The Difference Between Non-Arguments and Bad Arguments (Trump/Vance edition)
My recent writings on both Dorf on Law and Verdict have, not at all surprisingly, been driven by the ups and downs of the US presidential election. I did surprise myself, however, when I noticed that those columns added up to a larger narrative -- or actually two narratives, if one also counts my ongoing anguished critique of the media's coverage of American politics. That latter, overarching story of media malpractice, however, is not my focus here, mostly because there are only so many ways that one can mock big-time media types who reveal themselves to be as shallow as a tea saucer. I will surely have reason to go back to that subject again -- most likely very soon, unfortunately -- but for now, I want to focus on something a bit less familiar.
In the broadest terms, my narrative regarding Donald Trump and J.D. Vance (as well as their sycophants and enablers) has become a one-two punch. Punch One: I have argued (most directly in a two-part column on Verdict on September 16th and 17th) that the term "policy discussion" is being completely misused by nearly everyone involved in US politics, with the confusion working to Trump's benefit. Punch Two: I then argued in a companion two-part column on the 23rd and 24th that the word "argument" has been completely drained of meaning, especially in the non-debates that continue to plague the US political scene.
Today, I want to pose a critical question to myself about the second punch: Does it matter? That is, should anyone care whether we say that people are making assertions that are not arguments at all, as opposed to making arguments that are simply weak and laughable? Am I merely being pedantic in announcing that Trump's and Vance's assertions do not deserve to be called arguments in the first instance? After all, whether their statements are dismissed as not even having the form and content of arguments or instead are assessed as illogical and baseless arguments, who cares? If we can get people to see that Trump/Vance are not saying anything valid or useful, that would seem to be all that matters, without worrying about labels.
Let us consider my Punch One for comparison, because there is no question that the "not a policy discussion" distinction matters. As I have pointed out, many journalists and commentators who are not (knowingly) in the tank for Trump have bought into the idea that Trump would do himself a huge favor if only he could show some discipline and "discuss policy issues that people care about," as opposed to talking about whales, flush toilets, his own (supposedly awesome) beach bod, or whatever.
As far as it goes, there is some sense to all of that. Trump is obviously getting more and more detached from reality (to which he was only tenuously connected all along), and even his supporters seem to become bored by his stream-of-consciousness ramblings. Even so, the point that I have been emphasizing is that no one in TrumpWorld could possibly want him to "discuss policy," because he either has no policy ideas at all -- just to take one of his favorite examples, what is his policy proposal to reduce the price of bacon? -- or he has policy ideas that are hugely unpopular and are impossible to defend. That is true of Trump's own few policy commitments (across-the-board tariffs, rounding up and deporting tens of millions of people) and also of any off-the-Republican-shelf ideas like regressive tax cuts, blocking gun safety laws, or making climate change worse.
Imagine a conversation between a naive young campaign aide who takes seriously the idea that Trump and Vance should "discuss policy" and a Republican operative who needs to set the youngster straight.
Naive Aide: Gosh, I hear people say that Mr. Trump shouldn't keep talking about the 2020 election, Hannibal Lecter, or Jimmy Kimmel's joke from the Oscars seven months ago. I definitely understand that. So we should have him talk about policy, right?
Republican Hack: Yeah, that's the ticket, kid. Polls show that people (for no apparent reason) "trust" Trump on immigration and the economy -- though not so much on the economy lately -- because that's what they're angry about. And if we can just get Trump to talk about things that make them angry, we're golden.
NA: Got it. So we want him to talk about how he will reduce prices, right?
RH: No, that's not it at all, kid. We want him to talk about how prices are higher than they used to be.
NA: Right, but aren't we supposed to be getting him to discuss policy? "Hey, look at that problem" is not a policy discussion, is it?
RH: Are you kidding? We have no idea how to make prices go down. And even if we did try, any policy ideas could be ripped to shreds by people pointing out that price-reduction policies could lead to another Great Depression.
NA (feeling a bit deflated): Um, so we're not going to have a policy discussoin on the one thing that makes people angriest regarding the economy? What about immigration? Should we explain how Trump will "close the border"? After all, Mr. Vance keeps talking about "Kamala Harris's open borders," so should we have Mr. Trump talk about how he will close the border?
RH (becoming annoyed): How do you think we could we get him to pull that off? If he talks about building a wall, he opens himself up to being boring and to the response that Republicans controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House in 2017-18 but never built a wall. And if he talks about tightening border security, he'll be open to more attacks about his killing the harsh bipartisan bill from earlier this year. He can't talk about anything relevant to solving problems, you idiot.
NA: So why not have him talk about what we as Republicans believe in, like open-carry gun laws?
RH: Nope, next.
NA: Taking away birth control?
RH: Ixnay. Are you nuts?
NA: So what are we supposed to do to have Mr. Trump "discuss policy"?
RH: Have him yell about "the economy" and "out-of-control immigration."
NA: And then what?
RH: I think you're in the wrong line of work, punk.
There is, in other words, an objective meaning to the words "discuss policy," and Trump and Vance want nothing to do with it. Their entire approach to politics is simply to enrage people and then exploit their anger, at which point the Republicans will do things that harm most of their voters.
So that was the first half of the one-two punch, and it is very clear that the distinction very much matters between "saying words that convey nothing substantive but are policy-adjacent" and "discussing policy proposals that could be evaluated, debated, defended, amended, and possibly enacted." But what about my "assertions" vs. "actual arguments" distinction? There, I concede that the line is a bit blurry, at least some of the time. Does that blurriness matter? Should I (or anyone else) care?
Consider a very basic example. Imagine that someone is told that they need to come up with a policy to make people richer. They think: "Well, poor people will be richer if they have more money, so if we give everyone more money, they will be richer!" They then tell their favorite political candidate to announce that he will make everyone richer by having the government print more money and distribute it to everyone.
Is that a non-argument? Arguably not (pun intended). At least as a formal matter, it contains the elements of a policy argument. Problem: too many people have too little money. Policy Lever: the government has the ability to create money. Therefore, Policy Proposal: the government can solve that problem of poverty by doing something that is completely within its control.
If that is an argument, however, it is one that no one would take seriously (we should hope). If a person offered that as a good-faith argument, it would take no more than a few seconds to enlighten them. But surely that example is so outlandish that it is not even worth discussing. No candidate for high office would say anything equivalently stupid. Right?
But wait. Vance has continually claimed that "Kamala Harris's magic wand" supposedly gave certain immigrants legal status, and because it was a magic wand, Vance refused to call them "legal immigrants." That is not even at the level of the example above, which at least had a surface appeal (that is, the form of an argument). Vance is simply saying that legal is illegal, no matter what the law says. How does one even assess that kind of statement? "Printing money will make everyone rich" requires at least one step of logic to rebut, whereas "It's illegal because I insist that this legal thing is not legal" is -- or should be -- embarrassing.
In my Verdict columns last month, my paradigm case for "non-arguments" was Trump's habit of skipping over the steps between what he would do and how it would solve a problem. Indeed, he even skips the "what he would do" part most of the time, simply telling people that he will solve a problem. Interestingly, a recent Paul Krugman column brought up the same example that I used in one of my columns (not a surprise, given our overlapping areas of expertise). Krugman's column began:
Bring back voodoo economics!
I never thought I’d say that. But Donald Trump has managed something remarkable: He’s making traditional right-wing economic nonsense look relatively sensible in retrospect.
Ever since the rise of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have been vocal believers in the magical power of tax cuts for the rich. The idea was that if you reduced tax rates at the top, “job creators” would respond with a surge of productive energy, boosting the economy — hence trickling down to the middle class — and maybe even reducing the budget deficit.
This idea wasn’t unadulterated nonsense. Rather, it was adulterated nonsense. It described something that could happen in principle but doesn’t happen in practice; tax cuts never produced the promised economic surge, tax hikes never had the predicted destructive effects.
When it comes to voodoo economics, then, it is probably more accurate to call the Republicans' position a fully debunked argument, but an argument nonetheless. In Krugman's terms, it is adulterated but not unadulterated nonsense.
But it is that distinction that I no longer think matters most of the time. "No, I made an argument, and it was that tax cuts pay for themselves," all but begs for the response: "You think that's an argument?" And that retort, in turn, can mean one of two things: "You think that you've put together a series of statements that could prove a proposition?" or "You're still relying on that long-debunked, baseless argument?" When it is the latter, is that better?
Going back to the non-debate between Vance and Tim Walz, however, we still find ourselves in a miasma emanating from Vance. Walz at one point argued that Iran is closer to getting nuclear capabilities today because Trump as President unilaterally canceled the Iran nuclear agreement that had been negotiated under Barack Obama. That is an argument, putting together something that Trump did with a plausible and defensible claim about how Trump's action led to a bad result.
Vance's response? "And, Governor Walz, you blame Donald Trump, [but] who has been the Vice President for the last three and a half years, and the answer is your running mate, not mine." Again, one can stretch and call that an argument: Time passed while Harris was VP, something bad happened, so it is all Harris's fault. But if ever there were a perfect example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy, that is it.
And even if we were to give that logical fallacy the benefit of the doubt and call it an argument, the fact is that Trump shattered the one thing that was at least slowing Iran down. Once he did so, there was no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. "It's Harris's fault, because she and Biden couldn't fix what Trump irretrievably destroyed" is simply silly. Yet Vance continued to rely on that same fallacy: "Donald Trump consistently made the world more secure. ... But when did Iran and Hamas and their proxies attack Israel? It was during the administration of Kamala Harris."
I am not, of course, saying that it is uncommon for people to commit the post hoc fallacy. I am, however, saying that it is genuinely a difficult question as to whether we should say that a person who relies on something that has been known as a logical fallacy literally for millennia (and yes, I do mean "literally") has made an argument.
But difficult questions are not always interesting. I thus conclude that there is a clear category of non-argument, which does not even pretend to offer a mechanism for how to get from A to B. There is also a clear category of argument, which involves stating and defending facts and logic to get from A to B. Needless to say, arguments are not always valid, because they might not stand up to scrutiny, even if they start off looking promising.
Finally, there is this "other" category that Vance seems to love, saying things that sometimes could be restated in the form of an argument but not even coming close to passing the laugh test. As I noted above, I am perfectly willing to say that there is nothing to be gained by subjecting this last category to a labeling exercise. Trump says, "I alone can fix it." Vance says, "I'll say things that sound like they might or might not be backed up by facts or logic," but none of them withstand even a moment's scrutiny. Who is worse?