Spencer Critchley

Communication and Change

Leadership & Management

Here’s Why Arguing With Trump Supporters Doesn’t Work—and Here’s What Will.

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Stained glass window depicting WIlliam Wallace at the Wallace Monument, Stirling, Scotland via Otter / CC BY-SA (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)

One of the reasons we’re so divided is that we never agreed what kind of nation we should be: civic or ethnic. The Founders believed they were creating a civic nation: one based on reason and a social contract, by which free people chose to associate with each other.

But many people rejected that idea. They wanted an ethnic nation: one based not on reason but on faith, and not on a social contract but on loyalty to shared roots and culture. To them, a civic nation sounded soulless.

That split persists today, and it explains a lot about the durability of support for Trump, no matter what the facts say about his incompetence and corruption.

Ethnic nationalism frequently overlaps with racism, but the two aren’t identical. And discussions of ethnic nationalism often stop at racism, because racism looms so large and is so highly charged.

But as important as racism is, it’s not the whole story about ethnic nationalism, in which race and culture are intertwined. Sometimes ethnic nationalism is about race. Sometimes it’s about culture. And sometimes it’s about both.

To opponents of President Trump, including me, it looks obvious that he’s a racist. Some of his supporters think he’s a racist, too, and like that about him. But others think the racism charge is an unfair attack on someone who’s just trying to defend their culture. They’d say you don’t have to hate other cultures to love your own.

In the ethnic nationalist worldview, a nation is more than a lifeless contract, and faith and loyalty are more important than cold facts and logic. In fact all of us see things that way at least sometimes: when we’re inspired by stories of faith in, and loyalty to, legendary leaders like King Arthur, William Wallace (“Braveheart”), Luke Skywalker, or The Black Panther/King T’Challa.

Within the ethnic nationalist worldview, once you’ve sworn loyalty to your leader, it should be an unbreakable bond, but civic nationalists appear to be loyal to nothing. To civic nationalists, rational skepticism about leaders is a democratic virtue, but to ethnic nationalists, it looks like disloyalty or even treason.

It’s the same with civic nationalists’ commitment to progress: to them, progress looks self-evidently good. But to ethnic nationalists, people who are so willing to change, and to abandon tradition, can’t be trusted from one day to the next.

So it is with loyalty to Trump. Since his followers are committed to him, rational arguments are unlikely to change their minds — and may make their commitment even stronger. Ethnic nationalism is descended from the tradition of the divine right of kings, and the language of that tradition is used to describe Trump: a leader chosen by God.

So challenging loyalty to Trump with facts and logic, no matter how compelling they may be, is something like walking into the middle of a religious service and shouting, “But there’s no evidence any of this is true!” It isn’t likely to be persuasive. To the faithful, there’s a higher form of truth.

So how to campaign against Trump? Don’t argue with his followers. Show them he isn’t worthy of their devotion.

If loyalty to the man trumps trust in reason, expose the man for what he is.

Medieval soldiers swore to follow their king to the death — unless on the battlefield they discovered that he had no idea what he was doing and that he ran at the first sign of danger.

That’s Trump. Don’t try to show why he’s wrong. Show what he is.

(I develop these ideas and others in my book Patriots of Two Nations.)

Stained glass window depicting WIlliam Wallace at the Wallace Monument, Stirling, Scotland, via Otter / CC BY-SA.

The Failure Letter

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General Dwight Eisenhower speaks with men of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment, part of the 101st Airborne Division, on June 5, 1944, the day before the D-Day invasion.

What passes for “traditional values” among the Baby Boom generation and its descendants is often, in reality, a sad echo or even a parody of those values.

Think about the difference between a leader in World War II and what passes for a leader now. The night before D-Day, Dwight Eisenhower wrote his “In Case of Failure” letter. If the invasion failed, he wanted to make it clear who bore the responsibility:

The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

Compare Trump: “I don’t take responsibility at all.”

This after a lifetime of self-indulgence and faking it.

There were some children of the Greatest Generation who upheld the tradition they inherited, while expanding it to make it even better. We see them in our society now, thank God.

And then there were those who claimed all the benefits but none of the responsibilities, behaving like some heirs do, like the man we elected President: a lucky child.

Photo: Eisenhower speaks with men of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment, part of the 101st Airborne Division, on June 5, 1944, the day before the D-Day invasion. (Public domain via Wikimedia.org.)

Presidential Campaigns Are Not Logical, but Mythological

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Tapestry: King Arthur as one of the None Worthies
King Arthur

If you’re trying to make sense of a presidential campaign, it helps to realize that it’s not logical, but mythological. We’re choosing a leader, not a manager, and the process has more in common with mystical, ancient rites than with reviewing resumes.

What we look for in a leader hasn’t changed much since the beginning of history, or even before, when we were primates gathered in troupes. We’re looking for the one who will fight, and win, for us.

The judgment of who that is isn’t really based on judgment, but on instinct. It’s necessary (or should be) for a candidate to be qualified and to have solid policies, but it’s nowhere near sufficient. What catches our stronger interest and ends up persuading us is what is expressed in a fleeting facial expression, the tone of a voice, and the way a body moves, along with how all of these happen to interact with the culture of the moment — the right leader at the wrong time won’t succeed.

[Read more…] about Presidential Campaigns Are Not Logical, but Mythological

Mike Pompeo’s Meltdown & the Sad State of the Strong Man

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Silhouette of a walking man
iStock

Along with everything else we’re dealing with, there’s the sad state of the strong man. Not the Strong Man, like the currently popular Putin. The actual strong man.

It’s good that our understanding of what it means to be a man has evolved. But there are some traditional values that remain valuable, like courage, integrity, humility, and using your strength to protect people, not to prey on them.

A bully is a sad imitation of that, and in reality is its opposite.

A bully is a weak, frightened boy in a man’s body, putting on a noisy show.

Trump is a classic bully. But as I’ve said before, he isn’t the cause of what’s gone wrong with our country, he’s a symptom, and that applies to the state of manhood as well. It’s not Trump’s fault that such a flagrantly phony “tough guy” could be taken for the real thing. The fault, dear Brutus, is in ourselves.

And so with Trump’s Secretary of State and former CIA Director, Mike Pompeo. NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly recently asked him the tough but fair questions any serious reporter would have asked, instead of only the safe ones he wanted to answer. He ended the interview and then yelled and swore at her for about 10 minutes.

She was just doing her job, and he fell apart.

Embarrassing.

The contrast between the two of them raises yet another traditional value of the truly strong man: capability. Bullies are typically incompetent. It’s one reason for their inner sense of weakness (along with the bullying they themselves have often suffered in childhood).

Pompeo, like his boss, checks the incompetence box too. He’s been in the public eye for a long time, but doesn’t seem to know that real reporters don’t make deals like the one he claims he had with Kelly. And as the record shows, he didn’t have such a deal.

He also doesn’t seem to know how “off the record” works: wishing his post-interview meltdown had been off the record doesn’t make it so.

And he didn’t know how to avoid humiliating himself even further by demanding that an experienced foreign affairs journalist with a Master’s in European Studies find Ukraine on an unlabeled map. I guess he thought that was hard, but she didn’t.

It was a classic bully’s move. Kelly shouldn’t have had to pass such a test, though she easily did.

But Pompeo, true to form for a bully, failed a mild test of the strength he can only pretend to have.

War With Iran: The Evil Done by Nobody

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Qassim Suleimani photo from Wikimedia Commons
Qassim Suleimani (photo via Wikimedia Commons)

One overlooked aspect of the apparently impulsive and reckless decision to kill Qassim Suleimani: how evil is enabled by bureaucracy.

In this case, according to reporting, Trump’s advisers presented him with “bracketed options,” a common bureaucratic tactic. Bracketed options are designed to manipulate the recipient into choosing what the presenters want.

It’s a Goldilocks process: offer one choice that’s too far one way, another that’s too far the other way, and one in the middle that’s “just right.”

The trouble this time: these bureaucrats were dealing with Trump, who thinks at the level of an emotionally disturbed child. And he chose the most extreme option. He wasn’t supposed to, it was only there to nudge him towards another one, but he chose it.

It’s not that Suleimani didn’t have it coming. He was a brutal terrorist who could be targeted under the standards of just war, depending on the circumstances. But Trump appears to have risked chaos — death and suffering for untold numbers of people — with little more than a moment’s thought. If so, even if it somehow works out, this will still have been a grotesquely irresponsible decision.

“Top Pentagon officials were stunned,” according to the New York Times.

First of all, how could they possibly be stunned? Did they forget it was Donald Trump they were dealing with? An incredible lack of foresight for people we trust to plan wars.

But also, this was a typical example of bureaucratic dishonesty — one that happened to backfire terribly — found throughout government and in the private and nonprofit sectors too: anywhere that people are incentivized to diffuse accountability while their self-interest remains concentrated. Note that as stunned as Trump’s advisers were, none was too stunned to stick with the program — or lack of program, in this case.

Not every bureaucrat is dishonest, of course. Some are positively noble, like the courageous impeachment investigation witnesses who have risked their careers, and even their personal safety, in the service of truth and duty. And many just quietly and anonymously do their best.

But the incentives of bureaucracy encourage the ignoble. Stand up for the right thing and risk your livelihood? Or keep your head down and try to work the system?

Under these conditions, too often it’s the worst people who rise to the top: those who are the most skilled at pursuing their own interests while hiding them, behind a deliberately bland countenance.

This studied boringness can an asset, since it deflects attention from what’s really up. Attorney General William Barr is an exemplar. Watch any of his public defenses of the indefensible. Words, tone, body language: all say, “Nothing to see here.”

But we may not need a Barr. Evil can happen passively, just because it’s allowed to happen, just because no one is on the hook.

Either way, much of the evil done in our world has no apparent evil-doer. It seems to be born from the void, and so it is.

The void may be the absence of accountability, or it may be the void at the core of a deliberate schemer like the nihilistic Barr. When asked recently if he worries about the damage he’s done to his reputation, he answered, “Everyone dies.”

As Hannah Arendt says in “On Violence,” “The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence… for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.”