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What Precisely Was the Big Lie?
C. S. Lewis’s character Professor Kirk was right to ask why they don’t teach logic in schools these days. Our absurd political circumstances have rarely, if ever in human history, needed logic more. Let’s do what we can to shed some logic on the talk about Trump’s talk of the 2020 election, shall we?
An enthymeme is an argument with an unstated step, usually an unstated premise.
Aristotle explains that enthymemes can be useful rhetorically. You don’t always have to spell out every step, talk like a robot, and lose your audience. Sometimes it’s ok to just say, “The defendant was seen at the pier on the night of the crime, and therefore did not commit the murder,” without explicitly telling people who already know the local geography that the pier is a long way from the crime scene.
But enthymemes have a darker side, like when you say “Alex is Polish, so he’s stupid” (Richard Purtill‘s example of a bad enthymeme).
Obama gave us a fine example of a bad enthymeme in 2008. He used to diss John McCain by saying that McCain agreed with George W. Bush 90% of the time. (Or maybe it was 95%. Or maybe he varied his estimates. Hard to remember exactly. Let’s just stick with 90%, shall we?)
Obama’s argument against McCain depended on a premise that Obama did not say out loud–the premise that says just how often Bush was actually wrong. If the premise was that Bush is wrong 100% of the time, then the premises of the argument do a good job beating up McCain, but one of the premises is plainly false: No one is wrong 100% of the time.
But if the premise is only that Bush is wrong 65% of the time, then Obama’s argument only establishes that McCain is wrong 58.5% of the time. If the premise were that Bush is wrong 55% of the time, then the argument would establish that McCain was only wrong 49.5% of the time–in other words, that he is usually right!
So Obama had to keep it quiet just how often Bush was wrong. Whatever the premise was, if we said it out loud, we’d start thinking for ourselves instead of doing what Obama wanted, which was to scurry along from a hastily drawn conclusion that McCain is wrong a lot into an enthusiastic vote for Obama. If Obama had let his other premise out into the open, then it would have been easy to see two things:
1. There’s no general agreement on how often Bush was wrong, and therefore little clarity on how powerful Obama’s argument against McCain actually is.
2. The most powerful versions of the argument would rely on an obviously false premise.
Now, back to Trump. A lot of people are using enthymemes against Trump these days. Trump tells the Big Lie, we are told, and therefore he is a big liar, a big problem, a threat to the Constitution, and so on.
What I don’t understand is: What exactly is it that Trump said that was a lie? There is an unstated premise here.
Is the premise that Trump lied when he said the 2020 election was rigged? If so, then the Hemingway book shows that the premise is false–it actually was rigged.
Is the premise that Trump lied when he said that there was a lot of fraud? But in that case, the currently available evidence indicates that the premise is false–there was some fraud, and there was probably a lot of it.
Is the premise that Trump lied when he said that illegal actions flipped swing states? That’s probably a false premise too–illegal actions probably did flip swing states. Maybe the ones considered in Teigen vs. Wisconsin Elections Commission, for example, and almost certainly the million-plus Biden advantage in mail-in votes cast in violation of the state Constitution of Pennsylvania.
Or is the premise that Trump lied when he said the election was stolen electronically? If so, then we need to talk. We need to talk about how, without even talking about 2020 specifically, electronic fraud actually looks pretty plausible because we have vote-counting machines with internal modems and no processes in place to ensure that the modems are switched off during the vote-count. And after talking about that, we’d have to figure out what sort of evidence there is either for or against some of the machines having been hacked in 2020.
Is the premise that Trump lied when he said that the Senate should not have certified the Electoral College vote? If so, then the premise is wrong because Trump honestly believed it. But at least I can agree that he was mistaken about that.
Or is the premise that Trump lied when he said that the election was stolen when Dominion applied an algorithm and the voters “broke the algorithm” before some jerks brought in some fake ballots or whatever? Lots of details in there–likely at least partially mistaken, although still not a lie as such because he honestly believed it.
Is the premise that Trump lied when he said that we knew all that stuff at the time? Yeah, maybe that was a lie. I sure didn’t know it at the time; I was barely figuring out some of the early bits and pieces. I still don’t know exactly what happened in 2020.
Or is the premise that Trump lied when he said the election was stolen? I’ve heard it said that this is exactly the premise, but this is why we have to have big vocabulary words instead of nice things. Vocabulary words like “enthymeme.” An election could be “stolen” in any of the ways mentioned above. If that was the lie, then we still don’t know what the premise is.
What is the premise of the argument against Trump? What exactly was the Big Lie?
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Yes. I don’t think it can be done. I think you and I reach that same conclusion. With a Creator and souls a purpose for human rationality can be expressed. I’m looking for a logical explanation for human rationality without those. Have not seen one yet.
Bob, I think I should start a new post rather than continue this here. That okay with you?
yes
Tell me this: If Trump was a failed president who “sucked,” if he was so unpopular, why were the Democrats so afraid he would be reelected? We know they were. They’ve been very open about their fear. In fact, they began a vicious campaign against him, not his policies, two full years before the actual election. And why, despite their most vicious campaign, did he get as many votes as he did?
The answer is very obvious to the Democrats, just not to the Never Trumpers: Trump was a hugely successful and popular president. They knew that from their own polls.
He was popular not based on his personality but on his policies and strategies and clear thinking.
The Never Trumpers voted strictly on personality, at least I hope they did. If not, they should follow their heart to the Democratic Party, which very much wants to see us look like the European-style, welfare-state, centralized-government countries. That group of Never Trumpers needs to clarify their objectives for what they want the United States to be. It’s very different from what Trump wants for our country.
For all the other Never Trumpers, Biden was clearly not a kinder, gentler, more polite, better-informed president than Trump. Why did they prefer Biden? It seems to me that the Never Trumpers lack analytical abilities. To prefer Biden to Trump was an emotional judgment, not a reasoned one. It was very personal for them. Trump simply annoyed them and made them mad.
And they don’t care that Biden is obviously worse in every category they claim to care about, apparently because – at least to many of them, if not all – Biden isn’t from “their side” so it doesn’t matter to them how bad he is.
The big lie?
I would call the Steele Dossier one
I would call the coverage of Biden Inc a 2nd
The mostly peaceful protests as a third
Bears repeating. Thank you.
I think the unstated premise is that the 2020 election was a legitimate election and Biden was the legitimate winner. Thus, anyone who casts doubt on either the legitimacy of the 2020 election or Biden’s legitimacy as president is tagged as peddling “The Big Lie.”
It’s a bit like if someone says, “The moon landing was faked. We never landed on the moon.”
A person who says this might be accused of peddling, “The Big Lie.”
Similarly, if someone says that the September 11, 2001 attacks were conducted by Israel, not Al-Qaeda, that person might be accused of peddling, “The Big Lie.”
If someone says that the CIA paid Lee Harvey Oswald to kill President John F. Kennedy, that person would likely be accused of peddling, The Big Lie.”
I think that’s what is going on.
How about if someone says they are Christian but supports abortion?
Not sure if that’s similar to the examples I gave.
There are a lot of big lies out there. The term “The Big Lie” (as opposed to “a big lie”) is an attempt to obscure rather than clarify.
I saying that Biden professes that he is a Christian. If he said publicly that he is not would he be elected? I think he tells a big lie to have a chance at being elected.
Not just Christian, but Catholic. Him, and Pelosi, and so many others.
This is, and has been, exactly my question, for exactly this reason, ever since I first started hearing about Trump’s so called “big lie”.
Like, maybe, Winston Smith in 1984, I just didn’t know how to explain, as this post does, why it seemed unlikely to me that there could be any “big lie” that Trump was telling about the 2020 election.
Excellent post.
The mail-order sale of guns was outlawed because the opportunities for fraud were just too great.
Voting by mail is just fine, though.
Let that sink in.
This is even better:
I think there was indeed a Big Lie. This was in the Democratic Party 2020 platform:
(emphasis mine)
That’s a whopper, for sure.
Having talked to a “fully informed” and very committed Lefty on Friday, I found out that the Left is well aware of Biden’s committment to purge the domestic terrorists from our society.
But, fellow comrades, do not worry: according to the most recent Big Lie, only the truly rabid and most extreme of domestic terrorists are to be punished.
Alternately one could say that more people voted against Donald Trump than anyone else in the history of Presidential elections.
I looked for that and couldn’t find it again. Google/Bing/DuckDuckGo were of no help.
I believe the concern is not that DMV-caliber government employees personally hacked into the voting machines, but rather that DMV-caliber government employees mistakenly connected the voting machines to the Internet, thus exposing them to attack by hackers around the globe.
That said, if it happened in 2020 it could equally well have happened in 2016 when the big fear was that Russia somehow “hacked the election.”
This leads to the most basic argument in favor of the “rigged” election. Trump won in a historic fashion among the verifiable ballots counted (most overall votes in US history).
Yet, he lost the election due to a number of unverifiable votes heretofore unimaginable that were in Biden’s favor to a heretofore unimaginable degree (widespread over 90% vote rate and over 90% Biden vote precincts, when no elections in world history, even in dictatorships ever achieved that).
The basic argument is that we “Trumpers” want the same degree of integrity for their votes as there was for our votes and that the means and laws are in our favor to do so.
I think Donald Trump is responsible for almost all of the votes cast in the 2020 presidential election. I think nearly all of those who voted for Trump were voting for Trump and nearly all of those who voted for Biden were voting against Trump.
Back in the mid-1990s, one Republican politician was on the campaign trail assisting a Republican candidate for Congress.
The candidate for Congress gave a speech about his 12 point agenda that he would try to press for if he were elected to Congress. The Republican politician pulled him aside and told him he was running his campaign all wrong.
So, in 2020, Biden ran against the incumbent, Trump, and tried not to appear crazy.
And Biden failed, which makes his “win” even less credible.
Sure, just like Nixon’s landslide victory in ’72 was not credible because “I don’t know a single person who voted for him!”
And, as usual, the supposed Big Lie could be any number of things, most of which are not lies and some of which are true.
Yes, the existence of the dang machines with internal modems for teeny-tiny reasons (to allow for early electronic reporting of results) makes it possible for an entire race to be changed by just one person leaving a modem on through fraud or even just through incompetence.
This problem affects many elections, much as it pains me to say it.
Anyone can claim that any given election was rigged. Convincing a state or federal judge that an election was rigged is much harder than merely making the assertion.
Ok, sure. But why change the subject?