Are American politics cynical or honorable?
Wittgenstein says that logic can take care of itself. I take that to mean that you can’t explain why logic is logical, just elaborate that you can’t both assert a statement and its opposite even if people as a matter of course do so all the time as when you say Trump is a mean petulant man and is also your standard bearer. I also take Wittgenstein to mean that logic does not vary from place to place or time to time. There is no Jewish or Chinese logic. There is just logic. So logic is a metaphysical matter or, if you prefer, a transcendental matter, a part of the structure of the universe, and even more so, in that other galaxies may have different biologies but no galaxy would alter logic. Logic has a stature that is unassailable. That is very different from rhetoric, which is about persuasion rather than truth and which Plato castigated as a knack rather than necessarily aligned with truth. But consulting political discourse allows us to appreciate how indeed persuasions can change, and that is particularly important in the present day.
Consider the changing status of evidence. William of Occam brought in evidence or facts as a useful adjunct or supplement to the much more trustworthy grounds of logical argument. Proofs of God told you what was correct while evidence was an indication of what is true for some part of a field of study as still remains the case in social science where community studies show what holds only wherever it happens to apply, while Parsonsian sociology is logical in that it show what is inevitable in what happens to all societies throughout the galaxies that have societies. They have to have resources, a distribution of resources, norms and values. What else could there be?
Since the Scientific Revolution, empirical evidence has been the royal road to truth. You know a theory is true if there is factual evidence to support it. Theories, however internally consistent and elaborated, are not enough. Measurements on the perturbations of the orbit of Mercury proved that Einstein was right. Facts are therefore decisive, definitive, the final appeal, even though people may prefer to rely on their own judgments rather than what the number crunchers produce. Numbers are cold and can be mistaken while theories seem plausible and in many cases approachable. Voters at the present moment claim that the economy is lousy even though all the evidence says that the economy is doing quite well. People distrust facts even if scientists and scholars adopt facts as the final word.
There is a contemporary movement, however transient it might be, to challenge the supremacy of fact. It is not the one posed when Kelly Ann Conway said that there are alternative facts which commentators said she was abandoning reason itself by saying everyone could claim whatever facts they claimed to and so facts were relative rather than objective. All Conway was saying was that you can develop a different theory or point of view if you develop a different set of facts, which is true enough. The real challenge to fact occurs when there is no way to answer an assertion of fact, facts treating as the end of discussion, an impasse over facts, rather than facts being conclusive, certain facts judged as relevant to the generalizations, as when people denying economic facts because it is flooded by political issues and so make judgments that are no longer purely economic. One person sees the events on Jan. 6th as a protest that overreacted into a riot while others see it as an insurrection to overthrow the legitimate transfer of presidential power. Some see the facts supporting the trial of Donald Trump as rigged while others think it was justice as usual. There is nothing on either side to convince the other side though people battered by the events may decide to vote against Trump in November though recent polls suggest that the verdict hasn’t shifted many people. So claiming facts is not definitive because the sides can find facts or assumed facts to support them and there is no final decision maker to decide which facts are relevant or proven. People think the 2020 election was rigged even though no white paper has been produced by Conservative think tanks to marshall their facts and make the argument.
The political and logical situations at the present moment is not a clash of ideologies whereby systems of interlinked propositions explain and predict the course of social and political affairs as was the case with class based Marxism or race based Naziism, Marxism long enough to evolve so as to contain subspecies whereby the working class could triumph through democratic processes, in elections, and Bolsheviks who thought instead that a dictatorship of the proletariat was necessary. There are few dispassionate and analytic presentations of the Trump point of view, just assertions of support by marshaling clearly fallacious talking points such as that the Biden economy is terrible when, as I say, statistics all point that the economy is doing rather well. These are slogans not arguments or facts.
What can be said instead is that what has come to replace ideology are conflicting narratives which see the story of America so differently, not just on whether to be nostalgic about the Jim Crow South, but on a sense of the American enterprise. Remember that the present era is very distinctive because it has so diametrically different senses of what the world is rather than just about what to do with the stated and agreed upon affairs. Capitalists and workers both thought America was in Depression, disputing only how to manage it. Southerners thought the condition of blacks was not all that terrible but were adamant in their belief on segregation. Anti-abortionists are clear on what they disagree about with pro-abortionists, But on most contemporary political issues, there are widely different issues as to the facts. The economy is lousy or else it is just fine. The border is a major danger or a minor irritant that needs more efficient management. Foreign policy has led to America taking sides in two wars while Democrats think the wars are being well managed. The underlying sentiment is that America is badly in decline because its institutions are politicized and corrupt or else that American leaders are remaining true to basic principles applied to complex issues.
There is a fundamental asymmetry between Democrats and the Trump Republican party. The Trumpists are visibly and outspokenly mean spirited and not just Trump himself who says he is after revenge. A case in point is the attack against Hunter Biden so as to besmirch his father. They want his tainted history as a drug user punished because they can’t get at the President, who remains statesmanlike, just to make him partisan, as is useful in an election. The Republicans take glee in flailing him. That is very different when Republicans seemed only objectively cruel in their view of the poor and the working class as when Mitt Romney thought and said that there are makers and there are takers and that the takers support the Democratic Party. Romney seemed sad about the situation and not out to get the majority. But Republicans, as I read them, castigate the characters of their opposition personally while Democrats respond to the Republicans on the issues and are flummoxed as to why they continue to support a very bad man as their leader, however many of them in private may admit Trump's limitations.
But rather than fall back into categorical partisanship, however useful that may be in elections, consider the logic of the mental practices as they are, both sides rational even if, all things considered, one side is more reasonable than the other. What are the narrative lines that are being offered and the evidence presented by each? The reaction of Trumpites is alarm that America is being taken away from us while Biden sides itself as maintaining Constitutional rigor even to the point of not pardoning his own son from a crime that would not have been brought to court were he not a family member. The logic of alternative narratives is not truth but plausibility. The Trump presentation is offered in a cloud of cynicism, bad motives always provided to tie together the dots. Joe Biden must have been making money from Hunter’s appointment to Barisma. It is only a question of finding out the facts just as Guilliani claimed when he said he had loads of theories about how the 2020 election was rigged but no evidence, presumably an afterthought rather than the central story line. Cynicism ties the dots together. Biden must have told Garland to pursue the cases against Trump because Trump has said he would politicize the Justice Department were he to become President again and so it is implausible that anyone in the Oval Office would do otherwise. The alternative narrative is that people are so awed by the majesty of their offices, whether as Senators or Presidents or even Congresspeople, that they act with propriety, though there are enough exceptions of people holding office over holding principle to think the cynical view plausible. So what it comes down to is not simply the evidence more available to fill out one storyline rather than the other, but what are the interpolated motives drawn from and written into the stories: cynicism or honor. I prefer the latter but it will take a great historian describing our times to find the right balance of emotions that generates the story.