When Political Liberals Are Correct — Two Well-Communicated Essays Worthy of Becoming a Fiery Lawyer’s Closing Arguments — Comments on the Communicative Value of Reason-Able, but “Conclusory” Arguments

© 2012 Peter Free

 

06 April 2012

 

 

Introduction — what this essay is ultimately about

 

This essay addresses three issues in one bundle:

 

First, politically, Robert Scheer’s and Robert Reich’s recent excoriating attacks on the Republican Party are factually accurate.  (Though both could apply as well to Democrats, once elected to office.)

 

Second, stylistically, the way the two men launched their assaults is worth noticing, as example of effective closing arguments.

 

Third, ethically, there is a difference between conclusory arguments that are founded on facts and sound reasoning — arguably like Scheer’s and Reich’s — and those that are not.

 

I chose these two essays because they are viciously undiplomatic.  That these communications potentially succeed in delivering their core messages is due to the authors’ skilled integration of the above points.

 

 

Citations — to the Scheer and Reich essays

 

Robert Scheer, Obama By Default, Huffington Post (05 April 2012)

 

Robert Reich, The Fable of the Century, Huffington Post (05 April 2012)

 

 

Liberals finally find a voice — a comment about how the pendulum swings, when one of two adversarial positions makes a reality-divorced, jack-behind of itself

 

As a scientifically minded political independent, financial conservative, social liberal, and anti-imperialist I have been appalled at how both American political parties have abandoned any pretense of attempting to reasonably govern a democracy.

 

Republicans and Democrats have both become puppets for the plutocratic elite that run the nation.

 

That said, I have been more disappointed in the Republican Party’s performance.

 

The Republican Party has de-evolved from once representing reasonable political positions, as in the days of Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller, to deliberately spewing egregious lies, debasing reason, and overtly attempting to destroy anything resembling America’s once democratically embraced dream.

 

The Party of Abraham Lincoln has become the revivified ghost of the slave-holding Plantation Plutocracy of the Confederacy.

 

This analogy is not dismissively far-fetched because, just as the Confederacy did, Republican leadership uses unreasoned emotion, near-overt prejudice, and generalized existential fear to lure ordinary people to its cause — while simultaneously betraying them economically and destroying their ability to influence America’s purported democracy.

 

The effective communication underlying the Scheer and Reich essays struck me this week because for decades the Republican Party has been the much more effective communicator of the two U.S. political parties.  Republicans have been so by cleverly substituting emotion for reason.

 

Republicans generally substitute reason-lacking, button-pushing sound snippets for fact-based analyses.  The Republican Party’s approach to governance has been like putting emotionally florid vacuum-brains on steroids.

 

Today, Republican excesses in devaluing fact and cognition seem to be motivating a pendulum swing the other way.  Influential political liberals have finally found a countervailing, and possibly effective voice that is (at least arguably) more dependent on reason than lies.

 

Perhaps, because Republicans’ case has been so egregiously divorced from anything tangibly correct, it has opened itself to counterattack from opponents who are slightly less separated from Reality.  By being transparently manipulative and often irremediably stupid, Republicans may have lost their monopoly on effective political manipulation.

 

 

First — a general comment on the virtue of listening to adversaries’ reasoned arguments

 

Being a scientifically minded former attorney, I like listening to telling arguments, even when I ultimately prefer one to another.

 

Reasoned disagreements clarify thinking.  They have the potential to make us more effectively cope with real (as opposed to manufactured) problems.

 

Unfortunately, most people don’t listen to anyone they disagree with.  This tendency toward self-induced blindness makes our culture prone to making one mistake after another.  Culturally, we seem to enjoy wallowing in our personally un-insightful ignorance.

 

 

Second — sometimes, one can dump argument’s reasoning and merely present its conclusions, and still present an effective, but “conclusory” message that prompts soundly taken actions

 

Occasionally, arguments are effective in guiding constructive action because they omit attention-taxing reasoning.  These messages merely present the conclusions that reasoning legitimately reached.

 

For example, one might say, “You’ll fall, if you try to fly off this wall.”  The message skips the part about gravity’s action on bodies that are unequipped to fly.

 

These kinds of arguments are sometimes called “conclusory.”

 

“Conclusory” means that reasons for an argument’s conclusion(s) are not provided.  Generally, lawyers use the term to devalue arguments that allegedly have no basis in fact or reason.

 

In addressing Mr. Scheer’s essay (below), I use the word conclusory less pejoratively.  His message was and can be reasoned, but he chose to leave the reasoning process out, so as not to detract from his call to action.

 

The conclusory tendency works, even in reasoned discourse, because it draws listeners’ attention to the core of the case being made.  Abbreviation avoids distracting listeners/readers with attention-draining, step-by-step analysis.  The call to action becomes the core of the message.

 

However, the ethical legitimacy of any argument depends on it being Real World true, to the degree that we are able to approach truth in our obviously defective ways.

 

It is this fact-based ethical legitimacy that distinguishes between the Scheer and Reich essays and the predominant bulk of Republican Party communications.

 

 

Third — distinguishing between legitimate conclusory arguments and illegitimate ones

 

The abbreviating process that reaches legitimate conclusory endpoints is different than those that reach conclusions that fact-based reasoning could not legitimately reach.  For example, an argument that denies or distorts facts is not an ethically legitimate argument.  “You won’t fall, if you try to fly off this wall by flapping your arms.”

 

With the above paragraph, I am drawing attention to the difference between:

 

(a) political manipulation for purposes of personally staying in power,

 

as opposed to

 

(b) truthful argument for the purpose of advancing the public interest.

 

Though both these elements are political, the first defines the national interest much too narrowly.  It hones the public interest down to “my” interest.  It constricts argument’s tools down to those that will manipulate “you” into supporting “me.”  As a general rule, lying becomes a prominent component of the “personally staying in power” element.

 

In contrast, the second element’s public interest anchor requires that the argument bear some valid relationship to:

 

(i) what is actually going on in the world,

 

(ii) a reasonable definition of the public interest,

 

and

 

(iii) how Reality (fair-mindedly reported) affects the nation’s future.

 

In practice, the “personally stay in power” element is usually almost exclusively about pretense and political theater.  The “public interest” element is proportionately more about facts and a reasoned connection between them and proposed action or inaction.

 

Note — an analogy

 

This difference here is somewhat similar to:

 

(a) threatening your kid with the monster under the bed, so as to make him do his chores —

 

as opposed to

 

(b) explaining to him why we all have to do our parts in the home or farm’s small universe.

 

Alternative (b) gives the child the opportunity to understand what is going on and the pattern to emulate in discussing why he does not want to get with the program.

 

These two elements (theater and reason) obviously overlap, in that one cannot achieve the second without providing enough theater to get people to vote for the nation’s best interest.  Occasionally, parents will stray farther toward the monster under the bed alternative than an ideal world would wish.  Contrary to frightened conservatives’ blacks and whites, effective living is almost always about balancing.

 

This said, the proportions of theater and reality are strikingly different between the stay-in-power motivation and its public interest alternative.

 

 

In light of the above — look at Robert Scheer’s implicitly reason-supported, but conclusory argument

 

Scheer provocatively wrote:

 

The Republicans are a sick joke, and their narrow ideological stupidity has left rational voters no choice in the coming presidential election but Barack Obama.

 

With Ron Paul out of it and warmongering hedge fund hustler Mitt Romney the likely Republican nominee, the GOP has defined itself indelibly as the party of moneyed greed and unfettered imperialism.

 

It is with chilling certainty that one can predict that a single Romney appointee to the Supreme Court would seal the coup of the 1 percent that already is well on its way toward purchasing the nation's political soul.

 

Romney is the quintessential Citizens United super PAC candidate, a man who has turned avarice into virtue and comes to us now as a once-moderate politician transformed into the ultimate prophet of imperial hubris, blaming everyone from the Chinese to laid-off American workers for our problems.

 

Everyone, that is, except the Wall Street-dominated GOP, which midwifed the Great Recession under George W. Bush and now seeks to blame Obama for the enormous deficit spawned by the party's wanton behavior.

 

Without a militarily sophisticated enemy anywhere on the planet, the United States, thanks to the Bush-bloated budget, now spends almost as much on defense as the rest of the world combined.

 

Yet the GOP honchos dare claim they are for small government even as their chosen candidate chomps at the bit to go to war with Iran.

 

So insanely gullible are Republican voters that they buy Mitt's line that bailing out the auto industry to save the heart of America's legendary industrial base was an example of big-government waste.

 

Yet to them the almost unimaginable sum spent on the Wall Street bailout represents prudent small-government fiscal responsibility.

 

© 2012 Robert Scheer, Obama By Default, Huffington Post (05 April 2012)

 

Ouch.

 

 

The virtue of Scheer’s words is their punch-like brevity in attacking the Republican Party’s most striking weaknesses

 

Scheer’s essay is an example of why we should listen to adversaries.  They tell us where our weak points are.  They reveal how they are going to attack us.

 

Here, the only effective Republican Party alternatives in replying to Mr. Scheer are to:

 

Say his facts are wrong —which is a difficult case to make persuasively because Scheer’s facts are accurate

 

Continue to make the Party’s imperialistic argument for continued national paranoia — which could go either way, given Americans’ complacently uninvolved disinterest in things military

 

Admit that Republicans exclusively support the 1-Percenters — which is definitively true

 

And add that being economic elitists is good because “everybody” wants to be a 1-Percenter — which, in the United States, appears to be more true than not, largely because Americans are too mathematically challenged to recognize that not everyone can be in the top 1 percent

 

In sum:

 

If you are Republican, Scheer’s argument prompts you to choose among the above-listed potential responses to make a politically effective counter-reply.

 

If you are a Democrat, you have reasons to vote for our (usually dissembling) President.

 

If you are independent, you get to decide which side of the (mostly non-existent) fence you want to sit on.

 

 

Robert Reich’s genius in using theater to make an equally reason-able, but conclusory argument attacking the Republican Party

 

This is an outstanding piece of communicative writing because it winnows its argument down to the most telling essentials:

 

Imagine a country in which the very richest people get all the economic gains. They eventually accumulate so much of the nation's total income and wealth that the middle class no longer has the purchasing power to keep the economy going full speed. Most of the middle class's wages keep falling and their major asset -- their home -- keeps shrinking in value.

 

Imagine that the richest people in this country use some of their vast wealth to routinely bribe politicians. They get the politicians to cut their taxes so low there's no money to finance important public investments that the middle class depends on -- such as schools and roads, or safety nets such as health care for the elderly and poor.

 

Imagine further that among the richest of these rich are financiers. These financiers have so much power over the rest of the economy they get average taxpayers to bail them out when their bets in the casino called the stock market go bad. They have so much power they even shred regulations intended to limit their power.

 

These financiers have so much power they force businesses to lay off millions of workers and to reduce the wages and benefits of millions of others, in order to maximize profits and raise share prices -- all of which make the financiers even richer, because they own so many of shares of stock and run the casino.

 

© 2012 Robert Reich, The Fable of the Century, Huffington Post (05 April 2012)

 

Reich goes on, working his closing argument, piece by piece, into a brilliantly effective attack on American plutocracy.

 

 

The moral? — Truth-based arguments, even when presented in conclusory fashion, give us apparently real choices — but only when the competing answers to the question are genuinely different

 

My disagreement with Scheer and Reich enters because I think their description of Republicans also characterizes most Democrats, once in office.  I have addressed the “not much difference” 2012 presidential race, here.

 

I am, however, glad to see that some liberals are finding their voices.  I had grown tired of the one-sidedness of the communication battle between communicatively talented Republicans and inane Democrats and their liberal co-riders.

 

Perhaps if real issues are more clearly communicated (by anyone influential), “we the people” will be forced to recognize our own contributions to the problems that beset the American Republic.  One can hope.