Personal Safety and Slippery Slopes

At Outside the Beltway James Joyner reflects on the events of January 6, ultimately arriving at this conclusion:

I share Greenwald’s fear of overreaction and the threats to our civil liberties that comes with it. For selfish and ideological reasons, I would like the fences around public spaces in our nation’s capital to come down and the National Guard troops stationed there to go back to their day jobs. They can’t become permanent fixtures “just in case.”

But let’s also not pretend that the greatest danger to our Republic at the moment is coming from Democrats. It would be a lot harder to demonize Republicans if 74 million of them hadn’t voted to re-elect a would-be autocrat and if their elected officials didn’t overwhelmingly go along with his attempt to steal the election and then exonerate his incitement of a physical attack on the seat of government.

Neither James’s piece nor Glenn Greenwald’s, which serves as the point of departure for James’s post, uses the words “slippery slope” but as I see it there are actually four different things going on in the national debate about the events of January 6 and two of them are “slippery slope” arguments.

A “slippery slope” argument in reasoning, rhetoric, or case law is an argument that one step will inevitably be followed by a chain of other steps leading to a significantly negative outcome. For example, it can be argued that the attacks on September 11, 2001 were the culmination of a several different such chains of steps (inadequate airline security, failure to respond to terrorist attacks, etc.). Probably the most famous slippery slope argument in history is the “domino theory”, an argument for the Viet Nam War. Was the domino theory right or wrong? It’s still being debated.

A slippery slope argument may be refuted if the chain of steps can be demonstrated not to occur, if there is no slippery slope.

As I noted above I think there are actually four things going on:

• Extreme right-wing groups are angry and dangerous
• Congressional leaders are pursuing the will o’ the wisp of perfect safety
• It is being argued that we are on a slippery slope to a coup of right-wing extremists
• It is being argued that we are on a slippery slope to becoming a military dictatorship

I agree that extreme right-wing groups are angry and and dangerous. They may or may not be on the rise. I think that extremist groups of all kinds and persuasions are on the rise, facilitated by social media, which makes it easier for like-minded people to find each other. In a country as large as ours there are bound to be a certain number of dangerous extremists, from actual Sig Heil-ing Nazis to anarchists to Marxist revolutionaries to violent radical Islamists to others I probably can’t even imagine. The position presently being argued by the Democratic leadership in particular is that groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are uniquely dangerous. I’m skeptical. I think they’re all dangerous but in terms of ongoing civil disorder it’s hard to match the record of the anarchists in the Pacific Northwest.

Presently our political leadership is very old—most were born before 1946. In the past I’ve observed that members of the Silent Generation tend to be very insecure, understandable under the circumstances of their early lives. When you combine that insecurity with the precautionary principle and an actual threat, it may provoke an excessive response and IMO that’s what we’ve seen.

I think the notion that we are on a slippery slope to a coupe of right-wing extremists has been refuted by events. Has it been categorically disproven? No. But events subsequent to January 6 have not seen an escalation of the threat. Those predictions have all been wrong. While a vestigial threat may remain there doesn’t appear to be a slippery slope.

I don’t think the same argument can be made about the “security state”. The best way to refute the argument that we’re on a slippery slope in that direction would be to remove the National Guard and the barbed wire from Washington, DC and stop talking about increasing domestic surveillance efforts.