Defining Authoritarian as "people who want their children to be respectful, obedient, well-behaved and well-mannered"

Excellent deconstruction of an argument in The Scarlet ‘A’: Can junk science sink Trump? by James Taranto.

The demolition of the argument hinges on the hard work of checking the cited sources for consistency in the way the source is being used and examination of the logic tying the argument together. On both counts, the argument fails. What Taranto does is not actually all that hard. The problem is that we are inclined to take people at face value. We trust that they are arguing in good faith and that they have themselves validated their own argument. That trust is often misplaced. Instead of taking the ten or fifteen minutes to slow down, examine the constituent parts of the argument and then go back and check the sources, we simply accept it as given. To our detriment.

Here is a pivotal part of the argument deconstruction.

Still, let’s concede that MacWilliams’s characterization of these ideas as “authoritarian” is a legitimate opinion, whether one agrees with it or not. But MacWilliams isn’t just saying he regards Trump’s proposals as authoritarian. He claims to have scientific evidence that Trump’s supporters have authoritarian inclinations:

My finding is the result of a national poll I conducted in the last five days of December under the auspices of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, sampling 1,800 registered voters across the country and the political spectrum. Running a standard statistical analysis, I found that education, income, gender, age, ideology and religiosity had no significant bearing on a Republican voter’s preferred candidate. Only two of the variables I looked at were statistically significant: authoritarianism, followed by fear of terrorism, though the former was far more significant than the latter.

You may wonder: How in the world does one detect a tendency toward “authoritarianism” in a polity that has little direct experience of it? A poll that asked Americans’ attitudes toward Hitler—generally regarded as a totalitarian dictator, not an authoritarian one, but it was MacWilliams who cited Nazi Germany—would surely turn up almost unanimous hostility. Other historical and contemporary authoritarian figures like Mussolini, Franco and Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen may not have enough name recognition in the U.S. to yield any useful guidance about American attitudes.

It turns out MacWilliams’s method is entirely different:

My poll asked a set of four simple survey questions that political scientists have employed since 1992 to measure inclination toward authoritarianism. These questions pertain to child-rearing: whether it is more important for the voter to have a child who is respectful or independent; obedient or self-reliant; well-behaved or considerate; and well-mannered or curious. Respondents who pick the first option in each of these questions are strongly authoritarian.

In other words, what the poll found was that Republicans who want their children to be respectful, obedient, well-behaved and well-mannered have a propensity to support Trump. When you put it that way, it doesn’t reflect badly on him—or on them—at all.

MacWilliams commits the fallacy of equivocation, which a fact sheet from the Texas State University Philosophy Department defines as “when a key term or phrase in an argument is used in an ambiguous way, with one meaning in one portion of the argument and then another meaning in another portion of the argument.” The Texan philosophers provide some humorous examples, among them:

Noisy children are a real headache. Two aspirin will make a headache go away. Therefore, two aspirin will make noisy children go away. . . .

Sure philosophy helps you argue better, but do we really need to encourage people to argue? There’s enough hostility in this world.

MacWilliams—and, according to him, other political scientists since 1992—defines “authoritarianism” as an inclination to exercise parental authority. He then conflates that esoteric meaning with the more common political usage of the term, which he applies as a scarlet letter to Trump and his supporters.

There is an abuse of authority here—in the application of a veneer of science to a political attack that is not only empirically baseless but logically fallacious. Oh well, at least that’s good enough for David Brooks.

When Taranto lays it out so clearly, it is almost insulting the sleight of hand used to construct McWilliams' argument in the first place.