Dr. Kristian Niemitz is the Editorial Director and Head of Political Economy at the Institue of Economic Affairs
Leftists spend a lot of time and effort arguing against people who only exist in their imagination.
One of my favourite examples of this genre is the Left’s never-ending crusade against ‘trickle-down economics’. There is no such things as ‘trickle-down economics’. There are no trickle-down economists. Not a single one. There never was one. There never will be one. But post ‘Trickle-down economics is a disgusting capitalist scam!’ on social media, and it will never fail to attract huge amounts of applause.
Another example is the GDP-obsessed economist, who thinks that everything in life should revolve around the maximisation of GDP, and that everything which does not count towards GDP is worthless. Again, no such economist exists. No such economist has ever existed. No such economist will ever exist. Nonetheless, the Left – and, to be fair, the post-liberal/communitarian Right as well – invests a lot of time and effort into proving them wrong.
Why is strawman-bashing so popular? What’s the point of debunking positions that nobody holds? At first sight, it seems like a complete waste of time. Yet as so often, when an activity seems utterly pointless to us, but lots of people nonetheless continue to engage in it year after year, there is a good chance that we just misunderstand what it is trying to achieve.
As long as enough people believe in the strawman, strawman-bashing can serve valuable social signalling functions. Imagine you had lived in rural Romania at a time when enough people still believed in vampires. It would suit you, in that social context, to engage in performative vampire-bashing, even if you privately had some doubts, wondering why you had never seen one. Signalling your anti-vampire credentials would improve your social standing, so you would have good reason to suppress your doubts.
Strawman-bashing can also be a version of the substitution heuristic, where we avoid a difficult task by substituting an easier one instead. Suppose a political opponent believes X, where “X” is a position that is quite difficult to argue against. You act as if they actually believe Y, with “Y” being a position that quite obviously untenable and easy to rebut. Again, whether that is useful or not depends on what you are trying to achieve. If you want to have an intellectually honest discussion with that opponent, arguing against Y is useless. Because your opponent does not actually believe Y. They believe X. But if you can convince your audience that your opponent believes Y, then in rebutting Y, you can discredit that opponent in the audience’s eyes, and by extension, make it harder for them to cut through with their actual argument. The audience will think ‘Oh, that’s that crank who believes Y – ha ha! That’s so stupid!’, and not listen to the rest.
When the substitution heuristic is deployed in that way, the strawman version of your position can act like a voodoo doll. It is not you. But if someone sticks a needle into it, you nonetheless feel the pain.
The substitution heuristic would also explain why, at least nowadays, strawman-bashing is more common on the Left than elsewhere on the political spectrum. For the substitution heuristic to work, you need to have greater cultural clout than your opponents, so that you get to define not just your own position, but also theirs. If we have equal levels of cultural clout, you cannot successfully strawman my position. You can tell the audience ‘Niemietz believes Y’, but then I would simply respond ‘No I don’t; I believe X’, and that would be that. But of course, cultural clout is not evenly distributed. Gary Stevenson’s video ‘Debunking Trickle Down Economics’ has nearly 80,000 views, Robert Reich’s video ‘Does Trickle-Down Economics Actually Work?’ has over 230,000 views, while my own video, which explains that trickle-down economics does not exist, has a mere 4,000 views. The Left is not inherently more prone to strawman-bashing, it is just that they are ones who have the cultural clout to do so.
Strawman-bashing is annoying, especially if you are usually on the receiving end of it, but at least, we are familiar with it. This article, though, is not really about strawmanning. It is about the strawman’s less well-known, but equally irritating cousin: the balloon man.
Unlike a strawman, a balloon man is not a position which literally nobody in the world holds. It is an argument which has some adherents, but which gets inflated in a way which is wildly out of proportion with its actual support base.
Take people who describe themselves as ‘anti-fascists’. Technically, they are not bashing a strawman. Actual fascists do exist. You can find them on Twitter and other social media platforms. They are a bad bunch, and it is absolutely fine to call them out.
But it is also true that the word ‘fascist’ is thrown around too liberally and indiscriminately. If it were reserved for actual fascists, its use would drastically decline.
Or take critics of ‘atomistic individualism’. That’s not technically a strawman. Overzealous fans of Ayn Rand can indeed come across quite like that. It is just that there are so few of those, and they have so little influence, that the amount of vitriol directed at that position is grotesquely disproportionate.
The biggest balloon man of our time, though, has to be the ‘climate change sceptic’, or in some versions, the ‘climate change denier’. This is not a strawman. Those people exist. I have met them. I have had pints with them, which you can’t do with a strawman. They believe that climate science has been corrupted by political activists masquerading as scientists, and that the man-made contribution to climate change has been vastly exaggerated. I’m not one of them, for the simple reason that I don’t know enough about climate science to have an opinion on it either way, and I believe in the virtue of shutting up about things that one doesn’t understand. But they are real.
It is just that the characterisation of them as a powerful lobby, swimming in Big Oil money, strolling through the corridors of power and telling legislators what to do, is laughable. They are a bunch of obscure bloggers with zero influence. This is Greta Thunberg’s world, and the climate change sceptics are just living in it.
It has not always been this way. A while ago, Georgetown University published an article which argued that the oil industry has a decade-long history of promoting climate scepticism. However, even though the article was clearly written from an environmentalist, anti-oil-industry perspective, the authors could not avoid acknowledging that these activities largely came to an end a quarter-century ago: ‘Prompted by a strengthening consensus among the scientific community and growing concern among the public, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, big oil began making public concessions to climate science and hinted at a commitment to mitigating the threats of climate change.’ The article does not say that the industry has since redeemed itself. It says that their concessions to climate science have been insincere and tokenistic, and that the solutions they advocate are inadequate. But that is a different argument: of course, the oil industry’s stated support for climate policy is opportunistic. But the point is that by watching how an opportunist behaves, we can tell which way the wind is blowing. This is Greta Thunberg’s world now, and people act accordingly.
So why do environmentalists continue to obsess about ‘climate change deniers’? Why can’t they just enjoy their victory, and leave their vanquished foes alone?
It has a lot to do with the above-described substitution heuristic. Climate change sceptics are irrelevant, but climate policy sceptics are a thing, and you cannot entirely ignore them. A climate policy sceptic is someone who largely accepts mainstream climate science, but draws very different policy conclusions from it. In doing so, they present arguments that are difficult to rebut, so it is much easier to accuse them of ‘science denial’ instead.
In Britain, the core arguments of climate policy sceptics are:
1. Britain contributes less than 1% to global carbon emissions. We need to stop acting as if the global climate were determined by policy decisions made in Westminster.
2. The idea that if we lead unilaterally on decarbonisation, the rest of the world will eventually follow, has been tested to destruction over the past 20 years or so. Global emissions are still rising. The rest of the world is clearly not following, and we need to start accepting that.
3. Britain has already drastically reduced its carbon footprint since 2007, and imposed a great cost on itself. That – not a policy of ‘doing nothing’ – is the starting position. So the question is not ‘Should we do something or should we do nothing’, but ‘Should we do even more than what we already do?’
4. We have been pumping huge amounts of subsidies into renewable energy, and our energy bills keep going up. So it would be nice if renewable energy fans could stop insisting that renewable energy is ‘cheap’. If it is so cheap, why does it continue to rely on subsidies, and why do we never see that cheapness reflected in our energy bills?
5. If fossil fuels are so obviously inferior to other energy sources in every way, why do we need to pull every policy lever in the book to make people stop using them? Would they not just die out on their own?
I’m sure a well-read, well-informed environmentalist would have counterarguments. I’m not saying these points are irrefutable. What I’m saying is that arguing against them would take some effort. It is much easier to portray to ballon-man the people who are making those arguments as ‘science deniers’.
So far, this strategy of inflating and then bashing the ballon man has worked very well for the Thunbergistas. But maybe one day, it will blow up in their faces. And then the Net Zero cult could unravel quite quickly.
