Enough with the quotes, already!

"The thing about quotes on the internet is that you cannot confirm their validity."Abraham Lincoln

Honest Abe, had he ever actually been able to utter those words, would have been uncharacteristically wrong.  It turns out that, for the most part, it’s embarrassingly easy to verify quotes on the Internet.  The big obstacle is the desire to do it.  Just type the quote, or a few choice words from it, into a Google search and among your top ten searches (after the quote sites, about which more later) chances are someone has either confirmed or debunked it.

The ease of checking makes the proliferation of bogus quotes in arguments that much more troubling.  We’ve all seen them on Facebook or Twitter.  They come with a placard featuring a picture or painting of Famous Individual.  Over this background, usually in some era-appropriate script, come the words of wisdom:

“A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government.”  George Washington

Rock on, General Washington!  Take that, anti-gun pansies!  The ultimate unimpeachable source has just confirmed that the founders themselves saw the right to keep and bear arms as a bulwark against the tyranny of the government they worked so hard to create.  This quote scores on a number of points: it confirms an individual, as opposed to collective, right to keep and bear arms; it plays on the well-attested suspicion the Framers had of centralized authority; it strikes out against the putative gun-grabbers in modern days.

There’s only one gaping flaw in this.  Washington never, ever, as far as can be determined, uttered such words.  The words he did utter on this topic, the words that someone has altered, the ones that come from his first State of the Union message, are as follows:

“Among the many interesting objects which will engage your attention that of providing for the common defense will merit particular regard. To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.

A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined; to which end a uniform and well-digested plan is requisite; and their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories as tend to render them independent of others for essential, particularly military, supplies.

The proper establishment of the troops which may be deemed indispensable will be entitled to mature consideration. In the arrangements which may be made respecting it it will be of importance to conciliate the comfortable support of the officers and soldiers with a due regard to economy.”

 This quote is completely different.  Yes, there is the idea of an armed populace, but one that is disciplined, it seems, by government, giving perhaps a little backup to those who argue that the Second Amendment places the right to keep and bear arms in the context of a militia.  This armed populace is to be ready for war and has some connection to the legitimate armed forces.  Washington was not suggesting that the people be ready to take arms against a tyrannical government.

Such quotes abound.  Washington is extremely popular for obvious reasons: he was the “father of the country;” he is seemingly above partisan affiliation; he argued that America should remain as aloof as possible from the affairs of other nations.  But all of the founding generation is liable to turn up on your feed supporting one position or another.  Most often, these are positions associated with the political right or libertarians (though the left is not immune).

What’s going on here?  Why are these spurious quotations getting circulated and why do those sharing them never seem abashed when called out on it?

To find the answer we must look to our charged political environment.  Since the end of the Cold War, in the absence of an existential threat from outside, we have turned more viciously on one another.  As the last few elections have shown, the electorate is deeply, and narrowly, divided, and the needle doesn’t move far in either direction.  Any tool that might lend an advantage is one that will be used.

The founders of the United States can be deployed in this way.  It is unusual for a nation to have historical founders, people whose names have been signed to documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, people whose thoughts we can access through voluminous writings.  Since the American Revolution, the founding generation has been elevated to near godlike status in the American imagination, mostly on the strength of their propaganda.  We accept their argument that they were freedom-loving patriots fighting a cruel tyranny.  

This conditioning lends their words particular weight in political discussions.  There is a strain of thought that suggests the arc of American history since the founding is one of decadence, as we move farther and farther from the ideals of the framers.  It is hard not to look at the disputes among the founding generation—over the ratification of the Constitution, over the type of nation we would have, over the extension of the franchise, over the initial party split—and not see the present moment predicted.

And, we should be fair, they said a great many wonderful things.  Who would not be stirred by the first section of the Declaration of Independence and its radical claim that “all men are created equal?”  The endurance of the American republic can be offered as a testament to the strength of their vision.  But while we might justly praise this vision, we should also be aware of its limits.  We tend to think of the founders as anything other than the self-interested, elitist, political animals that they were.  We forget that, for the most part, they were afraid of democracy (there’s a reason that another bogus quote, this one attributed to Jefferson claiming, “Democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%” rings true).  In other words, they were just like us.  If you think politics today are dirty, look at the rhetoric employed in the election of 1800.

Because we see them as somehow different, more virtuous, possessing greater vision, we use quotes from famous people to support our positions.  We find them on quote sites that uncritically report quotes without providing proper attribution.  We accept them without question from partisan historians (e.g., the "historian" David Barton).  It's hard to resist giving our views the imprimatur of those wiser than us.

And when someone using the quote is called out, the response is usually an admission that the quote was passed along without research and a rejoinder along the lines of, “It doesn’t matter.  The words are true no matter who said them.”

If that’s the case, then why bother with the false attribution?  Is it because the words of Thomas Paine, voice of revolution, carry more weight than those of Michael Bazemore, professor of history and occasional blogger?  In a word, yes.  Quoting the founders, or anyone for that matter, in the service of the argument is simply an appeal to authority.  It is an attempt to win an argument without doing the work of logic, and a tacit admission that your point can't stand on its own.  Or, even worse, to win by cheating, by fabricating quotes, in a transparent attempt to give one’s own words added weight by placing them in the mouths of others.  Passing them along makes one an accessory to the dishonesty.   

This practice of appealing unthinkingly to authority, and accepting its pronouncements (true or fabricated) as evidence poisons debate.  It substitutes sound bites for reasoned thought.  In other words, the quote does what posters intend it to do.  For all intents and purposes deploying authoritative quotes is a means of closing debate, to say, as it were, "George Washington said it, I believe it, end of story." The tragedy is, with all due respect to Internet Lincoln, that it’s easy to confirm the validity of Internet quotes, to puncture the bubble of respectability . It takes only a few keystrokes and a desire for the truth.