Persuasion And Persuadability
Posted on December 5th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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Related to another post from earlier in the day, and inspired by Michael’s article in the new issue of TAC and Reihan’s post on national defense, I started to think about the problem of persuasion. Michael notes that movement conservatism is not engaging in any serious rethinking–even most of the reformers/reformists are by and large tinkering around the edges and none of them has much of anything to say about changing U.S. foreign policy–and he observed that there was absolutely no reconsideration of the war in Iraq going on. Some of our realist friends would dispute that and say that they have been thinking about the lessons of Iraq, but for the most part the lessons they are saying they learned are not all that satisfying. What would war supporters have to accept to demonstrate to opponents that they had learned the right lessons?
Stating the opponents’ case, Paul Schroeder wrote this for TAC last year :
The argument here is that the war never went wrong; it always was wrong, in specific, basic ways [bold mine-DL]. The distinction is fundamental, eminently practical, and involves lessons that the U.S.—its government, elites, and broad public alike—has not yet learned. It accounts for the fact that all of the current plans for getting out of Iraq are not really plans for genuinely getting out, but plans for staying on in one way or another so as to minimize further losses, recoup sunk costs, and protect particular interests. It means that until we squarely face what we have not hitherto faced as a nation—what this war represented, what we have done, and what this says about who and what we are—we will not be willing or able to take the practical steps necessary to contain the fire now burning, dampen and extinguish it as much as possible, and do what is necessary at home and abroad to prevent an even greater fire next time.
For the most part, such self-examination and self-criticism have not yet begun, and I doubt that they will start anytime soon. Even though it seems obvious to us that the war was decisive in wrecking the reputation of conservatism and the GOP, I suppose there is a certain logic, or at least a certain inevitability in the enduring conviction that there was nothing wrong with the war in Iraq that more soldiers and better planning couldn’t have solved. As Michael says, “It would be too incriminating to question the justice of the Iraq War.” More important than that, though, it would require not merely rethinking and some genuinely painful change for conservatives, but it would probably also involve tearing down some long-established, more widely-shared national myths. As Anatol Lieven said regarding the potential for policy changes in the new administration:
How much of this is likely? Eight years in Washington left me with considerable pessimism about the capability of the U.S. policy elites—Democrat as well as Republican—to carry out radical changes in policy if these required real civic courage and challenges to powerful domestic constituencies or dominant national myths [bold mine-DL].
This got me to thinking about Reihan’s remark that he didn’t think the Iraq war was pointless. Of course, I do think it is pointless, and worse than that, and have said so repeatedly for years. If it is anything, it seems to me, it is now pointless. That’s one of the more complimentary things one can say about it. At one time the war may have had a purpose, and back then it was a bad one; now it doesn’t even have that. How can one possibly persuade someone on the other side of such a huge chasm that he is on the wrong side? This is a problem that goes beyond language, tone and framing, because once you get past all of these things war supporters basically accept an important national myth–America does not fight futile, much less unjust, wars–and this is plainly irreconcilable with recognizing the futility of the war in Iraq, to say nothing of acknowledging its injustice.
Reihan is as smart and fair-minded a person as you can find among supporters of the war, and if I could imagine persuading anyone on the other side that the war was, in fact, an exercise in illegal aggression that did nothing to benefit American national security and served no vital U.S. interests that person would have to be Reihan. Right away, however, I am struck by a basic difficulty: how can a war opponent honestly call the war what he regards it to be while persuading a reasonable war supporter that he should no longer support it? Debates over the war have been as fruitless as they have been in part because the core assumptions and foreign policy visions of people on either side are so wildly divergent and contradictory that they are barely talking about the same thing.
This brings us to the larger question of persuadability–who is actually persuadable on a given question? I have started to have the creeping suspicion that persuadability in debate is very much like being an undecided voter: the less you know, and the less you have thought, about a particular topic, the more likely you are to be persuadable. This has much less to do with being reasonable, open-minded or willing to look at evidence; persuadability is probably closely linked to lack of knowledge, and the side in the debate that successfully fills that gap first wins. The longer you have been tied to a particular view, and the more time you have spent articulating reasons for holding it, the less persuadable you are going to be. Those who are persuadable are also likely to be the weakest in their newfound convictions, which they will drop just about as quickly as they adopted them.
It is true that there are war supporters who have since soured on the war or some that even flipped and became staunch opponents; war has radicalizing effects, and especially when things go awry it can cause dramatic shifts in the views of some people. Some who trusted the administration’s claims were burned when those claims were proven bogus. On the whole, however, very, very few have come into opposition because of antiwar arguments. This is a sobering realization. Was this because those making the antiwar case made unpersuasive arguments? Viewed narrowly, the answer would have to be yes, but it seems to me for the most part people who have changed their view on the war did so because of events. Their changed view had nothing to do with antiwar arguments, except indirectly insofar as events seemed to vindicate some or most of war opponents’ warnings and undermined the optimistic claims of supporters. Michael laments that ideas don’t matter in movement conservatism, but I am beginning to wonder if they ever matter in these debates.
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
12 Responses to “Persuasion And Persuadability”
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You’re completely right about war-proponents being unpersuadable by argument, only by facts. But there’s another factor that you don’t quite hammer the nail into, which is plain old ego and self-image. Most of the pro-war arguments aren’t even arguments at all, they are projections of a certain self-image onto the world scene. This is why it is so hard to argue against, because one is then attacking a deeply cherished self-image, and a national self-image, that wants to remain in place in spite of facts. This is why even the facts of the war’s failure may convince people that the war was a mistake, but they still cling to rationalizations for that which allow them to preserve their very self-image, and national image, that actually led them to support the war in the first place.
In this light, actually getting people to change American foreign policy such that we don’t get involved in these kinds of wars in the future isn’t really a matter of making persuasive arguments on issues of policy and even facts, it’s about leading people to abandon a failed self-image and adopting a new one, abandoning a failed national image and adopting a new one. This is a very tricky business, and I’m glad you bring the issue up, because it’s really something that ought to be discussed more. I’m not quite sure how that can be done, but I can certainly say that it needs to be done. We as Americans and as a collective really do need a new self-image to guide us in our foreign policy, because that is the determining factor in what policies we actually carry out, regardless of all these rational arguments.
. . . an important national myth–America does not fight futile, much less unjust, wars . . .
Rush Limbaugh had no problem saying that the Balkan adventure of a Democratic president was futile and unjust.
war supporters basically accept an important national myth–America does not fight futile, much less unjust, wars–and this is plainly irreconcilable with recognizing the futility of the war in Iraq, to say nothing of acknowledging its injustice.
After Vietnam, can one even posit that this “national myth” still existed? That futile conflict had a better ideological justification, being a lost “battle” in the Cold War, but it was also one that we entered based on “faulty intelligence” (lies) about the Gulf of Tonkin incident. And once mired in it, we spent years denying that our South Vietnamese allies lacked the will to fight on their own, even with the extraordinary amount of military hardware we gave them. Ultimately, all we did was gravely harm ourselves and the Vietnamese people by being there.
Even though it seems obvious to us that the war was decisive in wrecking the reputation of conservatism and the GOP, I suppose there is a certain logic, or at least a certain inevitability in the enduring conviction that there was nothing wrong with the war in Iraq that more soldiers and better planning couldn’t have solved.
I agree that “the war was decisive in wrecking the reputation of conservatism and the GOP,” just as the Vietnam War did for the Democrats. However, I don’t even buy the “certain logic” that there was “nothing wrong with the war in Iraq that more soldiers and better planning couldn’t have solved.” To the contrary, from the very beginning it bore all the hallmarks of a trumped-up conflict, and a distinct war of choice. Rice’s “mushroom cloud over Manhattan” and Cheney’s “there is ‘no doubt’ that Saddam possesses WMD” war drum beating were the closest we came to a “preemptive” necessity, and it was a complete and utter lie. The only thing of which there is “no doubt” was that Cheney et al were cooking the intelligence books to get this result, and pushing the U.S. into a conflict whose “imperialistic,” “hegemonic” [inset whatever word you want to describe a great power carving out a sphere of influence] agenda had more in common with the Spanish-American war than anything else (except that it was neither “splendid” nor “little.”)
I suppose I am an “old man” now raging against the folly and evil of other old men sending our youth into combat for less than the most compelling and urgent reasons of national security. I certainly felt there was every reason to go into Afghanistan after 9/11, but none whatsoever to start the Second Iraq War. The fact that they did it with such abysmal post “conquest” planning merely underscores the basic immorality of the decision.
To me, the “national myth” the Second Iraq War exploded was not that we don’t “fight futile, much less unjust, wars” but rather that we had learned from our Vietnam experience not to be manipulated by lies into another one. It’s amazing what fear and national trauma can produce.
I’ve written on my own blog that it is clear that there is simply no way Reihan and I can talk to each other about Iraq. I think Reihan is the greatest, I think he respects me too, but on Iraq, our differences are simply too irreconcilable for conversation to be frutiful. It’s too bad, but that’s probably just how it is.
“Reihan is the greatest”?
His support for the war represents a serious moral and analytical failure that can only cast serious doubts upon his character and intellect.
If that seems ad hominem is is because the problem is with the man, Mr. Salam himself. He, along with his mentor David Brooks and so many others, cheerfully set the stage for a mass murder. He will always stink of corpses as far as I’m concerned.
Well, if you’re arguing with an ideologue, it’s hopeless. But with anyone else? I don’t think so.
The trick isn’t to go after their conclusions, it’s to go after their premises. And most effective of all when you can throw a premise into question that they haven’t even thought much about, but rather assumed as a simple given. Look for those assumed premises and turn them upside down – gradually (in a conversation or debate) or with a sharp poke in the eye (in a speech), if necessary. Obviously, humorous memorability gets more mileage out of either case.
Furthermore, if arguing in good faith, one can also invite the opponent – “under which circumstances would my point-of-view have any merit?,” and almost inevitably get some useful leverage out of recycling his answer into a new purpose. (I’ve dissolved some formidable oppositions by that route.)
Most of all though, in “live debate,” honor the opponent’s dignity, don’t press for a full public capitulation, and rather leave him realizing that your position has more to speak for it than he’d supposed, and his own perhaps less. It’s the art of gradual persuasion, and perhaps those people are never brought into the proper camp, but they at least become less hostile to yours.
Unless he’s an ideologue, of course. They’re hopeless.
We’re all ideologues–we all have values and wish to see them upheld; we all believe in things and wish to see them accomplished.
There are two kinds of persuasion in my view: rational, and emotional.
The rational type is based on the standard scientific approach–empiricism is the standard by which validity is judged.
Emotional persuasion is more complicated. I think the ability to persuade emotionally is fundamentally a leadership skill, it requires the establishment of empathy and deployment of moral authority to purchase validity. No amount of stunning argumentation against the Iraq war is going to “win” a debate against a wounded veteran arguing the contrary position, in the minds (or more importantly, guts) of most people. The utilization of the commonly held sacred is a favored tactic in emotional persuasion, and usually has far more power than logic.
The only way to effectively sell an alternative to imperial hegemony, or torture, or socialism,–to which consent is almost always based in emotion, is for representatives of the sacred–those with genuine moral authority–to take a stand for the alternative and repurpose the common, shared values in support of the alternative while reframing the status quo in opposition. I strongly believe that the rhetoric is far less important than the source.
Daniel, there are times it seems you expect logic in this world. Why is that? Of course the war didn’t make any sense. Why would it? We’re all crazy and we just let the neocon crazies take over this time. Hopefully, we won’t make that mistake again.
Being a Superpower is never having to say, whoops, that was a bullshit war we could have avoided.
Or something.
The rational type is based on the standard scientific approach–empiricism is the standard by which validity is judged.
Not at all. This may be what certain empiricists demand, but this is not the only form of reasoning.
I like the premises approach myself. Conclusions are often not based upon facts but upon other conclusions. When you finally run down the actual premises, you may find there is no there, there – simply an assumption masquerading as a fact.
In the end, however, and as I think Daniel said, only those who believe themselves to be relatively uninformed are persuadable. Almost without exception, those of us who hold strong positions will continue to hold those positions even in the face of damaging counter-factuals.
And there are religious positions, where the facts are not equally ascertainable to the parties. Someone who believes the Bible to be the Word of God will have a difficult time using that as a fact in a discussion with someone who does not believe the same way, or believe in a god at all, someone who insists that facts be equally ascertainable to all parties to the discussion. There is literally no resolution to those kinds of disagreements.
Perhaps the best you can do under those circumstances is to point out the things that people would do if they truly believed in what they were saying. If abortion is murder, for example, then the woman who hires an abortionist is guilty of murder and should be punished as a murderer. If a blastocyst is a human being, then the in vitro fertilization clinic that disposes of frozen blastocysts is guilty of murder and should be punished as such. Further, uteri should be found for all those blastocysts as it is not their fault they were not chosen for implantation. Does that not seem logical, if we believe that a blastocyst is a human being?
In the end, we humans are extraordinarily good at justifying our positions, as well as all those “necessary” departures from the consequences of our position. We are all ideologues sooner or later.
Yeah, to halfway cede the point, persuasion is really hard.
In my experience (usually arguing business decisions and ethics), the best hope is to shoot for instilling doubt and therefore softening opposition. (And softened opposition is more likely to cede to a majority.) That’s where I’ve had my best luck.
To a different point above, however, I’d generally disagree. We’re not all ideologues, dogmatic and unwilling to cede any front to the convenience of our easy answers. There’s a difference between having core beliefs and having a handy imaginary model of ideals that refuse to acknowledge that the world and issues are complicated.
Most rational people can admit the shades of grey, pause to consider new information, and confess that they might not know all the answers. Ideologues are plainly a different stripe. Why else has “the reality-based community” become a catch-phrase in recent history? (And turned out to have been right more often?)