For reasons I can't quite identify myself, I've spent a bit of time lately watching the twitter traffic about the Mike Brown killing and its aftermath. The #Ferguson hash tag has attracted a nasty collection of particularly virulent trolls, whose tweets pretty much cover the full range from belittling liberals (at the more benign end) to spewing vile, racist invective of the type that seems to have cost Charleston Daily Mail columnist Don Surber his job.
As distasteful as those tweets are, I've come to realize that there's a pattern in them, and they're subject to analysis according to Aristotle's principles of Rhetoric. We like to think of rhetoric as the art of persuasion, useful in good causes, but Aristotle recognized that in itself rhetoric is neutral - its tools are available to speakers of both virtuous and depraved character. With that in mind, let's look at the patterns in those tweets (I'll spare you too many examples), and through the patterns see if we can't show how right-wingers disseminate ideas. Please wait a moment while I use the orange Brillo pad to scour my eyeballs, and I'll join you over the jump.
If I remember any of what I learned in college, Aristotle's system has three main components. The first is Ethos, the speaker's establishing credibility. Second is Pathos, the identification or creation of an emotional state in the audience, so that audience will be receptive to persuasion. Third, then, is Logos, the argument itself. Let's look at each in turn.
Ethos. Imagine I want to make an impression in wingnut circles (I can't imagine why, but bear with the counterfactual for a moment here). If my sample of #Ferguson trollery is any indication, I have to establish that I'm one of them. One way the tweeters seem to do that is by adopting user names with elements like "Conservative," or "Patriot." Never mind that their idea of patriotism isn't ours, or that they aren't actually traditional conservatives. In fact, that's the whole point. The tags are just shibboleths, signalling that their holders are members of the wingnut tribe.
Around here we've often complained about the use of right-wing "dog whistles," political tropes that we're meant to miss, while the target audience sits up and takes notice. When we recognize the other side's dog whistles, they seem artificially unpersuasive to us. But their purpose isn't to persuade - it's to signal, "hey - I have wingnut street cred, so listen to me." It's part of the ethos of right-wing rhetoric. Oh, and a caveat - ethos and ethics have nothing to do with one another.
Many of us here at the Great Orange Satan (and I'll confess I'm guilty of this myself, even in the previous paragraph) do the same thing. We use different tags and signals, but the intent is the same - we want to establish our street cred. The problem is that when ethos consists of establishing that your point of view is the same as your reader's, it can narrow the persuasive range of the argument. That right-wing poster called "Proud Conservative" isn't really trying to persuade me, but only to reinforce some notion rattling around right-wing circles. And if we wonder why we sometimes sound like an echo chamber, it may have to do with how we approach ethos in our own rhetoric.
At its most effective, ethos takes the form of establishing expertise or credibility on some matter of broad interest. I can't establish credibility in talking about the dangers or psychological effects of armed combat, because I've never been there. But people that have been there can persuade me to be receptive to learning something from them, because their experience lends credibility to their observations, and our common humanity gives them importance.
Pathos. And right-wing rhetoric can be pretty pathetic. More seriously, though, pathos is a speaker's effort to create or magnify in the listener an emotional state that will make the listener more receptive to persuasion. In the broad rhetoric of the mid-term election campaign, we've seen the Republicans make extensive use of fear, magnifying the threats of Obamacare, or ISIL, or ebola and tying those threats to the President. We can deride the fearmongering as nonsense, which it is, but it still serves its purpose. It creates in core Republican voters an emotional state, fear of Democrats, meant to enable the Republicans to persuade them to get out and vote.
What's been surprising and disturbing about the #Ferguson tweets is the degree to which pathos in the pro-Darren Wilson camp means arousing feelings either of hatred of, or of smug superiority over, Michael Brown and the protesters. It began with garden-variety racist sniping - "Excuse to loot," "Might as well protest, they don't have jobs," which was bad enough. Lots of tweets are condescending, as in, "Sorry you had to invent the myth of white privilege to justify playing the victim." As the weeks have gone by, though, the attacks have become increasingly incendiary. I simply won't repeat the uses of stereotyping and foul epithets ("thug" is the most common, but even worse ones are common) that pervade #Ferguson trollery. But I will report that the stock reply to anyone calling it out is, "Oh, now you're playing the race card."
On our side, especially in our campaign rhetoric, our preferred target emotion is outrage. It's why Mr Romney's infamous "47%" comment was such an effective weapon against him. Outrage has been effective in some individual races, especially in Kansas (both for Governor and for US Senator). It might help some at a national level (Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader? Yikes!), but it isn't necessarily the right emotion for enlisting new supporters to defend a Democratic majority in the Senate. And while we can make a good argument that things are better now than they might have been under Republican leadership, that's logos - things aren't anywhere near good enough that we can appeal to prosperity in whipping up emotions.
In Ferguson, the Mike Brown killing was a trigger, and the grievance over it runs deep. But the bigger issues there concern education, housing, equality of opportunity, segregation and redlining, court systems designed to generate revenue rather than assure justice, and militarized policing. The trolls want the discussion to concern only whether Officer Wilson was justified in killing Mr Brown. They simply don't care about those other issues. They see only a subject people that dare to speak up, and their pathos appeals to the emotions that relate to the narrow world they see.
Logos. This is the argument itself. This is where the rules of logic apply. In reality, though, racism is where the rhetoric of much of the #Ferguson trollery ends. Once you've adopted the position that racial inequality is somehow inherent, then you enjoy the convenience of never having to mount an argument. Just assert inequality as fact, and you're done. A common form this takes with regard to #Ferguson is the argument that if only Mike Brown had complied with Officer Wilson's demands, he'd be alive today. Perhaps, but that isn't the reasoning of a community in which law enforcement officers serve the public safety, rather than harassing the populace.
Asserting opinions or conclusions as fact seems one of the right wing's favorite pastimes. One #Ferguson troll likes to boast, "Don't get butthurt if I shred you with facts. Mike Brown was a th** who got justice." Asked to define justice and adduce factual evidence supporting that conclusion, this person replied, "Self-defense is justified. Thank you." That Darren Wilson acted in self-defense is a (dubious) conclusion. It surely is not a fact, and even if it were eventually a judicial conclusion, and even if it were the correct conclusion, it still would be a conclusion, and not a fact. (My own view is that Officer Wilson baited Mr Brown, and ultimately lost control of both the situation and himself. But I'll also admit that I can't prove it. I've articulated my personal conclusion, not a fact.)
I could go on at great length about the logical problems with right-wing arguments. DKos is full of diaries talking about right-wing use of false equivalence and straw-man arguments. Let me add to the list another important fallacy in the illogical arsenal of the right wing. If I were to start a right-wing cable news channel, its motto would be Post hoc, ergo propter hoc - "After which, therefore because of which." This is the logical fallacy of asserting that because A preceded B, then A caused B. My all-time favorite application of this fallacy is the assertion by a Republican member of Congress that "before Obamacare, there had never been a case of ebola in the United States." This statement, although true, proved so spectacularly pointless that even the Republican in question had to walk it back.
In the context of #Ferguson, the post hoc assertions generally turn up as answers to the argument that Ferguson is the culmination of 150 years of redlining and segregation in the St. Louis area. That assertion requires support, of course, for which I generally point to Colin Gordon, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City, UPenn Press, 2008. Anyway, faced with such an argument, some #Ferguson trolls have responded, "St. Louis was a great city before the liberal agenda of the 1960s." Ask whether that means they're pining for the good old days of Jim Crow, of course, and we're back to the race card.
We do often have a good time around here picking apart the logic of the assertions our opponents make, and evaluating their arguments critically is worthwhile. Many of us also take pride in the logical soundness of the arguments we put forth. With regard to logos, we have a fair claim to winning the day. But we also need to recognize that if our goal is to persuade people that don't already think the same way we do, logos isn't enough. We should learn from our opponents about ethos and pathos, and remember from Aristotle that the greatest persuasive power is in the effective combination of the three.