The Best Defense Is to Burn Down the Whole Goddamn House
You know the saying, “The best defense is a good offense”. Or, as L. Ron Hubbard (the founder of Scientology) put it: “The DEFENSE of anything is UNTENABLE. The only way to defend anything is to ATTACK, and if you ever forget that then you will lose every battle you are ever in engaged in …”
This is understood by successful grifters everywhere. If someone accuses you of some misdeed, the more time people spend thinking about that charge, the worse it is for you. The best you can hope for by directly addressing the charge is to minimize the damage. So the best rhetorical/scamming strategy has be to change the subject. Raise extraneous, emotionally charged issues. Go on the attack against your accuser, his family, or other group he belongs to. Most people are easily distracted, so they will simply stop thinking about what you may have done. Even your accusers (if they aren’t skilled con artists) will likely be distracted and turn toward talking about your accusations rather than their own. Most people are also easily emotionally manipulated, so you can just provoke strong emotions in them and short-circuit their rational faculties.
That’s how the President successfully defended against his impeachment. Attack the whistleblower. Attack Adam Schiff. Attack the Democrats in general. It’s also how they “defended” Judge Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings. Attack Ford. Attack Democrats in general. Provoke strong emotions. It almost worked for winning re-election too.
Ideologues, by the way, automatically do this to themselves. That’s why I can predict that some people who read this very post will immediately react by attacking me, or the Democrats, or by raising some other emotionally and ideologically charged issue. People don’t even have to deliberate about this – there’s a mechanism in our brains that just automatically deploys defense mechanisms against having our ideologies called into doubt.
Whataboutism
Once I was giving a guest lecture in someone’s class, and somehow the topic of people’s criticisms of President Obama came up. I mentioned that I thought people were concerned about how Obama’s spending was increasing the deficit. The other professor retorted that George W. Bush had increased the deficit too. I was confused by this; I didn’t understand why he was suddenly talking about Bush, how he imagined that that was a response to what I’d said, or how it was in any way relevant to the discussion. Was he saying that because Bush increased the deficit, it’s only fair that now Obama gets to do it too?
That was a classic example of whataboutism, and of the Hubbard/Trump defense strategy. As I later figured out, the other professor wasn’t trying to address the concern about Obama. He was distracting attention from it. He didn’t think of himself as doing that, though. He probably experienced it as his making a great counterpoint. And that’s because the way he perceived my comment was not as a cognitive point – he perceived it more like: “This is an attack on my tribe, the Democrats. Quick, counter-attack on the other tribe, the Republicans!”
(Note: That's never what I'm doing. I'm never just attacking a tribe. I'm actually making the cognitive point that my words literally express. E.g., in the above case, I was actually worried about the deficits under the then-current administration. I wasn't saying "Yay, Republicans!" or "Boo Democrats!")
This is why I consistently see this whataboutism when I criticize the left or the right. Someone always shows up to make a cognitively irrelevant but tribally appealing “defense” consisting of attacking someone on other side. If I say Trump did X, they’ll ignore that and retort that some leftist did Y – or vice versa.
Consequences
Here is something that happened in Denver recently:
There was a right-wing demonstration, and some left-wing people organized a counter-demonstration. These two guys had an altercation. Rightist guy slapped Leftist guy, then pulled out a can of mace and sprayed it at Leftist. Leftist pulled out a gun and shot Rightist dead. (https://www.denverpost.com/2020/11/03/matthew-dolloff-security-guard-posts-bond/)
This might seem like a different topic from the rest of this post. But it isn’t. Because this sort of thing is the consequence of the recent move in our culture toward the whole “defense by offense” strategy. Because the strategy involves attacking the whole group to which your accuser belongs (e.g., all people on the left), and then they are prompted to respond by attacking your entire group, we wind up having large groups of people filled with suspicion and outrage toward each other. The strategy also, again, involves deliberately inflaming passions so that people stop thinking. And so you get things like the Denver incident above. Those two guys never met each other before that day. They had no actual conflicting interests (it’s not like one of them slept with the other guy’s wife, or one of them stole the other guy’s car, etc.) Sure, they were each going to vote for different people, but since each vote has only a 1/10 million chance of affecting the outcome, that’s hardly a significant practical conflict. It’s not worth fighting with someone to stop them from voting. But they were each primed to hate the group to which the other belonged.
Aside: We used to have that sort of prejudice and hate between racial groups. Today, it’s more about ideological groups, groups defined by their political beliefs.
Now, I’m not saying President Trump has been the only one doing this. But he’s definitely a master of this game. The problem is that this sort of behavior tears the country apart.
The Election
And all this is why American politicians usually try to gracefully concede defeat. However sleazy they may be, they at least have a tiny bit of concern for the country – at least when they know they’ve lost, they refrain from taking a parting shot to sow discord on their way out.
This time will be different from usual. I don’t doubt that President Trump is looking for ways of filing frivolous lawsuits – not because this might actually change the outcome, but just so he can avoid admitting that he really lost, and so he can convince millions of people that the Democrats stole the election and that they should never accept the new President as legitimate. (If I’m wrong about Trump – if he actually has some concern about the country – then it’ll be displayed now in his concession speech.)
The only remedy is to get the divisive people out of power, stop airing their accusations and inflammatory rhetoric, and wait for the country to heal.