The Argument Ladder: A Taxonomy of Slogans
Applying the ladder system to MAGA, He Gets Us, Black Lives Matter, and other rallying phrases
Hey, friendo! I’m sure you’ve spent your week thinking about my Argument Ladder System™™®®™®™, and how you can apply it to conversations or topics that come to mind, and how the ladder analogy is middlingly contrived because two people don’t typically share one ladder.
In case you don’t want to read the previous article where I describe the system in detail, here it is in brief. Picture a conversation/argument as a series of cumulative aspects in which the parties agree or disagree:
Rung 1: what’s the problem?
Rung 2: what’s the solution?
Rung 3: who’s responsible for the solution?
Rung 4: who’s responsible for keeping the responsible, responsible?
Keeping track of where a conversation is located on the ladder means you’ll be more likely to keep it from flying off the rails (or at least recognize when it does).
(If you do want to read the previous article about the Ladder, enjoy:)
(Okay, either way, now you’re ready enough to continue, so, let’s.)
Laddering Some Political Slogans
This isn’t the post I expected to make as a followup. After all, the ladder system is a tool I came up with to unpack others’ positions in conversations – specifically to help express the source & motivation of evangelicals’ perspectives.
But in the process of writing the previous post and looking for examples, I kept thinking of political slogans. They’re already a sort of bite-size archetypal artifact, which makes them slot more easily into a taxonomy. I also think a post analyzing slogans will be easier to digest than a post inventing a bunch of hypothetical arguments with family members at Thanksgiving.
So let’s talk about a bunch of slogans in the context of the ladder, starting with the top rung and working our way down.
Rung 4: Specific directives
Recall that rung 4 conversations are about specific action and specific actors. To have a constructive rung 4 conversation, you need to have already agreed on a problem, what needs to be done about it, and who needs to do it. You’re now concerned with how to get that responsible person to do the damn thing.
Rung 4 slogans are concrete and specific. “Defund the police”, according to this system I’m inventing and applying here (love to use my own stuff, for me! Luxurious) is a solidly 4th-rung argument, built on some fairly specific lower rungs:
Rung 1 (the problem) is something like “policing in the US is inherently violent and exists to protect capital”
Rung 2 (the solution) is roughly “therefore we must redirect that money away from policing into systems that actually serve & protect people”
Rung 3 (who’s responsible) is “the government needs to pass legislation to do this” (I don’t know about you, but I don’t personally control any city budgets)
Rung 4 (how to make the responsible party do the thing) is kinda flexible depending on the audience: either “[hey voters, we must vote politicians into office that will] defund the police” or “[hey politicians, you need to] defund the police” can apply here.
Rung 4 slogans’ concreteness can be both a strength and weakness. I’m not presuming to have a better slogan up my sleeve – heck, many slogans work well specifically because they speak to a specific action for coherent reasons – but I think it’s useful to reflect on how the audience is essentially required to adopt the previous rungs in order to buy into the message. This means these slogans tend to be harder to spread. They’re essentially most effective with in-groups: people who already are on board with the rungs that led to the slogan.
In conversation, you’ll immediately feel you know a whole lot about someone’s perspective if they mention defunding the police; there aren’t a whole lot of other rungs that could get you to that conclusion.
Other specific-directive-type slogans that live at rung 4: “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” assumes a problem of waste, states a solution, and then targets the individual as the responsible party. You probably won’t find yourself arguing with someone who you find out is recycling to solve a wildly different problem than you.
The 14 word white supremacist phrase (Google it if you need to) is also rung 4, as is, um, “Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall.” (Yep, I’m leaning heavily on the wikipedia United States Political Slogans list throughout this post to jog my memory.)
Rung 3: Establishing a Stance
I spent a while deciding whether or not to combine rungs 3 and 4 in my slogan examples, but that didn’t feel faithful to how distinct the rungs are in conversationn. For example, you might agree with someone that tech companies need to ramp down their energy consumption (rung 3), but disagree on how to get that to happen – through incentive, fines, regulation, and so forth (rung 4).
What kind of slogan establishes an action and an actor but isn’t really specifying the means to get the actor to do the action? I think these end up being statements that that are more outgroup-oriented.
For instance, let’s take “Don’t Mess With Texas” seriously as a thing people say (something I have to assume Texans do daily):
Rung 1: Texas is presumably under threat and needs defending in some manner
Rung 2: Therefore, Texas is sure as heck gonna defend itself (the slogan sure isn’t “Texans Ask For Help When They Need It”
Rung 3: So: you’d better not mess with us (here’s our slogan)
Rung 4: N/A; this would need to be some specific action presumably justified by rungs 1-3 (a rung 4 version of this slogan could be something like “Fund Texan Milita”)
[ed: I realize this is actually an anti-littering slogan in terms of origin, but I liked placing its colloquial usage on the ladder. The original usage is arguably rung 4 because, not unlike a lot of advertising slogans, it’s directing the reader to change their behavior. Ok thank you, sorry Texans]
I think “Black Lives Matter” is also rung 3, but the fact that it’s a stance and not an action makes it vulnerable to misreads, deliberate or otherwise. My best shot at how it ladders up:
Rung 1: Police violence disproportionately impacts Black people
Rung 2: This can be solved by Black people being valued appropriately as humans by the state
Rung 3: Therefore we should all respect Black lives
Rung 4: N/A
Maybe this system sheds some light on why “All Lives Matter” is much more than a more-inclusive equivalent, and is instead a deliberately bad-faith equivocation. What, exactly, is the rung 1 problem that “All Lives Matter” trying to solve, or even the rung 2 solution that making all lives matter is seeking accomplish? Asking those questions to someone who says “all lives matter” to you will likely make the conversation awkward in an interesting way pretty quickly.
Evangelicals can often find common ground with nonreligious people at the third rung. You can absolutely find evangelicals that agree that Black Lives Matter, for example. But an evangelical is extremely unlikely to agree with a progressive on rung 4 (how to actually enact change), due to ideology / conservative political stance (e.g. not trusting government programs focused on inclusion).
And their lower rungs are probably quite different. An evangelical might instead be saying Black Lives Matter because Jesus loves all humans equally, which is very nice, but not the same foundation in the least. You might not get far if you assume the common ground of the slogan and then try to pivot the conversation to reducing police violence.
Rung 2: Bring Your Own Problem
Welcome to the most flexible tier of political slogan: a solution with an implicit problem and without a responsible party. These tend to be either rhetorical sledgehammers, or milquetoast copouts.
So let’s talk about Make America Great Again.
This is a rung 2 statement: it’s an explicit gesture at a kind of solution, with no even sort of implicitly specific action to take or problem to solve. I believe this type of slogan works well for powering grievance-based, reactionary, and/or populist political stances exactly for that reason.
Maybe for one person their driving grievance is that money is tighter than it used to be, but for another person it’s that there are too many illegal immigrants in their community. Both of these people might find themselves resonating with the slogan, but for essentially personally defined reasons. (I think this is one of the reasons it’s not helpful to blanket label Trump voters as “racist” or even “xenophobic”; regardless of the accuser’s reasoning, the accused may simply not see themselves that way, because their buy-in to the perspective the slogan sells them is for totally different reasons.)
MAGA on the ladder:
Rung 1: “America used to be better than it is now”
Rung 2: “[therefore we should] make America great again”
Rung 3: ???
Rung 4: ?????
It’s a feature, not a bug, that the problem statement isn’t clearly expressed. Instead, it tends to be left up to the audience, only hinted at through derogatory terminology and indirect allusions, presented as a vague, looming existential threat (“the breakdown of the American family unit”), or jumbled together into one sort of buffet of problems (the “transgender marxist drug-smuggling illegal immigrant” uber-badguy rhetoric that Trump used repeatedly on the campaign trail).
Rung 2 arguments show up in conversation a lot, and can easily become frustrating, because it’s pretty easy to find common ground with someone about how things SHOULD be without either party actually agreeing on why. The moment your conversation partner’s rung 1 why emerges (or their rung 3 who should do it emerges), you’ll learn quite quickly whether or not an argument will rear its head. The rung 2 position “we need peace in Gaza” hits very differently the moment you specify who is responsible for ensuring said peace, or what current problem that peace is intended to solve.
Cognitive dissonance can find relief by locking in at rung 2. I think it’s a safe bet that most evangelicals watching what’s going on with DOGE & Trump right now are recognizing aspects and downstream effects of the government’s “efficiency reduction” that aren’t in line with their Christian values. (At the very least they’d likely concede that the men themselves aren’t.) But way to blunt that dissonance is for the disenfranchised evangelical to only focus on rung 2 – “hey, at least we can agree that eliminating government waste is a real problem to solve”. Then one can avoid examining how their rung 1 definition of “government waste” might actually be different than Elon Musk’s.
In conversation, it’s very hard to challenge a broadly defined rung 1. One way to get someone to examine their first rung more closely is the individual emotional appeal: in this case, an article about DOGE’s misleading numbers, or explaining what 18F provided the government, or even talking about plane crashes and the FAA cuts may cause someone to reexamine their definition of “government waste”, but ultimately it’s incredibly difficult to combat cognitive dissonance protections with specific scenarios.
You’ll have better luck finding purchase upward. Evangelicals often express displeasure with Trump et. al. by looking up the ladder, not down. This is engagement with how something’s being done, not why; a criticism of “well we shouldn’t be doing it like that” while still tacitly agreeing with the premise.
Religion can find purchase easily in rung 2. “He Gets Us” is a rung 2 slogan, albeit a gauze-thin one. It presumes a need for Jesus and the existence of Jesus as a cool guy who is chill, but avoids any actual stance on what that means for you or Jesus. This is a tv-commercial-level cover for the quite explicitly clear stances of the companies behind the slogan. (Those companies’ higher- or lower-rung stances wouldn’t make for particularly well-received Super Bowl ads.)
The NFL likes to write rung 2 slogans in the back of the end zone. “Stop Hate”, “It Takes All Of Us” (I’m being generous here), and so forth. (“Stop Racism” is gone as of this coming season, as it was a little too far up the ladder, now replaced with the much more 2nd-rung “Choose Love”.)
Rung 1: Problem As Slogan
If you’ve read this far (omg, thank you, also, sorry), you’ve probably been wondering what kind of slogan or stance even looks like at rung 1. What slogans exist purely as an expression of a problem? I’ve got a few.
These slogans are about sharing a specific grievance. Remember Jimmy “The Rent Is Too Damn High” McMillan? There you go. What was his solution or platform or plan? Can’t say I recall, but I get where he’s coming from.
I looked for more rung 1 slogans and couldn’t find all that many; usually people don’t gravitate around rung 1 at scale. But the “vast right-wing conspiracy” language from the 90’s is at least in the neighborhood of a slogan, and sure is an intimation of a specific problem. Rung 1 is the location of conspiracy theories in general – any given reality-defining, often terrifying assertion of how something Really Works or who’s Really In Charge.
The other rung 1 slogan that comes to mind is “abortion stops a beating heart”. This is the anti-abortion bottom rung, at its core. That statement isn’t a solution, or a directive; it’s the very literal stated problem to solve.1
I feel this helps explain the harshness of the disconnect between pro-life and pro-choice stances. These stances aren’t different solutions to a common problem; they’re addressing different problems altogether. Both sides characterize the other via their own first-rung framing: anti-abortion people believe abortion is murder, so it stands to reason that the other side is pro-murder. Pro-choice people believe people with wombs have a right to what happens to their bodies, so it stands to reason that the other side doesn’t.
(I’m using the “anti-abortion” moniker here instead of “pro-life” deliberately. This is because the actual stated rung 1 position of the anti-abortion perspective is specifically to eliminate abortions and is not engaging with any number of possible ways to prevent death or suffering. The “pro-life” rebrand is a 2nd-rung broadening & softening of the actual stance, implying a much broader life-protecting position that just does not exist within that movement.)
Evangelicals generally save the specifics of rung 1 for themselves and each other. Messages to nonbelievers rarely start at rung 1. Instead, they start at rung 2 and work down. “Jesus Saves” is rung 2 – it’s the solution to rung 1, which is eternal separation from God.
Here’s the thing, though. Your evangelical neighbor and the guy on the corner with the megaphone and the “you’re going to hell” signs have the same first-rung perspective: if you don’t accept Christ, you’re going to hell. It’s just that only one of them is telling you that first.
And when the evangelical does communicate that first rung, a standard technique for sharing the gospel to someone is to focus on a rung 1 of guilt, not punishment. The witnessing believer might ask you if you’ve ever lied, or cheated, or stolen – leading up to a reading of Romans 3:23, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”. The problem to solve – to which Jesus is the solution – is then centered as “you are sinful and need saving”, rather than “God is going to punish you if you don’t do this”. This tactic deliberately avoids the fact that in order for one to adopt a belief in eternal salvation, one must first adopt in a belief in eternal punishment.
I Hope This Helps
Thanks for reading this post! I’m glad it finally exists, just so it’s here and not in my head forever. Please email me if you have questions or comments; I’ve gotten a few emails lately since starting back up again, and I realized I’ve never really specified what I’m offering in that area. So if you’ve used the ladder, or have questions about where certain topics or dynamics might map to it, I’d love to hear about it.
And although this is very much a blog about religious deconstruction – I am clearly not speaking from a bloodlessly neutral perspective, and am not seeking to equivocate sides – I’m also seeking to represent positions accurately. If you feel I’ve misrepresented a stance or characterization here, please let me know. If I end up with enough email to do a mailbag article, I’ll do it, with senders anonymized. (And please don’t send me angry emails or threats; I’m not going to repost it and say “get a load of this guy” about your angry email.)
Take care.
I want to be clear here that I’m describing the pro-life movement’s stated first rung vis a vis the slogan only.