How to Argue with Reactionaries

A field guide to declining the simulation

The first thing to understand is that you are not in an argument. The man asking whether you condemn the thing everyone is condemning, or why the media never says anything positive about his movement, is executing a procedure; your answer is not part of the equipment. Everything that looks like debate — the quick replies, the confident tone, the citation-shaped objects — is a set of techniques for preventing argument from occurring while producing its appearance, and the person who mistakes the appearance for the thing has already lost the only contest being run.

Sartre wrote the diagnosis in 1944, watching it work on his own countrymen: never believe they are unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know. The absurdity is recreation. Your obligation to use words responsibly — because you believe in words — is the exact asymmetry the whole arrangement runs on. He will hold you to every standard of intellectual honesty and observe none of them, because in his mouth the standards exist only as weapons aimed at you. The proof is that no rigor on your part ever earns reciprocity. It earns the next demand.

Each technique is an exploit against a specific argument-detector in the brain. Repetition exploits fluency — a claim heard three times feels truer than a claim heard once, which is the illusory truth effect, and it works on you too. Performative confidence exploits the credibility cue — audiences calibrate trust by confidence far more than by accuracy, which is why the confidence never flickers no matter how the last claim fared. Frame-shifting exploits the offense-defense asymmetry: the person answering charges always looks guiltier than the person making them, so the charges never stop. And the gallop — seventeen claims in ninety seconds — exploits refutation economics, the order-of-magnitude gap between the energy needed to produce nonsense and the energy needed to refute it. Call the repertoire what it is: a denial-of-service attack on the channel where argument would happen. The strategy is to win by default, and the default is power.

The deeper purpose is to make truth inarbitrable — to dissolve the category so that status and power do the sorting. Whataboutism is the famous member of this family and by now the over-discussed one; everyone can spot it, and it still concedes the existence of shared ground by accusing you of hypocrisy on it. The more pernicious techniques assume nothing shared. The firehose uses volume as epistemicide — so many conflicting claims that the audience concludes nobody knows anything, which was the victory condition. Selective rigor demands peer review from you and accepts screenshots from itself, manufacturing a loss either way: fail the impossible standard and you are refuted; meet it and the demand has already moved. Source disqualification — your newspaper is biased — is the master move, because it needs no content at all; it is a solvent applied to the category of authority itself, after which every dispute defaults to team identification. Arendt named the end state before the machinery existed: the ideal subject is the person for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer holds. Frankfurt’s correction applies throughout — the liar at least respects the truth enough to hide from it, and this machinery is beneath lying.

If you doubt the diagnosis, listen to the people who work inside it. Jessica Tarlov, who occupies the liberal seat on Fox’s The Five and would know, observed in a recent interview — I paraphrase from memory; she does a lot of podcasts — that her conservative colleagues simply don’t take politics as seriously as she does. Behind the scenes it is sport, all in good fun. Believe her. The unseriousness is structural rather than temperamental: the moment argument becomes real, verdicts start issuing from standards instead of from the in-group, and the project is precisely that verdicts issue from the in-group. This is also why hypocrisy charges bounce off. Hypocrisy is a charge against someone with positions, and you are indicting them for violating standards they never held. Your moral seriousness reads to them as a personality quirk: the earnest one at the table, who cannot take a joke.

So the field guide, in three rules.

First: never answer the inquisitor. When the condemn-X question arrives, the answer is jurisdictional: “I don’t file answers with prosecutors. Ask me as a person, and I will answer as one.” The demand is unsatisfiable by design — condemnation offered is always late, insufficient, or extendable to the next item — because submission rather than information was the object. In any public forum your real addressee is never the asker; it is the audience, and your job is to narrate the inquisition to them in real time: watch — this man is performing an arrest.

Second: never accept the frame. When the regime’s media operation runs a press cycle around its own obscenity — the racist video games posted to the White House website, say — your outrage is the product being harvested. Responding to the bait at the volume they want is doing their distribution for them. Speak about what you chose to speak about, at the time you chose to speak about it.

Third: reverse unilateral demands. When they complain that coverage of their politics is never positive and wait for your concession of bias, concede nothing. Ask what positive thing has come from the right wing lately, and let the silence answer.

Every rule is one rule. You cannot win a game your opponent is not playing, so stop playing and start describing. Argue for the audience and argue for the record, and treat every performance of debate as a claim on the arena where you thought arguments were won. Do not aim at his conversion; no such prize exists. The prize is everyone watching: that they see someone decline the simulation, and remember what a person looks like who still believes in words.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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