Guilt by Association

Leigh Kolb

This is not a man who sees America as you see America and as I see America. Our opponent is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.

Sarah Palin, 2008 presidential election

The guilt by association fallacy (GBA) is the erroneous logic that just because someone/something A is associated with someone/something B, that some- one/something A has or accepts all of the qualities of someone/something B. This fallacy permeates society, from social groups, to political campaigns, to business relationships, to the court system.

On the 2008 presidential campaign trail, vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin said that Barack Obama was “palling around with terrorists” since in the 1990s he had known and worked on community projects with Bill Ayres, a professor who was involved in the domestic terrorist group the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Mike Huckabee echoed her sentiments: “If you hang out with somebody who has never apologized for bombing the Pentagon and the Capitol and is proud of something he should have been ashamed of, then it calls into question your judgment” (Shipman 2008). The fact that Obama had worked with Ayres was enough for his opponents to call into question his patriotism and his loyalty to America (regardless of Obama’s denunciation of the acts). As Robert Gula (2002) has noted, true logic would dictate that “what the person is saying is the issue, not who his associates are” (231).

When politics, social issues, and business collide, GBA enters new realms. Michael Hiltzik (2015), an economics reporter with the Los Angeles Times, says, “This is a new advance in ‘guilt by association’: it’s guilt by association with the non-guilty.” He goes on to explain that the political ramification of association with a party that is deemed legally not guilty but politically guilty is a GBA

In his article for The Washington Post titled “Darren Wilson and Guilt by Association,” Jonathan Capehart (2014) featured an interview with law professor and author Alexandra Natapoff.

Police officers have been told by authorities as high as the Supreme Court that they can draw inferences in high crime neighborhoods or low-income or urban neighborhoods. [...] He [Wilson] conflates the community and the residents with so-called gangs. And once he does that it’s as if we’re being told that his excuse for not treating Michael Brown as a child and a resident and someone who he is paid by the taxpayers to protect and care for instead that he’s entitled to conflate Michael Brown because of the color of his [Brown’s] skin and the neighborhood in which he lives with known criminals.

GBA is also used when it is found that perpetrators of horrific events belonged to a certain group. The other members of the group, church, mosque, online forum, or those with a similar medical diagnosis that the perpetrator is or has identified with then suffers the consequences of being seen as being guilty. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports, “Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, anti-Muslim hate violence skyrocketed some 1,600%.” After the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, immediate connections were drawn to the video games, music, and films that the perpetrators con­sumed, making the pop culture (and its fans) seem guilty by their association to the killers.

Of course, McCarthyism - which came to a head in the 1950s in America with Senator Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover at the helm - targeted individuals who supposedly were involved in anti-American/communist activities. Thousands of people lost their jobs and reputations because of their association with other people who were thought to be communists, their connection to groups that had communist sympathies, or their interest in causes that were seen as communist (labor rights, civil rights, etc.). GBA can have dire consequences.

In a New York Times column titled “The Perfect-Victim Pitfall,” Charles M.

Guilt by Association 353 and Eric Garner detracted from the root problems of racism and criminal justice. He says,

The argument is that this is not a perfect case, because Brown - and, one would assume, now Garner - isn’t a perfect victim and the protesters haven’t all been perfectly civil, so therefore any movement to counter black oppression that flows from the case is inherently flawed. But this is ridiculous and reduc­tive, because it fails to acknowledge that the whole system is imperfect and rife with flaws. We don’t need to identify angels and demons to understand that inequity is hell.

His argument relies on how the complexities of the individuals are mirrored by the complexities of the problems, yet reductive and simplified arguments about the individuals detract from the real argument at hand.

GBA is often a knee-jerk reaction that has deep roots in people’s implicit biases and has even been supported consistently by legal precedent. To disrupt the desire to make these immediate and fallacious assumptions, individuals must recognize the consequences of doing so and instead build their arguments on facts and realities. In the examples above, those com­mitting fallacious thought spoke about their “victims” as one-dimensional, simplified caricatures instead of as complex individuals, which is the reality. Avoiding that kind of oversimplification and vilification will result in stronger, more responsible arguments. When who a person “palls around with” (or even has been casually associated with) is the object of the argu­ment, and not the person her/himself, the writer/speaker is committing guilt by association.

References

Blow, Charles. 2014.“The Perfect-Victim Pitfall.” The New York Times, December 3. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/opinion/charles-blow-first-michael-brown- now-eric-garner.html (accessed October 3, 2017).

Capehart, Jonathan. 2014. “Darren Wilson and Guilt by Association.” The Washington Post, December 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/ wp/2014/12/01/darren-wilson-and-guilt-by-association/?utm_term=.18063bd18210 (accessed October 3, 2017).

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

Hiltzik, Michael. 2015. “Planned Parenthood: A Terrified Business Partner Abandons the Organization.” Los Angeles Times, August 18. http://www.latimes.com/ business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-a-partner-bails-on-planned-parenthood-20150817- column.html (accessed October 3, 2017).

Shipman, Tim. 2008. “Sarah Palin: Barack Obama ‘Palling around with Terrorists’.” The Telegraph, October 4. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/sarah- palin/3137197/Sarah-Palin-accuses-Barack-Obama-of-terrorist-links.html (accessed October 3, 2017).