Matt Yglesias

The All Important “Or”

Studying formal logic turns out, it seems to me, to be of great use in understanding rhetoric. Take, for example, this from Jonah Goldberg (emphasis added):

Lots of folks on the right object to government intervention in the economy, even during a crisis. I had a mini-spat with Glenn Beck about this on his show earlier this week. I understand the objection, particularly given how often the left tries to create or exploit crises for the purpose of creating another New Deal.

As Professor Goldfarb taught me, “a or b” is true if and only if either “a” is true or else “b” is true. Thus, if it’s true that the left often tries to exploit crises, then it’s also true (a fortiori, as they say) that the left often tries to create or exploit crises. And since it is true that all political movements try to exploit crises to advance their policy agendas, it’s true that the left tries to do so. Thus it’s accurate, in extremely tendentious sense, to say that “often the left tries to create or exploit crises.” Thus, through a little bit of artful wordplay you can smuggle in the smear that American liberals often try to deliberately engineer crises and that, in particular, the current crisis — despite having unfolded entirely during an era of conservative governance — was deliberately engineered by liberals.

It’s all pretty clever.