Doctor Cleveland's picture

    Why Play with Fire? Four Explanations

    In my last post, I was worrying aloud about politicians who just couldn't seem to get it together to denounce violence and generally encourage the lunatic fringe to chill out. The intervening days, with the arrests of the "Hutaree army" and of the lunatic who threatened Eric Cantor on YouTube, make the question even more pressing. It's increasingly apparent that there really are dangerous and excitable people to whom you should absolutely not say words like "Armageddon" or "Apocalypse," and palpably clear that whipping up violence won't only harm people on a single side of any political debate. (The "both sides do it" argument, even when it's not factually refutable, is an insane excuse. The idea that political violence might threaten you or your family is not a reason not to try averting that violence.) So, my question remains: why keep the inflammatory rhetoric? Why speak out of both sides of the mouth, with the old condemn-but-condone act? ("Violence is wrong, but the Democrats shouldn't be surprised because they're destroying the Constitution." Please.)

    I don't want to lump everyone, or everyone on one side of the aisle, together. There are only a few people actually explicitly calling for mayhem, like the malicious clown Mike Vanderboegh who openly called on other "Sons of Liberty" to break the windows of Democratic lawmakers. Although none of these behaviors is either right or prudent, there remains a real difference between actively urging violent action, as Vanderboegh has, less direct incitement of the kind favored by Beck and the Tea Partiers, and simple refusal to give a full-throated condemnation. All of those behaviors are dangerous, but some are even more culpable than others. And the people indulging in these behaviors have a range of different motivations and incentives: the extremists at Tea Parties aren't fueled by the same things that motivate the politicians, who themselves have different motivations than the broadcasters.

    But the Vanderboeghs are actually easier to understand than the politicians and the broadcasters. Vanderboegh's behavior is more outrageous, because it explicitly urges criminal behavior while the others simply provide rationalizations for crime, but it's also makes more transparent sense. Vanderboegh is comfortable urging violent action because he hasn't got much to lose, and more importantly because he hopes to prevail through violence. He seems genuinely to believe that he speaks for a righteous majority who can achieve their political goals if they break enough windows. Of course, he's wrong: he's fringe, and a major outbreak of violence would almost certainly lead to a massive backlash against his position. The Hutaree also fit this model: they have relatively little to lose in the current dispensation, and they actually seem to believe that their terrorist action could start a popular uprising that they would win.

    The establishment figures, the elected officials and the multimillionaire broadcasters, are harder to understand, because they can't possibly be deluded in the way that Vanderboegh is. They must know, on some level, that any serious outbreak of civil violence would undermine their own positions. And unlike Vanderboegh and the Hutaree, they have plenty to lose. The Republicans in DC have to know that becoming seen as the party of insurrection would mean the end of their political fortunes for a generation. And Glenn Beck has to know that if some domestic terrorist cites him as an authority, his career will end.

    So what on earth could motivate these people, who have to know that violence is not in their own interests? I have four hypotheses, which apply in different degrees (and with frequent overlap) to different players:

    1. Lost in the Game
    Some major players, I suspect, are not thinking at all outside the rules of whatever daily news-cycle game they're playing. Others are simply not thinking ahead. Some people are, for whatever reason, unable to evaluate anything, even public safety, on its policy merits, or to imagine real-world consequences in a way that comes home to them. When they hear news of unsettling rhetoric or violent behavior, they don't think about what might happen outside the Beltway or the studio. They simply take the news as part of a struggle for political advantage, or as a way to attract ratings. The daily spin has become these people's primary reality, or at least the reality to which their behavior responds. I believe Eric Cantor to be one of these people; denouncing the Democrats for denouncing death threats is clearly oriented toward the spin world rather than the real world. It's to Cantor's personal, real-world advantage that no one harm or threaten members of Congress, but he seems primarily concerned with how threats and denunciations of threats function as political rhetoric.

    The ugly part of this is that certain figures on the Right are currently boxed in tactically in ways that keep them from taking a stand on the violence, for fear of being outflanked by some rival. If John Boehner comes out and joins with Pelosi to denounce inflammatory rhetoric, he might actually be attacked from the Right (by Cantor, or else by someone yet more radical than Cantor) during the next Republican leadership election. If Beck seriously backed off his conspiracy theories or stopped comparing Obama to Hitler, he might lose his core audience and be overtaken by some still-crazier broadcaster. A dynamic in which some people's short-term interests discourage them from confronting violence is sobering at best.

    2. Low Estimation of Their Following
    You know who would really be risking a lot if there were a serious and sustained outbreak of anti-establishment violence? Rush Limbaugh. The man's a multi-millionaire. The status quo is very, very good for him, and civil unrest would cost him big time. Yet the man is on TV and radio every day, telling people that anyone who uses words like "factory" is a "Marxist-Leninist" and calling the current Presidential Administration a "regime," as if it were some kind of occupying junta. What does this tell us? It tells us that, when you get down to cases, Limbaugh doesn't think that he has that many followers.

    Oh, he knows he has a few million followers. And he has to know, on some level, that some of those rubes are actually going to buy his act and believe that the elected President of the United States is a Communist tyrant. But Limbaugh knows that even if ten or fifteen percent of his audience decides that the United States is being unlawfully occupied and it's time for a war of "liberation," they don't have the numbers to start one. Sure, there might be some domestic terrorism, on the Oklahoma City scale or even greater, but Limbaugh figures he doesn't have enough believers to actually disrupt the status quo and put El Rushbo's vacation homes and stock portfolio in jeopardy. Also, Limabaugh may be counting on the fact that his viewers and listeners skew quite old, and are less likely to actually act out in criminal ways than the same number of equally angry and disaffected twenty-somethings would.

    3. Poor Risk Evaluation
    Some people saying things that are inflammatory or provocative are basically playing the odds: somebody might take them seriously and do something awful, but probably no one will. And, like a lot of folks in daily life, those people take a low probability (or high probability) to be determinative; most people operate on the the principle that when something is 99% (or 97% or 95%) likely to happen it will happen, and that things that are only 5% or 3% or 1% probable won't. (Additionally, we all have a natural tendency to view probabilities unrealistically when they apply to us, minimizing the odds of misfortune and maximizing the odds of good luck.) That's a mistaken but still workable approach to everyday probabilities, but a terrible one when applied to calculating serious risks.

    The first problem is that low probability has to be weighed against the possible gravity of the consequences. Russian roulette, after all, is a game that you have a nearly 84% chance of winning. An 84% chance means it's a ridiculously bad idea, because if you lose you die. And if we imagined playing Russian roulette with some smaller hypothetical chance of losing, imagining a revolver with 400 chambers and only one bullet, the odds would still remain completely insane. (Taking a 0.25% chance of a bullet in the head is incredibly risky, because even that small chance is a real chance.) I'm sure it's easy enough to say something crazy into a microphone, figuring that there's only a one in a million chance that some yahoo will act on it, but that one in a million chance is still unacceptable if it's a chance that the yahoo blows up a building with people in it.

    The second problem, of course, is the law of big numbers. A risk of less than one percent sounds tiny if you're only running the risk once. But if you apply that risk to a big enough number, you will get some bad results. Given enough chances, even a crazily improbable event will become inevitable. A statement that would only provoke one person in a million to committing violence is not responsible when you make that statement to three hundred million people. And it gets even less responsible when statements like that keep getting made every day.

    4. Hopes to Prevail
    I wouldn't accuse any specific individual of harboring this intention, and I don't believe many people share it. Indeed, I think that most people on the Right would recoil at any expression of this idea, and if anybody is thinking it they're certainly not sharing that thought, not even with their close ideological allies. But it remains possible that somewhere in the ranks of the inflammatory and the pointedly anti-anti-inflammatory there may be people who do secretly hope to benefit from small, containable amounts of political violence.

    If such people exist, they are distinct from the Vanderboeghs and the "Captain Hutarees," who are hoping for a broad violent upheaval and hope to win it. The people I'm more worried about don't expect such a conflagration, don't want one, and know that they would lose badly if one happened. No rational person expects to glean any advantage from large-scale violence. But one might conceivably use an atmosphere of potential violence, and of low-level scuffles and intimidation, for political gain. It's a loathsome tactic, but it's been done before: by the Know-Nothing Party in the 19th century, by the Klan and others during the Jim Crow period, and by thuggish local machines of various stripes. Intimidation has sometimes gone a long way in our politics; outright terrorism has usually backfired.

    For the most cynical of the cynical, the goal is to keep their followers' rage simmering without letting it boil over. Having people rant and scream in town hall meetings last summer is now regarded in the media as an effective political tactic; angry protesters in the halls of Congressional office buildings before a key vote is apparently also considered part of the game. But if things get crazier, the sponsors and allies of the crazy will pay a steep political price. The cynical strategy is to keep people inflamed, but not to get too many people hurt. It's a reckless strategy, and no one using it could actually be sure that it would work, because mob anger is too unpredictable. You can't keep a pot simmering forever; unless you turn off the heat, it will boil over or its contents will eventually burn.

    Topics: 

    Comments

    Doc, I don't always agree with your answers, but damn, you ask the most interesting questions. So, here's my answer. I think that you need to break down the various elements of the right because they all have different motivations.

    First, there are the "entertainers." Not only Beck and Limbaugh, but all the smalltime hate radio folks who are much worse. These folks have little to lose from some violence, so they simply may not care. I'm not suggesting that violence is immaterial to them, but as long as they're not blamed for directly inciting a particular act of terrorism, their downside is pretty limited. In addition, you have to factor in the human tendency to rationalize; they probably don't view the violence as their fault. Thus, if some crazies act up, it's not their problem as long as it doesn't affect their ratings.

    Second, there are the legislators. Those folks care more about their own butts than the G.O.P.'s. If someone from some congressman's district goes postal, that could present a problem for him, but he could reasonably assume that the chances are slim that the next explosion will come from home. On the flip side, if he were to publicly condemn the hysteria, he could be assured that his right-wing constituents would penalize him. John McCain is a case in point. Judging by his history, I'm guessing that he's very displeased by the wingnuts, but he's running hard against a challenger from the right, so he probably thinks that he can't afford to speak out.

    Third, there are the party leaders. I'm not even sure who those are. Michael Steele has the official title but no respect. McConnell and Boehner, maybe, but they seem impotent and clueless to boot. Nonetheless, these folks, whoever they are, present the most interesting case because they have a real stake in tamping down the violence. Nonetheless, they too have a flip side. There's is a very real risk that the Tea Party folks will cut the Republicans loose and push their own independent candidates, which would be devastating to the Republicans. We saw a perfect example of that in NY-23 last year. So the Republican leadership needs to keep a lid on the passion, but they can't afford to alienate the Tea Party types. That would explain Steele's schizophrenia--marginalizing Limbaugh one day and ass-kissing Tea Parties the next. I'm guessing that they're working the risk evaluation angle you mentioned, but they're weighing the risk of more violence against the risk of losing the base, which changes that the odds that you described.

    In any case, great post.


    Great response, Genghis. That's a lot to think about.

    As far as the politicians are concerned, I thinkyour point that there's no clear leadership may be a big part of the problem. A national leader, who needed to win a national election, would have powerful incentives to think long-term and to protect the party's national brand. A secure national leader would also have the authority to calm the waters, without fear of contradiction. McCain, late in the 2008 campaign, eventually decided that he had to damp down some of the anti-Obama lunacy, telling people at town halls that Obama was not a Muslim or a secret Kenyan. But McCain, as you point out, apparently can't take that kind of stand now.

    The overheated rhetoric would be poison for a general-election candidate, but the Republicans won't have a presidential nominee for two more years. And heating up the rhetoric, even dangerously, is possibly an effective strategy for a primary candidate, especially a second-tier primary candidate looking for momentum. So the dynamic promises to be risky until someone gets the GOP nomination, or until one of the leading primary contenders realizes that running as the responsible one who calms the nuts down is part of the path for victory.

    Boehner and McConnell don't seem clueless to me, although they do seem worried about their flanks. I don't think Boehner, especially, feels that he has a 100% grip on his caucus, and Cantor looks like someone who imagines himself as Leader and then Speaker. I think some of the more startling behavior we see from the House GOP, such as Boehner's "Hell, no!" speech and Cantor's press conference denouncing Democrats who denounce death threats, are episodes in Boehner and Cantor's struggle for leadership. That keeps both of them focused on pleasing the hard-liners in their own caucus, rather than winning over a majority of voters.

    Of course, their goal as party leaders should be to build a national majority, but the Republicans seem convinced that the national majority will come to them. Their whole plan, as far as I can see, is counting on 1994 to repeat itself automatically, and to count on anti-Obama backlash to give the Republican both houses of Congress. That keeps the party leadership focused on how they'll divide the pie that they expect to be baked for them. They don't seem focused on crafting a positive message, or on reaching out to moderates. It's a bad scene; I guess I don't expect the GOP start worrying seriously about violence until 2011, at the earliest, and even that depends on how the

    It's sad: this is the moment that a defeated party should be focused on coming up with new, creative policy ideas. But instead, the GOP is consumed with appeasing its craziest and least politically viable elements.

     


    I completely agree about the role that a true leader G.O.P. leader would likely play, and agree that we won't probably won't see any shift until 2011. The only possible interference, other than a really serious domestric terrorist attack, would be serious Republican losses in 2010. But I think that's unlikely. Furthermore, Republicans had very serious losses in 2008, but they behaved in the opposite way that a losing party usually does, veering to the extreme instead of back towards the middle. That's consistent with your point about Republican leadership eschewing any kind of positive message.

    I see three possible endings to this. One, a serious Republicans presidential candidate tames the hatemongers. Two, the rage strategy undermines the party to the point that they suffer serious enough losses to reconsider their tactics. Three, a charismatic right-wing demogogue actually wins the presidency. Obviously, three is the one that I'm most concerned about. It's not likely--the U.S. system makes fringe candidacies difficult, but it's not outside the realm of possibility. It has certainly happened elsewhere.


    I agree with those basic scenarios, although there are a couple of others. There is a scenario in which an extremist-friendly candidate wins the GOP nomination but then, with the brass ring of the Presidency so tantalizingly close, decides that s/he needs to rein in the crazies. (I can imagine a nominee afraid or unwilling to do that, but I can also easily imagine one responding to clear political imperatives.) There's also, although vanishingly unlikely, the possibilty of some kind of intra-party revolt if the GOP's 2010 gains are lackluster and the leadership even becomes crazier. I'm not counting on that.

    I also think the idea of a right-wing demagogue winning is frightening but remote; it would require some fairly drastic events to make it happen, and big crises might actually break Obama's way rather than his opponent's. (Say what you will, the POTUS is reassuring, and while incumbents take the blame they also get to be the heroic daddy.)

    I certainly agree with the GOP's frustrating and unorthodox tactics; a healthy party should have reversed course long ago, and the political price they paid in 2008 should have been unbearable. In this, actually, I think we can blame the long echo of 9/11, which still distorts our politics although it no longer sways many voters. Bush gained the presidency with 49% of the vote and governed in a confrontational, ideologically rigid way; by summer of 2001 he was already beginning to reap the consequences of his bad strategy, when he pushed a Senator out of his own party and lost the majority. But September 11 saved Bush, and made his self-destructive approach to politics work. The rally-around-the-flag effect, and Bush's demagoguery, actually got him increased majorities in 2002, when most presidents see Congressional losses. The Republicans decided that the lesson of 2002, which they've learned to excess, is that being more ideological always works. They stuck with that strategy even after getting beaten badly in 2006; they're sticking with it after getting beaten even harder in 2008. I don't know what it will take to make the Rump GOP abandon the 2002 playbook.


    I disagree with your recent history. Bush was partisan, ideological, warmongering, and confrontational, but he wasn't a demagogue, at least relative to compatriots like Tom DeLay and even Ronald Reagan. He didn't go for the George Wallace government-persecuting-America rhetoric, he didn't play up fears of Hispanics, blacks, or homosexuals. (Again, it's all relative.)

    I actually believe that 9/11 was a respite from the 40-year-trend of persecution paranoia. 9/11 and the Iraq War focused the nation on an external enemy and villains who actually wanted to do America harm, even if they lacked the means. But the current hatred and paranoia are focused on internal "enemies" who are not enemies at all. It was building in the 90s, paused from 2001-2003, and then started cranking up again with Bill O'Reilly and FOX News in 2004. I think that it's telling that Pat Buchanan, a true demagogue, didn't even support the Iraq War.

    I agree that the chances of real demagogic president are slim but I think not as remote as you believe. People in this country and elsewhere have been known to swoon and lose their senses over a charismatic leader who tells them what they want to hear. Fortunately, there's no one on the political scene who adequately fits that description.


    Okay, I retract "demagogue."Or I restrict it: he demagogued the war, and terrorism. He didn't race-bait, but he (and his proxies) were happy to to paint opponents as "soft on terror." So he was only a demagogue when it came to national security, but that was all the demagoguery he required.

    But my main point is that Bush ran to the Right under all circumstances, whatever the normal political logic was, and his post-9/11 popularity appeared to ratifty that approach.


    Fair enough, but my main point was that what we're seeing from the right these days is not a consequence of 9/11 or G.W.'s response to it.


    Agreed. It was not my intent to blame this civil irresponsibility on Bush, who was never inflammatory. Good point.

    I do think that the GOP's strategy of playing to the base under all circumstances is an indirect consequence of 9/11, which made that usually-unworkable strategy work for Bush. But playing to the base is not the same as inciting the base to violence, which Bush clearly did not do. It's a good point.


    Your point is also a good one. The play-to-the-base strategy was Bush's, and that's part of the reason that Republicans aren't trying to shut down the hysteria.


    Allow me to add a bit of game-theory to the mix: Tragedy of the Commons.

    The logic goes like this: No single player in the game would be completely responsible for pushing things over the edge, if it were to happen. Furthermore, if one of these major players were to stop playing the game, someone else would step in to fill their void. So, there are really two possibilities. One, there is no big game-changing event that brings down the status quo, in which case these people will continue to do well selling their phobias. Two, there is a game-changing event that probably would've happened whether or not they participated. They lose either way. So, on one hand there's a chance (and not a bad one, I hope) that they have something to gain. On the other hand there's a chance they have nothing to lose. I'm not sure their logic is flawed, although I am sure their morals are.


    That's also an excellent point, nebbie, and a good use of a class game-theory example.

    Maybe my thought on this is the same as my answer to Genghis's post: if the GOP had a leader, someone who "owned" their commons, and they understood that their individual fortunes were tied to that leader's fortunes, their incentives would look very different. Right now, every GOP player is interested in grazing his or her own goats in the common field; if they were focused on keeping it for the mayor of their village, instead of the mayor for the other village, they would act differently.


    "Liberals talking about violence."

    Can I just say that some of us have times - moments or hours or years or sometimes entire lives - where violence seems like a GREAT idea.

    Where anger and hatred and all that self-righteousness, all that adrenalin, all that mobbed up excitement, just feels GREAT.

    When even violent acts themselves are attractive, ENJOYABLE.

    I donno where this fits in your schemas, but some people like to be angry, like to hate, like watching violence, like seeming to be part of violent things, and even like participating in violence.

    I know it seems bizarre, but tens of millions of people kinda fit in these categories.

    Now.... for those who're LEADING these games, some of them feel this as well - it's not just a con. They know the juiciness of these feelings. And they also seem to know something liberals keep forgetting - that once a dynamic is set in motion, there are 1001 ways to ride the tide, surf it, incite and lead it, and if it fucks up... 1001 ways to disown it.

    The Republicans would be gone for a generation? Hello? I'm not sure you were watching the last 40 years, but these pricks APPEALED TO THE HATEFUL AND THE VIOLENT AND GAINED SUPPORT.


    Yes, I do know those things, Quinn. Anger and violence are part of human nature.  But public figures have strong incentives to prevent spasms of civil violence. At the very least, it serves their interest to channel the hate toward some external enemy. But encouraging bloodshed inside the house is self-destructive in every way.

    And they have appealed to the hateful and violent implicitly for the last forty years, but in the decade before that they indulged in actual violence and lost everything that was on the table for discussion at that point. Southern segregationists have done pretty well when they've stuck to the political process, because Northerners and Westerners weren't willing to get into a serious hassle over the way things worked in the South. But when segregationists turned to outright violence, and the rest of the country were seeing them as angry mobs on TV, the Jim Crow policies suffered absolute and permanent defeat. (No one's ever going back to separate rest rooms or any of that madness.) In 1952, the average white voter outside the South didn't especially care if black Americans could eat lunch at the Woolworth's in Birmingham. By 1962, when segregationists were blowing up churches, the position of whites outside the South had basically turned to, "Enough is enough." And the segregationists weren't offered any compromises then. It's only when they went back to peaceful political means (however vile the rhetoric) that Southern racists started to advance their policy goals again.


    Sorry Doc, but this is silly. Public figures have strong incentives to  prevent civil violence???

    Oh. Ok. I can stop worrying then.

    Seriously, there are ALWAYS public figures and public figure wannabe's who stand to gain from violence. Often, there are real costs and risks to them if they run too far out ahead in this direction. what we see now is that more and more of them are playing around the edges.

    I mean, you can make BIG money and BIG fame and BIG power gains from violence. It's hugely tempting. The fact that the Civil Rights movement may have won some battles in the 1960'sis an n of 1. Hell, I can show you 1,000,000 assholes who've gained from violence through history. Like, ummmm.... the citizens of the United States, for starters. From 1776 on.

    So a big time complete and absolutely total NO, to the idea that encouraging bloodshed inside the house is  self-destructive in every way. That doesn't hold in countries, corporations, organizations, sports teams, bands, marriages, churches or families.

     


    Latest Comments