Thanksgiving dinner with a side of Straw Man?
If your Thanksgiving dinner included any lively political discussion, chances are someone brought up a Straw Man argument. This is a type of logical fallacy whereby:
someone takes another person’s argument or point, distorts it or exaggerates it in some kind of extreme way, and then attacks the extreme distortion, as if that is really the claim the first person is making.
In the political arena, Republicans often use the Straw Man against Democratic proposals by making false, overbroad generalizations about the proposals, and then going after the fictional scenario they just concocted. For example, President Joe Biden and Congressional Democrats have proposed, in the Build Back Better legislation that was recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, to raise income taxes only on households with over $400,000 annual income. Indeed, many Americans would see lower taxes under the Democratic proposal. But you are hearing Republicans say instead that President Biden and the Democrats want to raise taxes on “middle class Americans.” A similar Republican Straw Man from the past is the PolitiFact Lie of the Year 2010 that President Barack Obama‘s Affordable Care Act was “a government takeover of healthcare,” when in fact the law left our private healthcare and health insurance systems in place. Note that such Straw Man arguments often feed existing political narratives, such as the Republican narratives that Democrats favor “Big Government” and “higher taxes.”
Unfortunately, Republicans do not have a monopoly on the Straw Man argument. In recent days, Jon “Bowzer” Bauman, a former rock and roll singer and minor TV personality who is the President of the Social Security Works PAC, tweeted this:
Messaging alert:
Democrats have got to stop using cutesy words like “shenanigans,” “highjinks,” “mischief” & “tomfoolery” to describe deadly serious Republican attempts to overturn our elections & destroy our democracy.
The messaging had better fit the crimes.
— Jon “Bowzer” Bauman (@JonBowzerBauman) November 23, 2021
Can you spot the Straw Man? Of course, it’s that Democrats are somehow downplaying Republican attempts to destroy our democracy, when in fact most Democrats have been raising the alarm bells ever since Russia waged cyber war on the United States to help Donald Trump take the 2016 election, and continue to do so through the January 6, 2020 domestic terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol, Republican attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and Republican efforts to rig future elections in their favor.
It’s important to identify such Straw Men regardless of who makes them, and also call them out. One way to do so is to reply to folks who make such arguments in social media. Here are two examples in response to Bowzer’s Straw Man tweet:
https://twitter.com/MessagingMatt/status/1463035688174202882
Oh, really? Because I've been using words like insurrection, sedition and traitor like I never thought I would.
— Mrs. 🇺🇸 🇺🇦Cooper (@incognito5600) November 23, 2021
This two-step process of identifying erroneous political arguments (which becomes easier with experience, and hopefully examples provided here at Messaging Matters are helpful), and then challenging such arguments publicly, can go a long way to winning the arguments and influencing media and policy. At minimum, it may make your next Thanksgiving more enjoyable!
Photo by Satya Murthy, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/pnrkJk
