You are a hot commodity. Every day, politicians, pundits, advertisers, bloggers, and politically minded folks in your social networks are vying for your attention, your support, your votes, and possibly your dollars, and they employ an entire arsenal of weapons—eloquent words, seductive arguments, tempting promises—designed to get you to buy their political narrative.
As a critical consumer of information, it’s important that you understand what you’re up against. Learning to identify logical fallacies (forms of faulty reasoning) and to understand different types of persuasive appeals not only can make you a better consumer of political information but also can help you to articulate your own arguments in a way that is both persuasive and ethical.
What to Watch Out For
The post hoc fallacy. From the Latin post hoc ergo propter hoc (meaning “after this, therefore because of this”), the post hoc fallacy occurs when one draws a cause-and-effect relationship between two events simply because one follows the other. You might observe, for example, that students who take notes on laptops do well on exams. But if you assert that the digital note-taking causes better grades, then you’re falling victim to the post hoc fallacy.
Appeals to tradition. Historical evidence is important, but using tradition as a litmus test for what is right or wrong is not always sound. When a pundit points to the way things have always been, it’s your job to carefully evaluate whether or not the way things have always been is the way things ought to be. Such appeals are particularly effective in persuading people who are nervous about change, which is one reason they come up so frequently in political narratives relating to things like marriage and family.
Emotional appeals. One surefire way to get lots of attention fast is to go for the heart: stirring up anger, fear, disgust, or empathy gets a quick reaction. It’s impossible to ignore your emotions when something is upsetting, but it pays to take a moment to evaluate whether you are being persuaded by evidence, or just by your own emotions.
The “straw man” fallacy. One way to make an argument appear stronger is to show that competing ideas are weaker. That can be fine when evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of two viable options. However, pundits often pit their argument not against actual alternatives, but instead against a simplified, weaker counterargument (or “straw man”) that can easily be knocked down. When someone presents a weak or even ludicrous counterargument, check to see whether the counterargument is even real. Unfortunately, when a straw man argument is also an emotional appeal, it can take on a narrative life of its own. Consider, for example, hysteria over government “death panels” during the fight over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
The slippery slope. You’ve heard this one a million times, on both sides of such contentious issues as gun control and freedom of speech: If you limit or allow one thing, that will eventually lead us down a “slippery slope” to anarchy, tyranny, or some other unthinkable outcome. It’s often possible that one will lead to another, but when someone presents such connections as inevitable, without any proof, you should take their arguments with the proverbial grain of salt.
The false dilemma. Beware any argument that implies that limited options are available, especially when it comes to policy. Just because the narrative implies there are no compromises or alternatives doesn’t mean that’s true.
Bandwagoning. The United States may be a democracy governed by, for, and of the people—but facts remain facts whether they are widely held or not. If a writer or commentator is using the popularity of a statement as proof of its validity, you should immediately take a second look. Opinions and beliefs are not credible evidence, even if they are widely agreed upon.
Anecdotal evidence and hasty generalizations. Anecdotes liven up speeches and can lend support to arguments—but they’re of limited use when making a point, and they should never be used as evidence of a trend. One story does not carry as much weight as real statistics that come from systematic research.
Red herrings. Take care to sort out and ignore irrelevant or unrelated information, which can be insinuated into arguments purely for the sake of distracting you from the matter at hand.
Cherry-picking evidence. Deciding what evidence to use—and what to leave out—is a crucial step in developing any argument. In the process, it may be tempting to select only the evidence that supports one’s own opinion and to ignore evidence that contradicts it. This tendency, which social scientists call confirmation bias, often occurs unconsciously, so it is especially important to be vigilant in weeding it out of any arguments you encounter—including your own.
But oddly, as we suggested earlier, as the national policymaking machinery can grind to a halt under divided government, an opportunity has opened up for states to take more action on their own. For several years a conservative Republican-controlled Congress resisted virtually every initiative put forth by the Obama administration, and similarly, President Obama was not shy about using the veto when Congress sent him bills that did not fit with his agenda. National inaction has left a policy vacuum that is being filled with state policy initiatives. Even though President Trump does not face divided government, the Republican caucus itself is split, causing inactivity at the national level that can be countered at the state level.
Three-fifths of the states are under unified control—both houses of the state legislature are controlled by the same party as the governor. This has given them the ability to move where gridlocked Washington cannot; and unlike Washington action that moves policy in the same direction nationwide, the states go their own, separate ways. Take immigration policy, for example. Some Republican-led states, such as Alabama and Arizona, have passed restrictive immigration legislation. Other states, where the Democrats are in control, have passed legislation to make life easier for undocumented workers and their families.
Gridlock between the president and Congress has also elevated the role of interexecutive negotiations in making changes in the major areas of education and health care. Republican governors have negotiated “waivers” with the federal bureaucracy (individualized changes in specific laws) to achieve politically workable solutions to problems in Medicaid and other federally mandated programs. The trend of hyperpartisanship and polarization that has led to gridlock at the national level has taken Congress out of the game as a significant actor in many policy areas, while executives (state and federal) make deals and the states take the initiative to implement policy that fits with their voters’ (very different) preferences.31
In Your Own Words
Describe the ways in which the national government can influence the states.
Citizenship and Federalism: Enhanced opportunities for participation and power at the state and local levels
State and local governments are closer to their citizens than is the federal government. Whereas the federal government may seem to take the form of an elite democracy, run by people far removed from everyday citizens, state and local governments allow far more opportunities for participatory governance if citizens choose to get involved. Citizens may vote for initiatives and referenda, run for local office, sit on school boards and other advisory boards, or even take part in citizen judicial boards and community-run probation programs.32 They can also use social media to organize marches and demonstrations and make their voices heard far more clearly at the local level than at the national level.
But there is another way that citizens can shape state and local policies as surely as when they vote at the polls, and that is by voting with their feet. In a kind of political pressure that the federal government almost never has to confront, citizens can move from a state or locality they don’t like to one that suits them better. Consider this: few Americans ever think seriously about changing countries. Other nations may be nice to visit, but