Beyond the Book: Glenn Beck and the Paranoid Style

This blog is singularly focused on logically deconstructing Arguing with Idiots. However, I will occasionally come across an outside piece — a blog post, an article, a video — that casts light on the endeavor. I will post them here.

Simon Maloy of Media Matters has just posted a thorough article on Glenn Beck’s use of paranoid rhetoric as a tool of persuasion. It’s an excellent piece, we’ll see a lot of what he is talking about pop up as I delve further into AwI.

Go read it: Glenn Beck and the Paranoid Style. I am closing comments for this post to encourage you to comment there.

Capitalism Fail

Chapter 1 of AwI is a “Defense of Capitalism”. If you are a reasonable person, you were likely unaware that capitalism required defending. I will probably end up wearing out the straw man icon, but here is the Idiot’s first claim in the book:

YOUR PRECIOUS FREE-MARKET CAPITALISM HAS FAILED.

If someone made this claim to you, your first response might be to find out what the Idiot meant by “free-market”, “capitalism”, and “failed”. It is a pretty extreme sentiment. Must we really argue whether capitalism has failed? Can’t we agree that a purely free-market capitalism economy is imperfect and have a discourse about what those flaws are and how they can be addressed?

Beck’s response to this facially absurd claim, on the other hand, is like a linguistic three-card-monte. The ambiguity of the terms ends up being something he can leverage throughout the remainder of the chapter, defining the terms alternatively to suit the needs of the current argument.

Beck starts off with an analogy: “You are a doctor with 50 sick patients, all of whom have the exact same symptoms.” But your patients are all different. The only thing they have in common is the disease. This, he says, is like the global economy: “Communists, socialists, capitalists, and everything in between, it doesn’t matter–the global recession infected everyone. Yet we look at all of these countries, with all of their different styles of government and different views on economic freedom, and we come to one nonsensical conclusion: Capitalism has failed.”

The analogy is a poor one for Beck rhetorically. Given the 50-patient scenario, my initial reaction isn’t that the 50 people spontaneously contracted some disease but, more likely, that it spread from one to the others. So, even if he is correct that we cannot conclude “capitalism has failed”, we can still hypothesize that it was Patient Zero in the global economic pandemic. Beck gives a nod to this when he writes:

If you could trace the economic crisis back to one seminal event, you’d probably point the finger at the collapse of the U.S. housing market. But was that a collapse triggered by a failure of capitalism, or by an abuse of it by the government?

Unsurprisingly, Beck answers his own question by asserting the latter:

So while some may argue that we need more regulation to prevent these future “excesses,” I would argue that it’s the existing regulations that created those excesses in the first place.

That’s an argument he addresses in the subsequent sections of AwI and one I will likewise address in subsequent posts.

Sidebar: Cruising Past Communism

There is also a sidebar on page 4 that’s worth addressing. Beck asserts that Haitian refugees bypass closer options and head to Florida “because the greedy, evil capitalists of America still ensure a far better quality of life than any benevolent dictator.” A couple of problems here.

First, I think the people of the Turks & Caicos Islands, Jamaica, and the Cayman Islands would be flabbergasted to learn that they are governed by “benevolent dictators”. Well, I guess Queen Elizabeth II seems benevolent enough.

Second, that America ensures a “far better” quality of life than the Turks & Caicos Islands and the Cayman Islands is something of an open question.

Third, I assume that he is correct about Haitian refugees heading to Florida to the exclusion of these other destinations, but I don’t know, and he doesn’t provide any support for it. (I will get to the issue of the citations generally in a later post.)

Fourth and finally, even if I assume that Haitian refugees disproportionally come to America over other possible destinations, I don’t know that our free-market capitalist economy is the determining factor, and again Beck doesn’t provide any support for it. If America were suddenly teleported to the middle of the Pacific, I think we can safely assume that the Haitian refugees wouldn’t be tracking passage through the Panama Canal.

I can agree generally that America has a very high standard of living, that our economic policies over the years (often derided by Beck in AwI) have fostered that high standard of living, and that our high standard of living makes us attractive to immigrants from other countries. But, in the end, the assertion and the graphic — complete with Cuba rendered in a blazing communist red — relies on an appeal to emotion, specifically pride, above anything substantive. It makes us feel good that refugees want to come to America … even if Beck doesn’t want them here.

Hello, Idiot!

The introduction to the book is called “How To Use this Book”. At first glance, that might seem like an odd way of phrasing it. I don’t need to be told how to use most books, the obvious exception being instruction manuals. And that’s exactly what Beck is going for here: “I hardly ever read instruction manuals.” Policy books are common, but they aren’t often cast as instruction manuals. What does that imply?

When a person instructs someone, they impart information to them. The instructor is knowledgeable and, importantly, right. The pupil is ignorant. The learned person educates the uninformed. That’s the premise of AwI. Contrast that approach with one more typical of policy texts: persuasion. In that context, the author’s correctness isn’t to be presumed but earned by valid argument.

I admit this is a subtle point, but it is important. First, it is carried throughout the entire text. The correctness of Beck’s position is not to be legitimately questioned. This unburdens it from the rigors of valid argument and makes the fallacies deployed by him seem all that less pernicious. Second, it constitutes a form of appeal to authority, the authority being Beck himself.

The Introduction also gives us our first glimpse of Beck-as-Idiot:

Say hello to the real star of this book: our idiot Friend. As you start reading, you’ll quickly notice that each chapter is formatted as an ongoing conversation between the idiot and me…The idiot’s arguments will always appear in the same bold red font you see above, and my (winning) responses follow.

Here’s the first bit of idiot text:

“HEY, WAIT A SECOND! WHO ARE YOU CALLING AN IDIOT! I THOUGHT YOU WERE MR. COMMON SENSE, NON-PARTISAN, BOTH-PARTIES-STINK … NOW YOU THINK THAT ALL DEMOCRATS ARE IDIOTS?!”

Why, no, he replies. Only people who disagree with me are idiots and there are plenty who are democrats, but also “Republicans, Libertarians, Communists, Anarchists, and members of just about every other political party you can imagine.” And there it is. The idiot argues that Beck claims “all Democrats are idiots”, and so he gets to reply that only some of them are. Classic straw man. What’s worse, from the syllogism he himself puts forward, the only Democrats who aren’t idiots are the ones that agree with him.

Finally, the Introduction closes with a comment about “facts”. As Beck says, “opinions should end where facts begin”. Beck trumpets the 25 pages of citations at the end of the book. Just what constitutes a “fact” worthy of trumping opinion is a sticky point. But that’s for another post on another day.

Next up: Capitalism!

Let’s Judge the Cover

For the inaugural post, it seems appropriate to comment on the book’s packaging before I tear it open and discuss the contents. These are necessarily superficial issues, but that doesn’t make them any less relevant. Indeed, the cover is the one thing you see every time you pick it up to read a passage. There are several issues with the cover.

First, there’s the title: Arguing with Idiots. Humorous enough¹, but an obvious ad hominem attack. Beck’s audience–particularly after reading his book–is informed. The people against whom they are arguing are “idiots”. This attack is reinforced by the book’s subtitle: “How To Stop Small Minds and Big Government”. And the “idiot” epithet is repeated throughout the book-flap text as well. That’s the starting point for Beck: I’m right, and anyone who disagrees with me is an idiot. It’s difficult to have a discourse with someone starting from such a strident position, but I’ll try.

Second, there’s the whole graphical theme. You’ve got the yellow and red color scheme, reminiscent of the flags of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.

The capital “R” in the title and in the header on the back cover is displayed in mirror image, Я, an overt reference to the Cyrillic letter “ya”. Finally, Beck himself is dressed in a military-style uniform in the cover photo. The specific style of uniform is indiscernible, but it certainly invokes the communist aesthetic and reinforces the communist theme. From the book text itself, we know explicitly that this character represents “our Idiot Friend”. (See, How To Use this Book) The inference is unmistakable: Not only are dissenters idiots, but they are associated, aligned, or affiliated with communists. This is no revelation, and indeed the association fallacy that starts on the cover is a running theme inside the book.

I’ll forgive the appeal to authority in the form of the front-cover sales blurbs: “#1 New York Times bestselling author” and “Host of the national television and radio shows”. These are typical book-selling techniques, but I can at least identify them. That Beck is a popular author and host does not imbue his arguments with any greater validity.

Finally, the cover is rife with straw men. These come in two forms. On the inside flap text, Beck sets up the imaginary arguments he’d like to have, e.g., “It happens to all of us: You’re minding your own business, when some idiot informs you that guns are evil, the Prius will save the planet, or the rich have to finally start paying their fair share of taxes.” Then, on the back cover, we have an atypical series of blurbs–not from supporters but from detractors, whose comments are short barbs with no substance, themselves simple personal attacks, e.g., “A lying sack of dog mess.” – Whoopi Goldberg.

Beck’s even crying! Look at the idiots he has to deal with.

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¹As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the book is undeniably funny. This is the first and last time I’ll acknowledge it on the main page. Yes, the book is funny. In many cases, the humor derives precisely from Beck’s deployment of a particular fallacy. The purpose of this site is not to evaluate the humorous qualities of the book but the quality of its argument.