Argument by Repetition

Leigh Kolb

There’s a woman in Chicago. She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards [...]. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is col­lecting welfare under each of her names.

Ronald Reagan’s 1976 campaign, the birth of the “Welfare Queen”

An argument by repetition (ABR; also known as ad nauseam or ad infinitum) is a fallacy by which the speaker uses the same word, phrase, story, or imagery repeatedly with the hopes that the repetition will lead to persua­sion. According to Nonsense: A Handbook of Logical Fallacies, this fallacy is a form of propaganda: “The propagandist says something over and over again. He may use different words each time, but it’s the same point. The theory is that if you say something often enough, people will eventually believe you” (Gula 2002, 23).

Often seen in politics, the ABR about the “Welfare Queen” who assumes different identities, has numerous children, and abuses the welfare system while raking in the cash, is an argument that has permeated the last few decades of political and social discourse about government welfare pro­grams. The narrative of the Welfare Queen, which Ronald Reagan began telling in his 1976 campaign, is a story that weaves together three crimi­nals’ stories into one symbol of a woman (assumed to be African American) who cheats the system. Kaaryn Gustafson, author of Cheating Welfare: Public Assistance and the Criminalization of Poverty, says, “It’s one of those persis­tent symbols that come up every election cycle” (quoted in Blake 2012).

In a Nieman Reports study of audience reactions to images in the media - specifically African American mothers on welfare - Franklin D. Gilliam (1999) stated:

My assumption going into this study was that the notion of the welfare queen had taken on the status of common knowledge, or what is known as a ‘narrative script.’ The welfare queen script has two key components - welfare recipients are disproportionately women, and women on welfare are dispro­portionately African-American.

He found that this story had direct effects on audiences’ perceptions about who receives welfare and their hostility about government social programs.

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Zucchino wrote The Myth of the Welfare Queen, a portrait of welfare mothers in Philadelphia. He found that the “image of the big-spending, lavish-living, Cadillac-driving welfare queen was by then thoroughly embedded in American folklore,” and it had a direct effect on people’s perceptions of welfare and, in turn, on the recipi­ents themselves (quoted in Gilliam 1999).

While the repetition of this story centers around the “welfare queen,” its repetition in politics has taken other forms: “entitlement society,” “handouts,” “food stamp president” are all loaded terms that are the natural bedfellows of the folklore of the “welfare queen.” Gustafson says, “This image of the lazy African-American woman who refuses to get a job and keeps having kids is pretty enduring. It’s always been a good way to distract the public from any meaningful conversations about poverty and inequality” (quoted in Blake 2012). ABR controls the script by repeating the script, and it often distracts audiences in the process.

In The New York Times, Paul Krugman (2013) examines how voters have completely skewed views of the deficit because politicians typically mislead the public about the real numbers. He says, “Am I saying that voters are stupid? Not at all. People have lives, jobs, children to raise. They’re not going to sit down with Congressional Budget Office reports. Instead, they rely on what they hear from authority figures. The problem is that much of what they hear is misleading if not outright false.” If they keep hearing repetitive “falsehoods,” they will believe them. He says that “In Stephen Colbert’s famous formulation, claims about runaway deficits may not be true, but they have truthiness, and that’s all that matters.” Truthiness (which was voted the 2005 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society) is Colbert’s term that means “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.” This con­cept is key to how ABR is a pervasive propaganda technique.

ABR takes many forms: jingles for advertising shampoo, phrases politi­cians use to evoke fear or gain favor, and narratives to malign - or even kill - certain groups of people.

In “The Truth Behind The Lies Of The Original ‘Welfare Queen’” on NPR, Gene Demby (2013) examines the real woman whose life inspired the “Welfare Queen” myth. Her name was Linda Taylor, and her crimes were intricate and complicated, as was her race (she identified as white, African American, and Asian throughout her tumultuous life). Demby refers to Josh Levin’s investigative story at Slate that delves into her crimes and her distracting and disingenuous legacy. She was associated with stealing babies and murdering a woman, but the single story about her that has permeated public opinion about public assistance is that her abuse of the welfare system represented the majority of recipients of welfare. Levin writes, “Linda Taylor’s story shows that there are real costs associated with this kind of panic, a moral climate in which stealing welfare money takes precedence over kidnapping and homicide” (quoted in Demby 2013). She was a compli­cated criminal, yet the repetitive fictionalized story turned into a political beacon that drastically shaped public opinion.

Speakers and writers often fall back on arguments that are familiar and reso­nate with audiences on an emotional level.

ABR seeks to convince an audience not by facts or logic but by the psychological and emotional power of repetition. Argument ad nauseam refers to this repetition to the point of exhaustion, or literally, nausea. Repeating words, phrases, narratives, and images are a powerful - but fallacious - propaganda technique to sway an audience.

References

Blake, John. 2012. “Return of the ‘Welfare Queen.’” CNN, January 23. http://www. cnn.com/2012/01/23/politics/weflare-queen/ (accessed September 28, 2017).

Colbert, Stephen. 2005. “The Word - Truthiness.” The Colbert Report, Comedy

Central. October 17. http://www.cc.com/video-clips/63ite2/the-colbert-report- the-word---truthiness (accessed September 28, 2017).

Demby, Gene. 2013. “The Truth Behind The Lies Of The Original ‘Welfare Queen.’” NPR, December 20. http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/12/20/255819681/ the-truthbehind-the-lies-of-the-original-welfare-queen (accessed September 28, 2017).

Gilliam, Franklin. 1999. “The ‘Welfare Queen’ Experiment.” Nieman Reports, June 15. http://niemanreports.org/articles/the-welfare-queen-experiment/ (accessed September 28, 2017).

Gula, Robert. 2002. Nonsense: A Handbook of Logical Fallacies. Mount Jackson, VA: Axios Press.

Herf, Jeffrey. 2006. The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. 1963. “I Have a Dream...” https://www.archives.gov/press/ exhibits/dream-speech.pdf (accessed September 28, 2017).

Krugman, Paul. 2013. “Moment of Truthiness.” The New York Times, August 15. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/16/opinion/krugman-moment-of-truthiness. html?_r=0 (accessed September 28, 2017).