Category Archives: Informal Fallacies

David Brooks, False Dichotomy, Narrativism, Straw Man

Now you tell me

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In today's New York Times David Brooks argues that Sarah Palin does not have the experience to be Vice President and therefore President.  He joins a growing chorus (he says) of conservative pundits who make this argument.  I can't say of course that I disagree with him or them.  But my interest in punditry here has little to do with agreement or disagreement.  For even in getting to this obvious conclusion, that Palin does not have the requisite experience to be a candidate for such an office, Brooks still encounters logical difficulty.  He cannot escape what has become the single most defining rhetorical trope of his intellectual career–the dichotomy. 

Brooks's dichotomies are not always fallacious ones–it's more often the case in fact that they are not.  A false dichotomy, the reader may remember, suggests two radically opposed and exhaustive possibilities, one completely ridiculous, one your view, as a means of suggesting your view has a kind of deductive support.  On further reflection, of course, one finds there are many shades of opposition to your view, so therefore the dichotomy, and the force it gives your position, is false.  So, for instance, you either endorse constitutional overreach, or you support the enemy and are thus a traitor.  Since one does not want to be a traitor, one finds one must support constitutional overreach.  But then it occurs to one that maybe there are other alternatives to constitutional overreach, so one discovers the dichotomy is false.  That's the fallacious false dichotomy.  Don't get me wrong, Brooks does it a lot.  Today, however, it just the rhetorically false dichotomy.  He writes:

There was a time when conservatives did not argue about this. Conservatism was once a frankly elitist movement. Conservatives stood against radical egalitarianism and the destruction of rigorous standards. They stood up for classical education, hard-earned knowledge, experience and prudence. Wisdom was acquired through immersion in the best that has been thought and said.

But, especially in America, there has always been a separate, populist, strain. For those in this school, book knowledge is suspect but practical knowledge is respected. The city is corrupting and the universities are kindergartens for overeducated fools.

The elitists favor sophistication, but the common-sense folk favor simplicity. The elitists favor deliberation, but the populists favor instinct.

This populist tendency produced the term-limits movement based on the belief that time in government destroys character but contact with grass-roots America gives one grounding in real life. And now it has produced Sarah Palin.

People may think this has a kind of sophistication to it–wow Brooks can really distill cultural, economic, and political tendencies can't he!–but it's rather a silly way of looking at complex historical, cultural, etc., phenomena.  He has, in other words, just pulled this out of his ass.  A minimum of inspection will reveal these things are hardly as opposed as he suggests–especially the small town/big city dichotomy.  

Where he gets into logical trouble today is elsewhere, however.  He continues the narrative that Democratic elites' main objection consists in the fact that Palin does not eat arugula:

Palin is the ultimate small-town renegade rising from the frontier to do battle with the corrupt establishment. Her followers take pride in the way she has aroused fear, hatred and panic in the minds of the liberal elite. The feminists declare that she’s not a real woman because she doesn’t hew to their rigid categories. People who’ve never been in a Wal-Mart think she is parochial because she has never summered in Tuscany.

Look at the condescension and snobbery oozing from elite quarters, her backers say. Look at the endless string of vicious, one-sided attacks in the news media. This is what elites produce. This is why regular people need to take control.

These two paragraphs distill the Palin/McCain campaign's political strategy: call everyone who disagrees with Sarah Palin a cultural elite, characterize the media as the enemy, and so forth.  It's one massive straw man.  But as long as they keep fighting it, the media will keep covering it, remarking on McCain's brilliant strategy in attacking the straw man, and in knocking him down, all the while they will keep asking why Obama can't get them interested in a real fight, and why this makes Obama weak.

But back to Brooks.  Having repeated eight years' worth of straw men, he joins the opposition and claims their arguments, repeated anywhere and everywhere for the last eight plus years, as his own:

And there’s a serious argument here. In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the nation’s founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Palin.

But before I get to those, I should remark that the above argument would be a false dichotomy.  There's an obvious middle ground between a separate class of executives and caricatured portraits of mountain folk.  But I digress, back to Brooks's agreement with everything he has ridiculed:

I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.

And the problem with this attitude is that, especially in his first term, it made Bush inept at governance. It turns out that governance, the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired skills. Most of all, it requires prudence.

Yes.  And I think of all of the energetic sophistries Brooks has produced in favor of this ineptness.  

George Will, non causa pro causa

Who cares

If we still wonder why our children isn't learning, we might also ask some why well-educated and rich adults can't seem to learn either.  On that point, once again, George Will has found the root cause of educational success in the American inner city.  What might it be?  If you guessed, eliminate the teachers unions, you'd be right:

CRJHS can have its work program, its entirely college preparatory courses ("the old, dead white man's curriculum," says an English teacher cheerfully), its zero tolerance of disorder (from gang symbols down to chewing gum), its enforcement of decorum (couples dancing suggestively are told to "leave some space there for the Holy Spirit") and its requirement that every family pay something, if only as little as $25 a month. It can have all this because it is not shackled by bureaucracy or unions, as public schools are. 

Cristo Rey can have all of this because it is a private, Catholic, school that can pick and choose its students.  The ones not chosen end up somewhere else.  Where do they go?  Who will educate them?  I think it's clear at this point that if you asked George Will he'd say: who cares.

David Brooks, False Dichotomy, George Will, Straw Man

Better off

Now perhaps that the answer is likely to be "sadly, no," George Will no longer wants to hear the question: "are you better off than you were four years ago?"  In all fairness, his problem is McCain's use of this very Reaganite phrase.  When Reagan used it, of course, it made sense:

The nation considered the answer obvious. Reeling from oil shocks worse than today's, with 52 U.S. hostages in Tehran and with the Soviet Union rampant in Afghanistan, voters resoundingly said no. Today we know that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan hastened the collapse of the Evil Empire, so some things that seem to make us worse off are not unmixed curses.

Take heart America, look on the bright side.  In Will's defense, there are any number of reasons to reject this particular political device.  I might say in the first place that McCain looks like a fool asking it, considering his the Republican candidate for President.  As Will points out, it's a fairly vague question, but I would say that's its rhetorical, not logical, appeal.  Here is, however, one reason not to reject it:

The people asking and those answering the "better off" question seem to assume that the only facts that matter are those that can be expressed as economic statistics. Statistics are fine as far as they go, but they do not go very far in measuring life as actually lived.

No one really assumes that economic facts are the only relevant ones.  And it also would be supremely  disingenuous to suggest the question ought to consider the accumulation of good memories:

Suppose in those years you read "Middlemarch," rediscovered Fred Astaire's movies, took up fly-fishing, saw Chartres and acquired grandchildren. Even if the value of your stock portfolio is down since 2004 (the Dow actually is up), are you not decidedly better off?

Sheez.  Most people hearing that question would assume its non of the asker's business whether they've had a good time in their personal life these past four years.  But what looked initially like straw man in its misrepresentation of the question, now turns into an excursus on the meaning of life, David Brooks style:

We do, unfortunately, live, as Edmund Burke lamented, in an age of "economists and calculators" who are eager to reduce all things to the dust of numeracy, neglecting what Burke called "the decent drapery of life." In this supposedly rational and scientific age, the thirst for simple metrics seduces people into a preoccupation with things that lend themselves to quantification.

Self-consciously "modern" people have an urge to reduce assessments of their lives to things that can be presented in tables, charts and graphs — personal and national economic statistics. This sharpens their minds by narrowing them. Such people might as well measure out their lives in coffee spoons.

So now if you care to consider your economic status now versus four years ago, you measure your life in coffee spoons?  Now it's a false dichotomy: you either consider your reading of Middlemarch, your grandchildren, and baseball fandom have made your life better (despite your home foreclosure and costs of medication), or you are an economic reductionist.  

Ad Hominem, Paul Krugman

But you are the man

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Not long ago there was that commercial for cell phones which featured a powerful CEO type (in a corner office) claiming to an underling that his new cell phone plan was his way of "sticking it to the man."  The underling responded, but "you are the man."  One couldn't help but be reminded of that during the Republican convention.  In the department of things that had to be said (which is not a department here), Paul Krugman writes:

Can the super-rich former governor of Massachusetts — the son of a Fortune 500 C.E.O. who made a vast fortune in the leveraged-buyout business — really keep a straight face while denouncing “Eastern elites”?

Can the former mayor of New York City, a man who, as USA Today put it, “marched in gay pride parades, dressed up in drag and lived temporarily with a gay couple and their Shih Tzu” — that was between his second and third marriages — really get away with saying that Barack Obama doesn’t think small towns are sufficiently “cosmopolitan”?

Can the vice-presidential candidate of a party that has controlled the White House, Congress or both for 26 of the past 28 years, a party that, Borg-like, assimilated much of the D.C. lobbying industry into itself — until Congress changed hands, high-paying lobbying jobs were reserved for loyal Republicans — really portray herself as running against the “Washington elite”?

Yes, they can.

This is not some kind of ad hominem, as someone might think.  Romney's vast wealth-and his Harvard education and Eastern upbringing–make nonsense of the charge of "Eastern elitism."  Elitism would disqualify Romney (and Bush and especially McCain) well before it would Obama.  But Romney's charge, its falsity aside, is an ad hominem: rather than address the impact of Obama's policy proposals on regular non-arugula eating folk, Romney and his ilk have made a concerted effort to talk about the distracting and meaningless effemera of personality.

George Will, Specious allegations of fallacy, Straw Man

Not everyone made it

When I was a kid, I would wander alone through the woods, walk home alone from school (as a kindergartner), and ride a bike without a helmet (among much else).  Wondering aloud once not long ago how anyone ever survived, a friend of mine quipped: not everyone made it. 

On to today's story.  George "The Case for a Man with Little Experience" Will seems rightly dismayed by the idea that a person with such little experience as Sarah Palin might be chosen as a Vice Presidential candidate.  No argument here, though it's mainly her views on everything that bother me.  While complaining, however, that she has no Madisonian intellectual heft, Will displays his:

In his Denver speech, Barack Obama derided the "discredited Republican philosophy" that he caricatured in four words — "you're on your own." Then he promised to "keep . . . our toys safe." Among the four candidates for national office, perhaps only Palin might give a Madisonian answer — one cognizant of the idea that the federal government's powers are limited because they are enumerated — if asked to identify any provision of the Constitution, other than the First Amendment, that imposes meaningful limits on congressional or executive authority to act.

Doesn't seem much of a caricature when you then go on to complain that kids, when it comes to toys imported from another country, commerce of an international kind, you are indeed on your own.  But hey, not everyone makes it.  

Specious allegations of fallacy, Straw Man, Things that are false, William Safire

We’ll get hit again

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William Safire must not have cable TV, internet, or newspaper delivery wherever he is spending is retirement.  He writes:

“Don’t tell me that Democrats won’t defend this country,” he cried angrily. “Don’t tell me that Democrats won’t keep us safe.” Who’s telling him that? By escalating criticism, he knocked down a straw man, the oldest speechifying trick in the book. He promised to “restore our moral standing” (shades of Jimmy Carter) “so that America is once more the last, best hope for” (Lincoln wrote of) “all who are called to the cause of freedom” (shades of George W. Bush). But does he apply that idealist “cause of freedom” to the invaded Georgians? He didn’t say.

You have absolutely got to be kidding me.  Who is telling him that?  That claim–that Democrats won't defend you–has been the cornerstone of the right's argument against the Democrats for seven years–made in various forms by nearly every one of their intellectual and political superstars.

But he's right.  It is a straw man. 

Equivocation, George Will

Renewable

It was stuff like this that inspired us to start this blog four years ago.  From the All-Around Gold Medalist in Sophistry, George Will:

Barack Obama has made his economic thinking excruciatingly clear, so it also is clear that his running mate should be Rumpelstiltskin. He spun straw into gold, a skill an Obama administration will need to fulfill its fairy-tale promises.

Obama recently said that he would "require that 10 percent of our energy comes from renewable sources by the end of my first term — more than double what we have now." Note the verb "require" and the adjective "renewable."

By 2012 he would "require" the economy's huge energy sector to — here things become comic — supply half as much energy from renewable sources as already is being supplied by just one potentially renewable source. About 20 percent of America's energy comes from nuclear energy produced using fuel rods, which, when spent, can be reprocessed into fresh fuel.

Obama is (this is part of liberalism's catechism) leery of nuclear power. He also says — and might say so even if Nevada were not a swing state — that he distrusts the safety of Nevada's Yucca Mountain for storage of radioactive waste. Evidently he prefers today's situation — nuclear waste stored at 126 inherently insecure above-ground sites in 39 states, within 75 miles of where more than 161 million Americans live.

By any ordinary definition, nuclear power might be an extremely efficient resource, but, as the problem of nuclear waste makes painfully clear, it is not entirely renewable–nor is it without potential environmental cost.  To claim otherwise stretches the definition of "renewable."

So much of sophistry, so it seems to me, consists in this kind of overreaching–there's nothing wrong with claiming that Obama's energy project leaves out very efficient, safe and clean energy resources (if that's the case), there's just no need to claim he's somehow involved in a laughable contradiction.  Besides, the man who wrote "The Case for Bush" ought to be more circumspect when he says this:

In 1996, Bob Dole, citing the Clinton campaign's scabrous fundraising, exclaimed: "Where's the outrage?" In this year's campaign, soggy with environmental messianism, deranged self-importance and delusional economics, the question is: Where is the derisive laughter? 

Oh it's there alright.

Equivocation, John McCain

Poor in spirit

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Sorry McCain fan or fans, it's hard not to make fun of this:

“I define rich in other ways besides income,” he said. “Some people are wealthy and rich in their lives and their children and their ability to educate them. Others are poor if they’re billionaires.”

That may be.  When the question is tax policy (as it most certainly was) however, there's only one kind of rich that counts–the kind with 7 or 10 or more houses, and 270,000 a year on household staff expenses.

George Will, Straw Man

Stop contradicting yourself

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In the never begun quest to figure out why our children isn't learning, George Will hits upon the answer:

Unfortunately, powerful factions fiercely oppose the flourishing. Among them are education schools with their romantic progressivism — teachers should be mere "enablers" of group learning; self-esteem is a prerequisite for accomplishment, not a consequence thereof. Other opponents are the teachers unions and their handmaiden, the Democratic Party. Today's liberals favor paternalism — you cannot eat trans fats; you must buy health insurance — for everyone except children. Odd.  

His argument would be better if he could find some representative liberal making that argument.  But alas.  Perhaps honesty is just too much to ask.

UPDATE: here's a more enlightening discussion of the same piece.  

Complex Question, False Dichotomy, Michael Gerson

Weighed, analyzed, confronted

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On the theme of taking pride in being ignorant, here's Michael Gerson on Barack Obama:

What took place instead under Warren's precise and revealing questioning was the most important event so far of the 2008 campaign — a performance every voter should seek out on the Internet and watch.

First, the forum previewed the stylistic battle lines of the contest ahead, and it should give Democrats pause. Obama was fluent, cool and cerebral — the qualities that made Adlai Stevenson interesting but did not make him president. Obama took care to point out that he had once been a professor at the University of Chicago, but that bit of biography was unnecessary. His whole manner smacks of chalkboards and campus ivy. Issues from stem cell research to the nature of evil are weighed, analyzed and explained instead of confronted.

Weighing, analyzing, and explaining them does not entail not confronting these issues.  Indeed, I shudder at the confronting that does not follow the weighing, the analyzing and the explaining.

One more thing.  Later in the piece, Gerson writes:

Obama's response on abortion — the issue that remains his largest obstacle to evangelical support — bordered on a gaffe. Asked by Warren at what point in its development a baby gains "human rights," Obama said that such determinations were "above my pay grade" — a silly answer to a sophisticated question. If Obama is genuinely unsure about this matter, he (and the law) should err in favor of protecting innocent life. If Obama believes that a baby in the womb lacks human rights, he should say so — pro-choice men and women must affirm (as many sincerely do) that developing life has a lesser status. Here the professor failed the test of logic. 

It doesn't follow by a matter of logic alone that "uncertainty" in the matter should tend one way rather than the other.  Besides, the mother's autonomy seems more well established than the fetus' personhood, so one could say well established rights should take precedence (in the case of conflict).  But Gerson obviously distorted Obama's point.  Aside from this, Warren's framing of the question ("gains rights") is devious: human rights are not "gained" and "lost" (except in certain places) as one accumulates chips.  You have them or you don't.  Suggesting otherwise (in the case of the fetus) seems something of a heap paradox: when is a heap a heap? Two? Three?

There may, of course, be nothing wrong with the "heap" view of rights, Warren (and Gerson) just ought to acknowledge when it has been sneaked into a question to a pro-choice Presidential candidate in front of an admittedly hostile pro-life audience.  In light of those facts, Obama's answer–with its weighing, analyzing, and confronting–was right on point.

H/t mahablog