Stanley Fish on the impossibility of arguing with Trump supporters

“I don’t know if you recall,” the eminent academic Stanley Fish said to me when our interview came to the subject of Trump supporters, “but there was a television program on for a long time about 20 years ago called Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”

I did indeed recall that, I said. I had asked him, though, how one might change a Trump supporter’s mind.

“The people who loved that program were the people who were neither rich nor famous,” Fish continued. “Because rather than resenting or envying the rich and famous, they could watch the program and imagine themselves being the rich and famous.

“Suppose you have a very firm Trump supporter who also has a cousin who he or she really admires and trusts. That cousin comes and tells the story of some kind of interaction between him or her and Trump’s business operations, real estates, golf courses and so on. Has the documentation to back it up and it’s absolutely damning. Well, that personal connection might get someone to change his or her mind,” Fish said. But it was one of only a few narrow possibilities for a successful argument to what he’d call the “interpretive community” of Trump supporters that he could see. They’d need to be convinced by someone they had some other reason to trust.

As a rule, Fish is pretty comfortable being at the center of an argument. He inspires rather divided views from his fellow public intellectuals. On the one hand he has held a host of prestigious appointments at various universities, an academic star from the time of his writings on Milton. Currently he is a visiting professor at Cardozo Law School in New York. He publishes frequently in academic and mainstream media outlets and makes regular appearances in the New York Times. He has written over a dozen books. He is taught all over the country.

On the other hand: Martha Nussbaum has called some of his ideas “alarming”. Terry Eagleton called him the “Donald Trump of American academia, a brash, noisy entrepreneur of the intellect who pushes his ideas in the conceptual marketplace with all the fervor with which others peddle second-hand Hoovers”. Camille Paglia said she preferred the term “totalitarian Tinkerbell”.

The problem with Fish, most of these people say, is that he is an incorrigible relativist, too postmodern to hold any firm beliefs. He is slippery, can’t be depended on to come up with a clean truth of the matter. To quote Eagleton again: “For Fish, a man has no more control over his beliefs than some ideologues believe he has over his penis.”

For his own part Fish simply calls himself an “anti-foundationalist”, which means, as he explains in Winning Arguments, that he thinks there are no final authorities, only temporary certainties. He finds liberation in that, advises people not to worry about it so much. “The skills of disputation,” he writes, “are the skills by means of which political orders and indeed civilizations are built.”

In essence Winning Arguments claims that a state of argument is inevitable. But Fish takes his own argument a little bit further than that might suggest. In the opening pages of the book, he writes that he believes that “the state of agreement that would render argument unnecessary – a universal agreement brought about by facts so clear that no rational being could deny them – is not something we mortals will ever achieve”. Instead, he argues, we are doomed to spend eternity not quite coming to terms with the world in the same way. He covers four major types of arguments: political, legal, domestic and academic. All of them, he says, are ultimately unwinnable.

The problem, as Fish described it to me, is that we aren’t all working from the same facts. He gave, as an example, an analysis of the recent coverage of the mass shooting at the Pulse Club in Orlando. “If you were just reading [newspaper] front pages, you wouldn’t think that they were writing about the same event, because in the one case, the case of the New York Daily News, the villain was the National Rifle Association, who was practically accused of pulling the trigger,” he said. “On the other side, the New York Post side, this was an event which was one more round in the long-running battle between Isis and the United States.” Those two accounts, Fish says, obviously can’t coexist, but two communities believe them so fervently they cannot be dissuaded by presenting a set of competing facts.

Fish points out that this is true of many communities of conspiracy theorists, those who believe that the Holocaust didn’t happen, or that Lyndon Johnson was behind the Kennedy assassination. “The question is, ‘Could you show to those people a set of facts that would lead them to abandon what we consider to be their outlandish views?’” said Fish. “The answer to that question is no, because all people who have a story to which they are committed are able to take any set of counter-evidence and turn it back, within the perspective of the story they believe in.” The facts, in other words, are not things people can easily agree on.

A couple of years ago these ideas might have seemed distinctly unpalatable. Who wants to believe that we can’t, ultimately, convince each other of anything? Yet in a time of Trump and Brexit, the point seems to be proven almost nightly on the news. Sometimes the public is deliberately lied to – but other times the public seems to be collaborating in the lie itself, convincing itself. (See, for instance, the notion that Donald Trump is a self-made success.)

But isn’t it possible to step out of one’s worldview for a second, I ask? Isn’t it possible to be persuaded upon reflection? “I’m certainly willing to say that you can reflect on any number of things, including step back from your current political commitments and try to reflect analytically on them,” Fish said. But, he says, “That active reflection will itself be structured. It’s not a pure act of reflection and it’s not a pure stepping back. That’s what’s unavailable.”

Fish says that it is, even in that context, possible to change someone’s mind. He points to the theories of Thomas Kuhn. “Those moments when anomalies pile up in a way that can no longer be ignored, that they cannot be assimilated any longer and then, suddenly there’s what might be called, a tipping point,” Fish said.

“Again, change is not a simple challenge from an outside event to a set of assumptions. It’s the ability of a set of assumptions to account for or assimilate something that it encounters. Change is not predictable. It’s not inevitable. It can occur. When it occurs, it will always occur because of a process on the inside, rather than because something indisputable from the outside has challenged and refuted the system.” In other words: Fish simply believes you have to persuade people on their own terms, because change can only come from within.