sen Inhofe held up a snowball on the floor of the U.S. Senate in an attempt to “disprove” the overwhelming scientific consensus regarding our changing climate. One may initially attribute these kinds of stunts to a lack of basic scientific acumen. After all, no one thinks rising global temperatures imply the immediate end of snow everywhere on the planet. Thankfully, however, we need not hypothesize about the Senator’s reasons for denying the reality of climate change; he did us the favor of making them explicit by proclaiming, “Do you realize I was actually on [the climate change] side of this issue when I was chairing that committee and first heard about this? I thought it must be true until I found out what it would cost.”[4] His lack of understanding, then, seems not to be a scientific one, but something else altogether.

It might be tempting to dismiss Sen. Inhofe as an anomaly on this score. Unfortunately, however, he is not alone in possessing these particular epistemic motivations. In a recent study, research participants who identified as Republican were more than twice as likely to affirm a plausible scientific prediction (namely that, ‘Global temperatures will rise 3.2 degrees in the 21^st century’) when it was paired with a free market solution to avoid it than when it was paired with a policy solution involving taxes and regulation (Campbell and Kay 2014). This evidence suggests that climate change deniers don’t always become deniers because they reject the science behind climate change; rather, some may well become deniers because they dislike the proposed solutions—generally regulation or taxes. For such individuals, their dislike of proposed solutions to the problem appears to color their view on whether or not the science regarding the underlying issue is reliable.[5]

In short, climate skeptics demonstrate the limits of the deficit model of scientific communication, a model that holds that popular opinions differ from a given scientific consensus only when citizens lack scientific knowledge (Requarth 2017). In the domain of climate change, scientific literacy actually has a small negative effect on developing accurate beliefs about climate change: among those who take themselves to be conservative, those who know the most about science take climate change to pose the least amount of risk (Kahan et al. 2012). These conservative, scientifically knowledgable citizens are already aware of the scientific consensus—they simply reject it (Kahan 2014).

This phenomenon fits well with Michael Mann’s “Six stages of climate change denial,” in which climate deniers tend to move (sometimes fluidly) from outright denial of the science, to denial of human causation, to denial of serious harm, to optimism about human adaptability (2012). These moves make little sense when considered as an attempt to formulate a coherent system of beliefs, but climate denial is generally more pragmatic than epistemic: For deniers, any dialectical move that postpones action—particularly the kind of bold action needed to combat climate change—is a winning one. If you jokingly point out the folly of using a local snowfall to disprove a change in average global temperature, many climate deniers will laugh right along with you. Despite their pronouncements to the contrary, they aren’t using the snow to claim that climate change doesn’t exist, but rather to claim that a world of climate change won’t be so dissimilar to our own. Any policy response that’s even slightly costly would always thereby be inappropriate because, as they like to say, “the climate is always changing.”

The problem, of course, is that the world won’t be so different for them: privileged adults currently living in the developed world. If the reasoning behind that kind of climate denial were merely lavishly imprudent—and, for what it’s worth, it is (Stern et al. 2006; Stern et al. 2014)—the rest of us might be able to tolerate it as an input to our collective civic discourse (Habermas 1991). Yet in today’s tightly interconnected world, the venerable requirement not to harm others gives us a number of novel, moral reasons for action (Shue 2010a). These reasons become even stronger given the fact that we know that the impacts of climate change will not be regionally uniform, with many of the least fortunate most vulnerable to its most adverse effects (Stocker et al. 2013). These differences in vulnerability become even more salient when we consider issues of intergenerational justice (Barry 1997; Broome 2012). If we realize that one of the purposes of the language of justice is to provide normative protections for the vulnerable, we quickly realize that for future generations and those already less fortunate, the status quo with respect to climate change is not merely imprudent but also immoral (Shue 2010b). What this tells us is that for many climate deniers, their espoused denial of the science isn’t motivated solely by skepticism of the scientific reasoning, but also a rejection of the moral imperatives that stem from that reasoning.

So, we are left in a dialectically impossible situation with the denier of climate change. They claim to deny the science, so an appeal to justice will leave them unmoved—after all, why should we sacrifice to solve a moral problem that doesn’t actually exist? Yet a move to the scientific realm will be equally unsuccessful if the root disagreement is as much normative as it is descriptive. The denier of climate change thereby becomes a moving target that we are left unable to engage, let alone convince.

 

SHIFTING FOCUS FROM DENIERS TO THE CAUTIOUS AND CONCERNED

If what we’ve said thus far is plausible, then we have good reason to believe that at least some climate deniers are unlikely to abandon their position even in the face of contrary evidence, in part because their denial is motivated by their dislike of the proposed policy solutions. This state of affairs would be especially problematic if climate deniers constituted a majority of the population, and so could easily turn their views into political will. Recent data suggests, however, that climate denialism doesn’t enjoy anything like a majority. According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, in 2016, 72% of Americans regarded climate change with ‘caution’, ‘concern’, or ‘alarm’ (Roser-Renouf 2016).[6] In other words, a clear and significant majority of Americans “believe in” the reality of climate change and would be amenable to some form of climate action.

The problem remains, however, that mere belief in anthropogenic climate change isn’t sufficient to motivate climate action. Indeed, nearly half of Trump supporters (49%) report believing that climate change is occurring, but that didn’t stop them from voting for an avowed climate denier (Leiserowitz 2017). Individuals must also be aware of the consequences of inaction, rather than merely that a problem exists; for what distinguishes the cautious, concerned, and alarmed is how important they take the issue of climate change to be, how much they are worried about climate change, and how long they think it will be before people are harmed by climate change. For far too many, climate change is taken to be yet another issue among many, ranking behind objectively less dangerous problems, like gun control or infrastructure (Roser-Renouf 2016). There’s little reason to believe, therefore, that even near universal belief in the existence of a problem would be sufficient to spur bold and radical climate action.

We want to suggest an alternative to trying to create a universal consensus about the reality of climate change: Focusing on the cautious and concerned in order to get them to reconsider the significance of the climate crises. There are at least two reasons that this approach may prove to be more efficacious than continuing to browbeat climate deniers. First, those who are cautious and concerned about climate change are much more malleable than are those who deny the fact of climate change altogether. These individuals have considered the issue much less thoroughly, and they report that they are much more open to revising their opinions about climate change’s relative significance (Leiserowitz et al. 2009). Second, although U.S. citizens remain divided on the question of whether regulation is beneficial for the public interest in general (42% believing it is to 45% believing it is not), in the more specific domain of environmental protection, that division is significantly diminished, with many more believing that environmental regulations are generally worth the costs they may impose (59% believing environmental regulations are in general beneficial for the public interest to 34% believing they are not). Indeed, 62% of self-identified Trump voters support taxing and or regulating greenhouse gases (Leiserowitz 2017). The cautious and concerned, then, may be receptive both to reconsider the seriousness of climate change, as well as the need for government regulation.

We therefore recommend focusing on those who are cautious and concerned in order to make them appropriately alarmed. We do so despite recognizing that the language of ‘alarm’ is not particularly popular in climate change debates, in no small part because ‘alarmist’ is a preferred moniker by the deniers for those who advocate for climate action. Alarmism may well be disreputable if one were trying to scare others in the absence of evidence (perhaps wearing billboards saying, ‘the end is nigh!’). We contend, however, that the reasons to be alarmed can be based on the same, solid data that justifies a belief in climate change itself. The same scientific evidence that demonstrates that the climate is changing also tells us that relatively small changes in the earth’s climate can have drastic effects on the planet’s life-support systems. And alarm, we think, is precisely the appropriate normative reaction to such facts. In a way, then, our goal is a kind of reclamation project: climate alarmism isn’t an epithet to anyone but the denier, and so we shouldn’t be bullied into avoiding (sometimes dire) warnings. Of course we’re alarmed, because we find the situation objectively alarming.

 

CHANGING CLIMATE COMMUNICATION

If the percentage of those Americans who are alarmed about climate change were slightly higher, then perhaps we would start to see real change: change in the public dialogue, change in what we demand of our policy makers, and ultimately change in public policy. Yet developing a deep understanding of the threat of climate change and the demands of justice is difficult: the problem is global in scale, the effects are occurring over a fairly long time-scale (for humans), and the threats pose a type of danger that we simply haven’t experienced before. So, climate change is often spoken about it in a abstract way, normalizing the processes with thousands of headlines that lack any kind of intimate drama: “Climate change may decrease wheat yield in Bangladesh by more than 30% by 2050,” or “Record-breaking heat waves may become the norm, say scientists.” Such normalization makes the problem seem far off and difficult to relate to in our everyday lives. The cautious and concerned citizens affirm these statements, and acknowledge that at some point, someone, somewhere really ought to do…something.

The unfortunate truth that we must face is that motivating people is often difficult—especially if what we must motivate them to do runs counter to their more immediate self-interest. Exacerbating this issue is the fact that we are all subject to predictable biases.[7] One that is particularly relevant for present purposes is that we tend to move slowly from our initial response to climate change, thinking that it must not be that bad, or else someone would be doing something about it. After all, most of us only hear the same kinds of political solutions we hear in other areas of political discourse: a modest change in taxation, new investments of research and development funds, or regulations treating CO₂ as a pollutant. It’s not surprising, therefore, that so many take climate change to be yet another issue among many. If you only hear more tempered solutions to the climate problem, you are more likely to believe that one of them must be sufficient to solve the crisis.

Some have advocated that one possible solution would be to appeal to emotions rather than reasons, focusing on sympathetic or relatable figures (Requarth 2017). A powerful example of this type of appeal can be found in Susan Mathew’s recent analysis of the Podcast S-Town:

In reality, the feeling I get when I think deeply about climate change is the same feeling I get when I remember that someday, at some point, I, me, myself personally, am going to die. There’s fear and disbelief, and my heart seems to collapse in on itself. Eventually, something in me forces myself to stop thinking about it…John B. didn’t have this defense mechanism…He felt the reality of our impending doom every day. He kept staring off the edge of the cliff. He couldn’t look away. Which reaction is “normal”? Mine is certainly more common. It’s also more pragmatic…But if you want to ask which is more logical, which is more moral, which is more correct, the answer is surely John’s. What kind of human can look ahead and realize that we’re headed for a massive disaster and then shrug and still order takeout?” (2017)

Another effective example imagines future tourism posters encouraging vistors to scuba dive the Lincoln Memorial, kayak Arches National Park, and visit the Pacific Coast in Nevada (Lui 2017).

These kinds of appeals surely have some place in the larger climate communication strategies, but they are vulnerable to the charge of hyperbole. They are also suceptable to counter-emotional appeals by those who want to defend the status quo. To acquiesce to emotional appeals wholeheartedly, even to mix emotional appeals with scientific data, is to forfeit the objective, epistemic high ground that science is meant to provide. The kind of stable and widespread climate alarm that has the potential to spur bold climate action cannot be primilarly the product of an appeal to emotion.

In order to get people to grasp the true danger climate change threatens—or, in other words, in order to alter beliefs about climate changes without brute appeal to emotion—we contend that, the climate crises must be shown to be both more tangible and more urgent. Two strategies that we want to suggest are:

1. Grounding larger, global changes in smaller, local ones; and
2. Grounding future effects in changes that are already occurring.[8]

In short: we suggest fighting typical cognitive biases by bringing the global and future effects back home to the local and present.

With respect to the first strategy, we can begin by noting that citizens—even citizens in a landscape littered with a focus on climate denialism—generally understand and acknowledge the local impacts of our changing climate (McCormick 2016). In the United States, many citizens are well aware of the changes affecting them—of how, in the Midwest, higher nighttime temperatures have reduced corn yields (Thaler 2016); or how in the West, exposure to higher temperatures have caused losses in livestock that have exceeded $1 billion annually (Hatfield et al. 2014); or how in Miami, FL, or Hampton VA, rising sea levels are already threatening local infrastructure (Thaler 2016) and may already be impacting the long-term value of local real-estate (Nehemas 2016).

With respect to the second strategy, we can highlight that these changes occurring in our own neighborhoods are unprecedented, worsening, and threatening genuinely terrifying days to come. All over, warmer air is holding more moisture, increasing the severity of deadly whether events. Between October 2015 and October 2016, the United States was subjected to eight storms that would, without climate change, be once-every-500-years storms (NOAA 2016). The flooding that caused so much devastation in Louisiana (Vaidyanathan 2016),[9] West Virginia (Dileberto 2016)[10] and Maryland (Dance 2016)[11] have each been called a once-every-1000-years event. Unfortunately, climate change has made terms like ‘once-every-1000-years storm’ meaningless. We can expect these types of events—and worse—year after year.

The last 30 years have been warmer than any since 1850 and they are very likely the warmest in the last 1400 years (Stoker et al. 2013). More recently, 2016 was the hottest year on record, replacing 2015, which replaced 2014. We are already seeing disturbing disruptions of precisely the kind predicted by climate models. Unprecedented ‘heat domes’ have caused deadly temperatures during the past two years, especially in the Middle East, where the heat index climbed to 165 degrees F during July 2015 (Samenow 2015). At the end of 2016, in the Arctic winter, when temperatures should be plunging and sea ice should be expanding rapidly, temperatures were soaring, and sea ice was actually shrinking (Yulsman 2016).

People are already suffering, losing their homes, and dying because of human emissions. Globally, earlier spring temperatures have disrupted critical ecosystem services on which human society depends (i.e., clean air and water, crop pollination, etc.) (Staudinger et al. 2012). Water resources have become scarce and more highly variable (Haddeland et al. 2014), with associated negative consequences for crop yields (Lobell et al. 2011) as well as food security overall (Shindell et al. 2012). And it will only get worse. The World Health Orginization estimates that between 2030 and 2050, climate disruptions will cause an additional 250,000 deaths per year (WHO 2014).

If we continue business as usual for too long, then in the latter half of the century, we will face the much more dangerous reality of a 4–5 degree C rise in temperature, bringing virtually unimaginable damage and suffering. The world of unmitigated climate change is a world in which, by 2100, large swaths of the world (portions of North Africa, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean) will be virtually uninhabitable in the summer months due to heat. Low-lying island nations and coastal regions will disappear, creating millions more climate refugees (World Bank Group 2014). Combined with escalating food insecurity and severe water stress, as well as changing disease vectors and the political instability that could result from all of these pressures, the world of under-mitigated climate change will be a world of massive human suffering.

 

TRUMPETING ALARM

While granting that a change in climate communications could alter public discourse in a positive way, some may nonetheless worry that current polical realities complicate that recommendation. One could believe that ignoring the climate denials of those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo is one thing, but ignoring the climate denials of those in positions of political power is quite another. In this section, we want to suggest that while this state of affairs is indeed troubling, the best strategy may nonetheless be an indirect one. The time has come to give up on convincing climate deniers of the obvious facts—even deniers in high elected office—but that does not imply that we need resign ourselves to a future of climate inaction.

In the 2016 election, the differences in level of concern regarding climate change among the cautious, concerned, and alarmed was reflected in different choices of a Presidential Candidate. While the ‘alarmed’ citizens rank the issues of environmental protection, climate change, and alternative sources of energy at or near the top of their policy concerns, the ‘concerned’ rank those issues somewhere in the middle behind issues like infrastructure and gun control, and the ‘cautious’ rank them near the bottom of several dozen listed options (Roser-Renouf 2016). Unsurprisingly, the relative size of these various groups ended up having an influence on both the democratic primary and the general election.[12] In 2016, the percentage of Americans who categorize themselves as “alarmed” was merely 17% in comparison with 28% who are concerned and 27% who are cautious (Roser-Renouf 2016). While those ‘alarmed’ is up from 10% in 2010,[13] it was not enough to nominate a 2016 presidential candidate in either party with a platform of significant climate action, nor was it enough to stop a climate denier from eventually taking office. In other words, the reality of climate change, while accepted by most people, was not sufficiently important either to nominate a genuine environmental champion, or even to prevent the election of an outright climate denier. What this seems to suggest is that one way the last election could have been changed (or that the next one could be) is by engaging unmotivated believers in an effort to make climate policy a more important voting issue. One clear benefit to spreading appropriate alarm concerning climate change is that, at a minimum, widespread understanding of the gamble we are taking with the climate could help to prevent the election of proud climate deniers to elected office (e.g., Trump, Inhofe, Rubio, Cruz, and dozens of others).[14]

The quick and radical change in elective officials’ attitudes towards cigarette regulation may prove to be a useful case study on this score. The change in the positions of a majority of elected officials was not brought about because old representatives were replaced with new ones,[15] but because—either out of pragmatic or democratic concerns—many elected officials changed their position as their constituents’ views changed. Long before the changes in cigarette regulation of the 1980s,1990s, and 2000s, there was a widespread belief that cigarette smoking was dangerous. It was, however, developing a better understanding of who would be harmed, how they would be harmed, and when they would be harmed that spurred a change in belief about the significance of the issue.

That kind of understanding can also lead to an even more important political benefit of increased alarm: Not only would it limit the ability of one party to tolerate climate deniers, it could lead many in the other to become less likely to tolerate climate moderates. Becoming appropriately alarmed allows citizens to realize a fundamental truth: Climate change will require dramatic political action. Not only will combating climate change require policies like carbon taxing, but it will also likely demand the kind of solutions almost never raised in mainstream discussions of climate policy, solutions such as divesting pension funds from fossil fuel companies and taking preventive action to strand trillions of dollars of fossil fuels in the ground.[16] The problem is serious. The solutions required to solve it are very likely not what they were twenty, ten, or even five years ago. We need an Apollo Program, or a Manhattan Project, not merely an expansion of New England’s cap and trade market (McKibben 2016). In today’s world, the only way to even begin a truthful conversation about our climate policies is to be sufficiently alarmed.

 

CONCLUSION

In the coming years, as President Trump threatens to roll back even our already insufficient, incremental progress on climate change, citizens must fight back against those measures—but we cannot do so by simply fighting against denialism. We must talk about climate more: every year, every month, every week, but we must do so strategically, investing our efforts where they are likely to have a real effect. We must make clear what is at stake and what the costs of inaction will be, thereby making it more likely that we can achieve a citizenry that is appropriately alarmed.

To do so, it is important to recognize that not all deniers are scientific deniers; their flaws are more than merely epistemic. They agitate, they obfuscate, and they dominate discussion. One cannot win an argument with someone whose goal is to keep others talking about their incalcitrant, untethered beliefs. To participate in that “argument” is, by definition, to lose it. Engaging the denier is not a costless endeavor; the world continues to burn. While it does, far too many get distracted, they view themselves on the “right side of history,” and give themselves moral credit for doing nothing more than believing the most brute facts of modern science. We must do more: We must become keenly aware of the specific dangers climate change poses and we must spur bold climate action. We’ve likely already lost the next four years to climate policy regression; we can’t risk losing any more.

 

Dr. Marcus Hedahl is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the U.S. Naval Academy. He holds a B.S. in Physics from the University of Notre Dame and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Georgetown University. He previously served as a Dahrendorf Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment located at the London School of Economics and Political Science and as an Environmental Justice Fellow at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics.

Travis N. Rieder is the Assistant Director of Education Initiatives & a Research Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. Travis holds a BA from Hanover College, an MA from the University of South Carolina, and a PhD from Georgetown University, all in Philosophy. He also completed a Hecht-Levi Postdoctoral Fellowship in Bioethics at the Berman Institute before joining the faculty in 2015.

 

REFERENCES

Barry, Brian. 1997. “Sustainability and Intergenerational Justice,” Theoria 44 (89): 43–65.

Broome, John. 2012. Climate Matters. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Campbell, Troy, Aaron C. Kay. 2014. “Solution Aversion: On the Relation between Ideology and Motivated Disbelief.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 107 (5): 809–24.

Dance, Scott. 2016. “Ellicott City Gets Rainfall Expected Only Once Every Millennium.” Balitmore Sun, July 31. Accessed February 26, 2017, http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/weather/weather-blog/bal-wx-ellicott-city-gets-rainfall-expected-only-once-every-few-hundred-years-20160731-story.html.

Davenport, Coral. 2017. “E.P.A. Chief Doubts Consensus View of Climate Change.” New York Times, March 9. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/09/us/politics/epa-scott-pruitt-global-warming.html?_r=0

Di Liberto, Tom. 2016. “’Thousand-Year’ Downpour Led to Deadly West Virginia Floods.” Climate.gov, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Accessed February 26, 2017. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/event-tracker/thousand-year-downpour-led-deadly-west-virginia-floods/

Gardiner, Stephen M. 2013. A Perfect Moral Storm. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Habermas, Jurgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into the Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Burger, T. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Haddeland, Ingjerd, Jens Heinke, Hester Biemans, et al. 2014. “Global Water Resources Affected by Human Interventions and Climate Change.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 (9): 3251–56.

Haidt, Jonathan. 2001. “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail.” Psychological Review 108 (4): 814–34.

Hatfield, Jerry, Gene Takle, Robert Grotjahn, et al. “Agri­culture. Climate Change Impacts in the United States: The Third National Climate Assessment.” In U.S. Global Change Research Program, edited by J. M. Melillo, Terese (T.C.) Richmond, and G. W. Yohe, 150–74.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 2014. Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jamieson, Dale. (2014). Reason in a Dark Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Johansson, Daniel J. A., Brian C. O’Neill, Claudia Tebaldi, and Olle Häggström. 2015. “Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity in Light of Observations Over the Warming Hiatus.” Nature Climate Change 5: 449–53.

Kahan, Dan M., Ellen Peters, and Maggie Witttlin, et al. 2012. “The Polarizing Impact of Science Literacy and Numeracy on Perceived Climate Change Risks.” May 27. Nature Climate Change 2, Letters.

Kahan, Dan. 2015. “Climate-Science Communication and the Measurement Problem.”Advances in Political Psychology 36: 1–43.

Knobe, Joshua. 2003. “Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language.” Analysis 63, 190–93.

Leiserowitz, Anthony, Edward Maibach, and Connie Roser-Renouf. 2009. “Global Warming’s Six Americas.” May 20. Yale University and George Mason University. New Haven, CT: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

Leiserowitz, Anthony, Edward Maibach, Connie Roser-Renouf, Matthew Cutler, and Seth Rosenthal. 2017. “Trump Voters & Global Warming. Yale University and George Mason University.” February 6. New Haven, CT: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

Lobell, David, Wolfram Schlenker, and Justin Costa-Roberts. 2011. “Climate Trends and Global Crop Production Since 1980.” Science 333 (6042): 616–20.

Lui, Kevin. 2017. “These Spoof Posters Show What Climate Change in America Could Look Like.” Time, April 19. http://time.com/4747673/climate-change-march-for-science-posters/

Mann, Michael. 2012. The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. New York: Columbia University Press.

Matthews, Susan. 2017. “Why John B.’s Climate Obsession in S-Town is so Unsettling.” Slate, April 13. http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2017/04/13/why_john_b_mclemore_s_obsession_with_climate_change_in_s_town_is_so_unsettling.html

McCormick, Sabrina. 2016. “Assessing Climate Change Vulnerability in Urban America: Stakeholder-Driven Approaches.” Climate Change 138: 397–410.

McKibben, Bill. 2012. “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.” Rolling Stone, July 19. Accessed February 21, 2017. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719.

———. 2016. “Recalculating the Climate Math.” New Republic, September 22. Accessed February 21, 2017. https://newrepublic.com/article/136987/recalculating-climate-math.

Meyjes, Toby. 2016. “Climate Denial ‘Will be Donald Trump’s Official Policy.” Metro U.K., November 29. Accessed January 9, 2017. http://metro.co.uk/2016/11/29/climate-denial-will-be-donald-trumps-official-policy-6290224/.

Nehemas, Nicholas. 2016. “Miami Real Estate Had a Really Bad Month of July.” Miami Herald, August 24. Accessed January 15, 2017. http://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/real-estate-news/article97640357.html#storylink=cpy.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). 2016. “Exceedance Probability Analysis for Selected Storm Events.” Hydrometeorological Design Studies Center. http://www.nws.noaa.gov/oh/hdsc/aep_storm_analysis/index.html.

Requarth, Tim. 2017. “Scientists, Stop Thinking Explaining Science Will Fix Things.” Slate, April 19. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/04/explaining_science_won_t_fix_information_illiteracy.html

Rogelj, Joeri, Michel den Elzen M, Niklas Hoehne, et al. 2016. “Paris Agreement Climate Proposals Need a Boost to Keep Warming Well Below 2°C.” Nature 534: 631–39. Accessed February 21, 2017.

Roser-Renouf, Connie, Edward Maibach, Anthony Leiserowitz, and Seth Rosenthal. 2016. “Global Warming’s Six Americas and the Election.” 2016. Yale University and George Mason University. New Haven, CT: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

Samenow, Jason. 2015. “Iran City Hits Suffocating Heat Index of 165 Degrees, Near World Record.” The Washington Post, July 31. Accessed February 21, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/07/30/iran-city-hits-suffocating-heat-index-of-154-degrees-near-world-record/?utm_term=.22457bb44846.

Sidahmed, Mazin. 2016. “Climate Change Denial in the Trump Cabinet: Where Do His Nominees Stand?” The Guardian, December 15. Accessed January 9, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/dec/15/trump-cabinet-climate-change-deniers.

Shue, Henry. 2010a. “Subsistence Emissions and Luxury Emissions,” in S. Gardiner, S. Caney, D. Jamieson, & H. Shue (eds.) Climate Ethics: Essential Readings, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———. 2010b “Deadly Delays, Saving Opportunities: Creating a More Dangerous World?” In Climate Ethics: Essential Readings, edited by Stephen Gardiner, Simon Caney, Dale Jamieson, and Henry Shue, 146–62. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shindell, Drew, Johan C. Kuylenstierna, Elisabetta Vignati, et al. 2012. “Simultaneously Mitigating Near-term Climate Change and Improving Human Health and Food Security,” Science 335 (6065): 183–89.

Schwartz, John. 2017. “A Conservative Climate Solution.” New York Times. Feb 7. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/science/a-conservative-climate-solution-republican-group-calls-for-carbon-tax.html

Staudinger, Michelle D., Nancy B. Grimm, Amanda Staudt, et al. 2012. “Impacts of Climate Change on Biodiversity, Ecosystems, and Ecosystem Services: Technical Input to the 2013 National Climate Assessment.” United States Global Change Research Program. https://downloads.globalchange.gov/nca/technical_inputs/Biodiversity-Ecosystems-and-Ecosystem-Services-Technical-Input.pdf

Stocker, Thomas., Dahe Qin, Gian-Casper Plattner, et al., editors. 2013. “Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thaler, Andrew David. 2016. “When I Talk about Climate Change, I Don’t Talk about Science.” Accessed January 15, 2017. http://www.southernfriedscience.com/when-i-talk-about-climate-change-i-dont-talk-about-science/.

Vaidyanathan, Gayathri. 2016. “Why the Deadly Louisiana Flood Occurred,” Scientific American, August 15. Accessed February 26, 2017. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-deadly-louisiana-flood-occurred/

World Health Organization (WHO). 2014. Quantitative Risk Assessment of the Effects of Climate Change on Selected Causes of Death, 2030s and 2050s. Geneva: World Health Organization.

World Bank Group. 2014. Turn Down the Heat: Confronting the New Climate Normal. Washington, DC: World Bank.

Yulsman, Tom. 2016. “Something Really Crazy Is Happening in the Arctic.” Discover, November 20. Accessed January 9, 2017. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/imageo/2016/11/20/something-really-crazy-is-happening-in-the-arctic/#.WHPOcVs7RGZ.

 

ENDNOTES

[1] This claim should not be read to imply a denial of any disagreement about the specifics of climate change. There is, for example, significant uncertainty regarding the amount of warming we should expect given a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide (3 degrees Celsius is a common estimate, but this is a point of much debate). For a brief overview of this issue – known as equilibrium climate sensitivity – see the discussion of the so-called ‘warming hiatus’ in (Johansson et al 2015). There is also disagreement about precisely how successful and predictive various climate models are. Although groups like the Potsdam Institute have made strong claims about what a world with 4 degrees Celsius warming would be like, the IPCC assessment reports, for instance, tend to assign much lower confidence levels to predictions concerning dramatic change over longer periods of time; compare (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2014) and (World Bank Group 2014).

[2] A particularly powerful reading of the history of climate debate can be found in Jamieson (2014).

[3] Indeed, although the Paris Treaty is being widely hailed as a major first step in global climate action, it is nothing like a ‘first’ step. It was the outcome of COP21, or ‘Conference of the Parties 21’, meaning that it was at least the twenty-first “first step.” Moreover, as has been widely noted, the commitments made at COP21 are not nearly enough on their own to prevent dangerous warming; the most recent numbers indicate that faithful adherence to the Paris Treaty would limit warming to between 2.9 and 3.4 degrees Celsius (Rogelj et al) – a far cry from the aspirational limit of 1.5 degrees set in that very same document.

[4] Sen. Inhofe made this comment during an interview on Rachel Maddow. The complete transcript of the show is available at NBC, here: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/46762101/ (last accessed Feb. 21, 2017).

[5] Although such a finding is, in one sense, surprising (the desirability of a solution simply doesn’t bear on whether a problem exists), it also follows a general trend in social and moral psychology. Joshua Knobe, for instance, has shown that much folk psychology does not follow the expected, ‘linear’ model of reasoning we might expect: just as the acceptability of a solution can effect one’s acceptance of climate science, the ‘Knobe Effect’ tells us that the moral acceptability of an act can influence one’s acceptance of that act as ‘intentional’ (Knobe 2003). Perhaps even more disruptively, Jonathan Haidt has argued that the empirical data implies that most people, most of the time, don’t reason at all, but rather engage in post hoc rationalization (Haidt 2001). These growing sets of literature combine with others to suggest that we perhaps shouldn’t be all that surprised at Inhofe’s and others’ move from ‘unacceptable implications’ to ‘bad science’, even if such a move violates the norms of logic.

[6] These are not self identified categories, but rather ways in which the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication groups American citizens based on their answers to a variety of questions regarding their beliefs about climate change. Those categories are the alarmed, the concerned, the cautious, the disengaged, the doubtful, and the dismissive. In this paper, when we refer to the cautious, concerned, or alarmed, we are referring to those who would be categorized as such given the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication’s criteria for differentiation. All of the Program’s studies and data, as well as interactive polling-data maps, can be found at their website, here: http://climatecommunication.yale.edu.

[7] Many relevant biases have been well explored (Gardiner 2013). Here we consider a bias not tied to the more general problem of climate change, but related specifically to the condition of not being sufficient alarmed by the current climate crises.

[8] These two strategies are advanced merely as a starting hypothesis; they are not intended to be a comprehensive list.

[9] Six people were killed by the floods that left more than 20,000 people in need of rescue (Vaidyanathan 2016).

[10] Flooding was blamed for the deaths of 23 people, making it the deadliest WV flood on record (DiLibreto 2016).

[11] Two people were killed in the flooding in Ellicott City as a result (Dance 2016).

[12] The fate of climate change discussion on the Democratic side of the 2016 election is an interesting case study in exploring these factions of American voters. Senator Sanders seemed to have the support of many of the 17% of alarmed voters, as both he and they discussed climate change loudly and often as a genuine legislative priority. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, although not hostile to climate change policy, seemed much more comfortable with the majority position that climate change ought to be addressed, but that there are other priorities.

[13] Although still down from its high point of 18% in 2009.

[14] That contention ought not be read as an endorsement of either party or any particular candidate. It is, in fact, a sad and somehow uniquely American issue that admitting the existence of climate change has become, for a vocal minority, a politicized issue. Nonetheless, in both parties, you can find leaders who favor bold climate action—albeit in different ways (Schwartz 2017). We hope that phenomenon can become more widespread. In fact, it is our greatest hope that President Trump himself will eschew his current position of climate denial. After all, barring a cataclysmic political event, that is the only way in the next four years to obtain an Executive who takes seriously the pragmatic and moral dangers that climate change presents.

[15] See note 15.

[16] For those who think this claims sounds too extreme, some simple math demonstrates its veracity. As Bill McKibben has powerfully articulated, the amount of oil currently in known reserves—oil that we will burn, so long as it is economically viable and we are not prohibited from doing so—is about five times the amount that would guarantee that we pass the two degree temperature rise threshold. For all of the relevant data, see McKibben’s (2012) and (2016).