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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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My point is that anyone can make any assertion that they want to make.
Someone I know has told me, “We never landed on the moon.” I think that this either a lie or a false statement. But it’s not like I am going to be able to convince this guy that we actually did land on the moon.
In fact, maybe this person is saying “We never landed on the moon,” not because he actually believes this, but because he likes being “anti-establisment.”
Similarly, I think people who say, “The election was rigged,” might not even believe that the election was actually rigged. They are making that statement so that they can boost up their anti-establishment credentials.
Most people are just sick of arguing about the election and aren’t going to take the time to try to argue anyone out of their position.
How much time would you spend trying to convince someone that we actually did land on the moon? It’s a waste of time. At some point you just dismiss the moon landing denier as a crazy person, smile and change the subject.
Which was a chance of subject from what I had just said.
I am well aware of the versatility of mere assertion. That’s why we have logic.
If you say that the moon landing never happened, some people will argue with you, but others will simply assume you are crazy.
It’s very similar with people who claim the 2020 election was rigged or illegitimate. Some people will put their debating cap on. But most people will just shrug and think, “What a nut job.”
Your point being that some people don’t care about logic or don’t know they should care on some issue? Yeah, I knew that too. That’s why we have rhetoric–not that it can solve every problem.
It’s not that some people don’t care about logic.
It’s just that some people don’t want to waste their time with people they think of as nut jobs.
How much time would you be willing to spend debating with someone who said the moon landing never happened?
How much time would you be willing to spend debating with someone who claims that the earth is flat?
My guess is that you have better uses of your time than to debate with crazy people.
Yeah, like I said, in the part you missed, I knew that too.
In theory, I’m interested in arguments against the moon landing or for a flat earth. I just need more time, or some reason to prioritize it. That’s what people need on elections too, which is why we have things like logic and rhetoric–not that they can solve every problem.
Sure. But all the logic and rhetoric in the world isn’t going to convince most people that the 2020 election was rigged or illegitimate. It’s only going to convince most people that some people are sore losers when it comes to elections.
Literally, it would. All the rhetoric and logic in the world could convince people. The only reason they’re hard to convince is, since it certainly isn’t logic, all the rhetoric being used for the opposite conclusion.
Nope. You aren’t going to convince anyone who isn’t a full bore Trump supporter that Trump actually did win the 2020 election.
It seems to me that what’s missing amidst all the rhetoric and logic is evidence. And the evidence needs to come from credible sources to be believed, but there’s little agreement anymore as to which sources are trustworthy.
Way to ignore what I said.
And way to deny my existence! Dude, I even convinced me with the evidence I found! I’m not a full-bore Trump supporter! Trump’s a jerk!
What are you talking about? When I’m talking about logic, I’m talking about evidence.
How could a person even talk about logic without talking about evidence, or vice versa?
The available evidence I’ve had time and brain cells to sort through is linked above.
You voted for Trump, though, correct?
Maybe there exists some people who voted for Biden but have diligently scrutinized the 2020 election process and concluded that Biden didn’t legitimately win the 2020 election. If such people exist, I have not heard or read of any of them.
You call what you are advocating logic. But it could be a case of confirmation bias.
The evidence you have presented is only going to convince people who supported Trump’s 2020 candidacy. At least that’s my estimation.
I have yet to meet anyone who supported Biden in 2020 say to me that the 2020 election was not legitimate or rigged. All of this comes from people who supported Trump.
In 2020, yes.
I’m not a full-bore Trump supporter. Did you mean something else? Please say what you mean, or else leave me alone.
What a fine opportunity to look at some of my conclusions, look at their premises, and see whether they premises do a good job supporting them!
@heavywater Did you ever respond to why there should be on-line internet capability in machines that are processing and tabulating votes?
He is good at it?
I refused to get into the weeds on the election controversy. It’s a waste of time.
If someone wants to advocate for getting rid of mail in voting, count me in. But I’m not going to waste my time getting into arcana over the 2020 election.
I realize that it’s hard when a candidate that you supported loses. But if you are a mature and sane person, you can get over it.
Sounds like an endorsement for whatever took place.
Oh, and waste a ton of my time? That’s exactly my point. Most people aren’t going to spend hours and hours doing research on whether the 2020 election was legitimate because that is a bit like spending hours and hours of time researching whether the moon landing actually happened.
Some people are willing to waste time like that. I’m not.
Easier to imply anyone doing the work is either immature or insane or both.
It is a waste of time to investigate law-breaking, don’t you know.
We can have discussions about what kinds of election laws we would like to have. No mail in voting? Sure. I think France even disallows mail in voting and I don’t even think that France has early voting.
But that is a separate question from whether a given election result was legitimate.
I do think that many Trump supporters have been unable to muster the maturity and sanity needed to accept that their preferred candidate lost.
Saint Augustine said that he thinks Trump is a jerk. Well, what if many multitudes of Americans also believed that Trump was a jerk and decided to get the jerk out of the White House by voting for Biden?
The result? A Biden victory.
That’s a simpler explanation than Sidney Powell’s crackpot idea of the Venezuelans rigging our voting machines to elect Biden.
You are acting as if there is no connection between election integrity and election results.
I disagree.
There you go! Name calling.
Which is nothing of what Auggie’s exhaustive work really hinges on, but hey, you are too busy an man to actually look at the evidence he has spent hours collecting.
I can attest to this. I had already read the Dominion user’s manuals and the Texan evaluation of Dominion’s offerings when he started, so I knew it to be the Mazarati of election fraud, but Augie thought it was all exaggerated, and he would find very little fraud versus the claims. And I also can attest to Trump being a jerk.
Ad hominem attack is the refuge of the feeble.
I made it easy for you. Parts you could do in seconds or minutes. Follow the links. Start with “Intro to Eight” or “Teigen.”