People often talk about money or class standing in a political argument. But I’m not referring in this post to liberal elitism. Nor am I talking about the even more brazen, ‘I have more money than you, therefore I’m better’ kind of thing.
Rather, I want to focus on more subtle ideas. And ones found primarily on the political left. Leftists will appeal to money or class status when discrediting certain kinds of views or people.
Two Kinds of Political Argument
I’ll take a look at two general kinds of arguments along these lines. Perhaps rather than calling them ‘arguments,’ I should call them ‘schemas’ or ‘tendencies.’ We see many flavors of both, and we need more detail to spell them out. But they capture a lot of what happens, particularly on leftist Twitter.
What we find when we look closely at these kinds of arguments is that many turn into a fallacy called ‘ad hominem.’ In this fallacy, the arguer attacks a person – their character, motives, etc. – rather than the viewpoint in question. But we find this thorny to identify. Why? Sometimes the leftist arguer finds something about the person’s character or motives that the viewpoint reveals.
For that reason, it’s tough to separate an ad hominem from a good political argument. I’ve run into this myself a few times, notably where I point out some of the class-based problems with, e.g., the Elizabeth Warren presidential campaign and its supporters. And so, I find it helpful to think a bit about when these appeals work and when they don’t.
Argument #1: ‘You can’t understand this point because you’re wealthy/etc.’
I see some version of the above political argument all the time. But I’ll use the point about Warren to illustrate it. Sometimes Bernie Sanders supporters dismiss – or the press presents them as dismissing (a key difference) – Warren supporters. They do so due to the wealth of Warren supporters, their high educational status, their place in the professional-managerial class, and so on.
This is no good. The way I see it, we can look at this as a dilemma. Either people dismiss Warren supporters maliciously or with good intentions. If they’re doing it maliciously, then the argument is just an ad hominem. They’re attacking the person rather than refuting their actual views. But if they’re doing it with good intentions, then they’re letting people off the hook for holding bad views merely because they’re wealthy. That’s no good, either. We should challenge their views, not make excuses for the people who hold them. Wealthy people, et al., aren’t blind to the truth because of their wealth or status. We should demand they look past those things and see the truth.
Philosophically, I think we find the roots of the political argument in a perversion of standpoint theory. In fact, perversions of standpoint theory lie at the heart of many identity-based bad arguments. I showed this awhile back in my discussion of Afropessimism. But here’s the basic idea. Standpoint theorists hold, among other views, that identity-based lived experience can put a person in a better position to know certain things. However, people stretch this point too far – declaring that people automatically know certain things because they’re a part of an identity group or that people outside the identity group can’t know certain things.
Argument #2: ‘This is a bourgeois view, and therefore it’s wrong.’
This, on the other hand, is a much more ambiguous kind of political argument. If leftists dismiss a view just because members of the bourgeois class might find it attractive, then it’s a terrible (and, frankly, silly) argument. We know from history that some members of the bourgeois class sometimes come to the right view.
Friedrich Engels, for one. But even Karl Marx – and more so, his wife Jenny – hail from (or have experience with) classes other than the working class and come to hold good views.
But there’s another sense in which this is a solid leftist political argument, and it’s that sense in which I employ it against many people across the mainstream political spectrum. What’s that sense? If we object to a view because it advances the interests of the bourgeoisie as a class, then, yes, that’s a good objection. That’s just good class politics, not ad hominem.
P.S.
I’ve written previously about fallacies, and it’s one of my favorite topics to teach students. The biggest challenge with teaching fallacies? Moving the student from a taxonomic approach to an approach where they look closely at actual cases in the world. That’s the approach I’ve continued here.
