Down on the Ground Talking With Tea Partiers

by George Sibley

Most of the local Tea Party leadership was sitting on a bench in front of a local coffeeshop as I came out from a meeting, right by the bike rack where my trusty rusty bike waited patiently. Three of them – call them Tom, Dick and Harry, names changed to protect – whatever. I know two of them by name and vice versa, although we’ve never talked much. But as I grabbed my bike and kicked up the stand, saying something polite seemed to be in order. Rather than the weather, I decided to try flattery.

“Wow,” I said, “seeing the three of you here like this makes me think the government should fear for its future.”

It worked well enough – got smiles of the sort that say, “we know you’re putting us on but that’s the right way to do it”. Then Tom counterpoked. “You know, George, there’s cures for your Obama disease.” I have a certain reputation around town.

I backpedaled a little – not even on the bike yet. “I suppose,” I said. “But I’d want to know if the cure might be worse than the disease.”

It’s actually not hard to convince me these days that there is something diseased about the Obama administration. Like, once elected you catch re-election fever, or the power pox, something nonfatal but seriously debilitating to good governance. So I decided to change the subject, and commended them on having the democratic chutzpah to attempt a petition to recall all three of our county commissioners. But honesty decreed that I follow that up by acknowledging I was glad it hadn’t succeeded.

“We came close,” said Dick.

“How close?” I asked, genuinely curious, not having heard any figures.

Harry held up a thumb and a forefinger about an inch apart. “That close,” he said. I’m not going to hear any figures.

“There’s a hell of a lot of angry people out there,” Dick said.

“All we want is for our gover’ment to obey the constitution,” said Tom.

“Ummm,” I said, hearing the temperature of the conversation rising a little, and wishing I’d just commented on the weather and hopped on my bike. “What’re they doing that’s unconstitutional?”

“You know they’ve taken away your right to vote, don’t you?” said Dick.

“Huh?”

“Twice the people told them, in elections, we don’t want a new jail, and they’re going ahead and building it anyway.”

Now this gets into a local sore spot, details of which I don’t want to bore you with. Suffice it to say that Gunnison County is under serious state pressure to upgrade the county jail, which is often so overcrowded and under-equipped that it probably borders on “cruel and unusual punishment.” But twice the voters have refused to further indebt themselves through jail bond referenda. So the commissioners have figured out how to trim down in a few other areas, and build an adequate new jail without a bond issue or tax increase. Frugal fiscal management that, it seems to me, ought to get praise from the less-government minions rather than this howling condemnation.

But now these guys are telling me that, since the people had said that we didn’t want more indebtedness for a new jail, the commissioners have somehow taken away our right to vote?

“What the people said,” I reminded them, “is they didn’t want to pay extra for a new jail. Not that they didn’t want a new jail. How could anyone here not want a new jail? The old one’s a disgrace to us!” I realized the temperature of my conversation was rising a little.

“Well,” Tom jumped in, “why did they go build a new building then? Why didn’t they just enlarge the old one? Clean out a few of those useless county employees and expand the jail there? That would’a cost a lot less!”

“Uh – you have figures on that?”

“You’ll get figures!” Tom said.

“There’s not a county official doing anything worth a damn!” said Harry, with the certainty of a person who has heard it from God.

“Those commissioners all need to be sent to the rubber room in Pueblo!” Dick added.

I basically just retreated. With or without dignity, but the conversation was going nowhere positive. And I am left with the realization – after other similar conversations around the valley, with people who speak with the assurance of divine revelation – that I simply do not know how to hold an intelligent political discussion with a growing number of my fellow citizens.

This is a rough concession from someone who spent two decades trying to teach college students how to discipline their own thinking, and how to realize when they were dealing with an undisciplined thinker. “Detection of Common Rhetorical Artifice Ploys,” I called the unit, or more briefly “CRAP Detection.” It was all about dissecting the kinds of arguments I was getting from these angry guys on the coffeeshop bench – how to identify hasty generalizations, slippery slope arguments (like the “vote denial” one above), topic shifts (like the jump from the jail to county employees above), unstated-premise logic, et cetera.

Unfortunately this stuff doesn’t just happen on the bench in front of the coffeeshop. We Coloradans now have a major-party gubernatorial candidate, Dan Maes, who said in early August, according to the Denver Post (August 4, 2010), that “Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper’s policies, particularly his efforts to boost bike riding, are ‘converting Denver into a United Nations community.’” Maes said in a later interview that he once thought the mayor’s efforts to promote cycling and other environmental initiatives were harmless and well-meaning. Now he realizes “that’s exactly the attitude they want you to have.”

How does a “CRAP Detector” look at such incredulous nonsense? I begin with the strangulated faulty syllogisms underlying this breathtaking conclusion:

• Major Premise (Unstated): The United Nations is made up of countries full of people who ride bicycles.

• Minor Premise: Hickenlooper wants us to ride bicycles.

• Conclusion: Hickenlooper wants to turn us into a United Nations type of country.

An unstated or implied “everyone knows” premise in what purports to be a logical analysis is usually a sign that someone is trying to slip something over on us. Usually – as in this case – stating the premise exposes the flawed logic. (Is there no other good, healthy, energy-saving reason for suggesting that people ride bicycles?) CRAP Detection here also involves unloading and inspecting the baggage on “United Nations.”

But probably the most persistent example of “implied-premise” CRAP that every mainstream Republican, along with the Tea Partiers, continues to shovel out is this one: Lowering taxes, especially for the rich, will lead to the creation of new jobs.

What is the logic there? A little CRAP detection reveals another big unstated premise sequence in a transitive syllogism:

• Premise 1: Lowering taxes will keep more money in the private sector.

• Premise 2 (unstated): That money might be invested in productive economic activity (as opposed to non-productive betting against the economy in the Wall Street casinos).

• Premise 3 (unstated): Investment in productive economic activity might lead to some job creation (as opposed to more automation or off-shoring).

• Transitive Conclusion: Lowering taxes might lead to job creation (if incentives are added to make sure the money flows that way rather than into the more lucrative casino).

If Republicans and Tea Partiers were to state that whole argument – and acknowledge that what happens in the middle premises is critical to the argument – then we might begin to have an intelligent national dialogue about how to make tax cuts in the right places work in the right way. Ask David Stockman, inventor of Reaganomics, who has been very public recently about how ignoring the middle premises has made the whole thing fall apart.

But the argument still works on the street and in the coffeeshop. And this seems problematic if we are really serious about self-governance. We have a misbegotten notion in America that in a democracy everyone’s opinion is as good as everyone else’s. But I would argue that an opinion based on that kind of undetected CRAP is just not as good as a position that has worked logically and responsibly through the boring old facts and numbers.

Maybe this sounds like I’m flaunting my education, but the fact is I don’t think my education is worth a damn where the feet meet the street. Street logic is what’s happening today, and in the street, the argument goes to whoever talks the loudest, fastest and most aggressively (“crosshairs” came up in our discussion of the commissioners – you know: “Second Amendment solutions”).

The only place, really, where CRAP Detection works reasonably well is in the print media, which, at its best, flows at the speed of actual thought, and can give bad arguments the dissection they deserve, if it will. But the analysis never “goes viral” the way the CRAP does. As a people, we just don’t think things through much, and even take a sort of hickish, redneck pride in that.

Trying to talk with the Tea Partiers, I am haunted by images of Brownshirts in Germany, and Joseph Goebbels: “Whoever can conquer the street will one day conquer the state, for every form of power politics and any dictatorship-run state has its roots in the street.”

George Sibley was born in Western Pennsylvania, but was conceived in Colorado by Colorado natives, and thus considers himself to be a native Coloradan.