Egg-manning: Arguing with the fringes

I've been thinking more about writer Dan Brooks's post about the death of the Straw Man and the rise of the Egg Man. I'm not in love with Brooks's name for this "egg-manning" phenomenon (for one thing, googling it currently yields pictures of Peyton Manning being egged, which I'm not necessarily opposed to, but is indicative of the requirement of lexical singularity in the age of Google). So far, I've only been able to find one other use of it online (by blogger Tim Hall). But as I read more opinion pieces on both mainstream news websites like the New York Times and encounter news via social media (on Facebook and Twitter, where the person sharing the opinion piece is, in effect, endorsing the argument), I keep returning to this concept.

While straw-manning involves making up an imaginary person who holds a view opposed to your own just so that you can refute it, egg-manning involves finding a real person advancing a real view on social media just so that you can refute it. Finding an actual person essentially justifies the necessity of making your argument. There really are people who must be argued against!

Straw-manning involved assuming that someone out there disagrees with your argument. Egg-manning does not assume this, but instead makes another, typically unstated, assumption. The assumption that egg-manners make is that the person making the argument opposed to their own is part of a large, influential group of people, and that the expression of the argument is part of a larger trend. Rarely is any particular opinion held by only one person; you can search for a hashtag or a term or through various interconnected bits of the blogosphere or social news networks and usually find hundreds or maybe thousands of examples of the argument which you wish to argue against.

The next step in the assumption is the implicit or explicit linking of these hundreds or thousands of people actually stating the argument online with a larger mainstream group that, while not actually stating the argument, has stated or acted in such ways that makes it clear that they believe in some of the same things as the group that actually states the argument online. Most often in the U.S., these large mainstream groups are liberals/Democrats or conservatives/Republicans. Sometimes, they're smaller and/or more amorphous groups, like racists, sexists, Tea-Partiers, Social Justice Warriors, fraternity brothers, hipsters, or many other groups that are partially defined by their stated beliefs and actions. The largest, most amorphous group to be argued against in the U.S. right now is The Establishment. Dissimilarities between ideas held by the small group actually stating the argument online and the large group not stating the argument are ignored in favor of whatever they have in common, which, to the egg-manner, represents a coherent ideological framework.

Even if that group of people isn't large right now, it could become large in the future if its ideas are not argued against. Often times, an example from history is provided to show how quickly ideas can spread if they are not forcefully countered with another argument, a time when silence sealed the fate of a people. In the past, small, vocal groups of people got large less-vocal groups to go along with them. This is intended to make it clear that arguing against a dangerous idea is not so much an act of participating in civil discourse (and thus not subject to the informal rules of civil discourse), but a kind of duty, and that to fail to argue against it would constitute negligence of one's duty.

Sometimes, the egg-manners are correct, as many people who assume things tend to be every now and then: a dangerous view that once was fringe becomes mainstream. It can happen quickly with viral spread of ideas through social media. But other times, the egg-manners are incorrect. The view never becomes one held by more than an un-influential, fringe group online. Of course, if you are able to indefinitely postpone the point at which you believe the fringe idea will become mainstream, you can never be proven wrong, but if we were to require that the aforementioned assumptions be tested (which requires setting a finite time frame in which the fringe idea would become mainstream), I think that many assumptions like this would turn out not to be true.

Then there is the possibility of a backfiring effect: that by arguing against the fringe idea, egg-manners give legitimacy to it, thus bringing about its popularity. Not only are egg-manners raising the profile of ideas with which they argue; they are also providing more examples of opposite arguments for the egg-manners on the other side of argument to use in their egg-manning. There's likely an emotional component to the way in which egg-manning fuels that which it seeks to fight: anger from one side fuels anger from the other.

It's unclear whether egg-manners consider their arguments to be "arguments" in the traditional sense - attempts to convince another person of the truth and/or to provide support for a like-minded person who feels alone - or whether they consider them to be acts of self-expression. If it is the former, the egg-manner should care about the impact of the argument. But if it is the latter, being wrong and ineffective may not matter. It's a rhetorical maneuver that continues to interest me. If only it had a better name.

Survival of the Angriest

My basic sense of the discourse about politics (articles, comments on online news websites, blogs, TV shows, radio shows) is that a certain rhetorical mode or style unifies those on the far right and far left. It is characterized by anger at authorities on the opposite end of an ideological or demographic spectrum. The "bad guy" in this mode could be those who support a patriarchal society, those who support a racist society, Obama, Bush, Congresspeople, university administration, corporations such as Comcast or Walmart, "Wall Street", unions, mainstream media, etc. I'll call this, for lack of a better term, the "anger-laden" rhetorical style. It succeeds by invoking strong, negative emotions in information consumers (arguably, you could include discourse that invokes or reflects anxiety, but prior research suggests that anger and anxiety operate differently when it comes to news). We could contrast this to a drier, scientific, inquiry-based style (a la fivethirtyeight.com), or a style that attempts to present both sides of an issue in a relatively affect-less way (a la The New York Times or the BBC). I recognize, of course, that no sources are totally bereft of affect-invoking content or style, but that when compared to, say, FoxNews or the Huffington Post, it becomes clear that inquiry-based or relatively affect-less sources employ a style that depends less on pushing the anger buttons of the audience.

I sense that in the arena of news or discourse about public issues, the ratio of anger-laden style information to other styles of information has changed, and that this change is associated with increasing partisanship among political leaders (even while the partisanship of the overall US population changes very little).

It is entirely possible that the angry, negative-affect-laden rhetorical style was always dominant (see the rhetoric of some popular newspapers' editorials, muckrakers, etc.), but I would counter that by noting that the decline in consumption of mainstream news sources (which are more apt to favor an affect-less style) and the ascendance of non-mainstream sources (which are more apt to favor an anger-laden style) is undeniable.

Perhaps the ascendance of the anger-laden rhetorical style of conveying political/public opinion information draws in a segment of the population that didn't spend much time reading or viewing such information at all. In other words, there was always anger-laden, affect-less, and inquiry-based styles of conveying this kind of information, but fewer people overall were spending less time with any kind of political information than is the case now. Now, we have more consumption of such information, which sounds great, but actually the people who are new to the conversation are driving the demand for (and the supply of, in a market-based news environment) anger-laden information. So yes, very few people ever consumed affect-less information and they were probably always outweighed by consumers of affect-laden information, but not to the extent that they are outnumbered now that there has been an influx of new news consumers and new news sources to meet the increased demand. The ratio of affect-less to affect-laden information shrunk in response to the demands of an influx of new consumers

This change in that ratio could push moderates out of the online conversation about politics and away from offline political participation. The moderates would still exist, and any public onion poll would detect their presence and reflect an overall population that didn't go through the increase in partisanship that our leadership has undergone. There might be a spiral-of-silence effect happening with the moderates: they see that their voice isn't represented in the articles themselves or the comments sections and so they spend their time on other things: their own families, their own hobbies and interests.

Of course, any such argument lamenting this shift toward affect-laden information leaves one up to the accusation that one is pining away for "the good old days" when sensible, logical elites dominated public discourse and the political arena while the hot-headed rabble kept to the fringes. It is impossible for me to deny the historical reality that elites often dismissed arguments they didn't agree with simply by dismissing rhetorical styles that privileged emotional, subjective experiences over scientific or quasi-scientific approaches. I certainly recognize the value (and inevitability) of emotion in public discourse, and the fact that all arguments contain some combination of objectivity and subjectivity, of "hot" emotion and "cold" logic.

But I just don't see the current use of an anger-laden rhetorical style as the reflection of pre-existing public opinions and rhetorical styles that were heretofore excluded from public discourse. I see it as driving a shift in political thought and behavior, one that excludes anything other than anger (including positive-affect messages favoring compassion, affection, or understanding). And even though it is problematic to assert (either explicitly or implicitly) the superiority of cold rationality, I think its total exclusion (or even a significant reduction) from public discourse would only lead to an increased inability to see the world through anyone else's eyes, and that this wouldn't be a good thing.

But I'm in idle speculation mode here. I seek evidence of this, and I don't have much to point to right now that would suggest I'm on to something or that I'm dead wrong. Does the ascendance of anger-laden information (if it even is truly ascendant) reflect increased political participation and/or does it increase the polarization of elected officials and the disenfranchisement of moderates, lessening any chance we have at mutual understanding?