Wallace Scapegoating and Weaknesses

Scapegoating: 

According to Roberts miller, “Parties must not prevent each other from advancing stand- points or casting doubt on standpoints.”41 Various strategies that attempt to do this—threatening harm, engaging in personal attack, trying to discredit the interlocutor—are fallacious because they try to prevent the disagreement from happening at all, thereby precluding its being resolved”. Wallace does this quite a bit when he talks about the government. He uses ad hominen to blame and personally attack the government for its mistakes. He states, “It is a government that claims to us that it is bountiful as it buys its power from us with the fruits of its rapaciousness of the wealth that free men before it have produced and builds on crumbling credit without responsibilities to the debtors, our children.” Instead of fairly representing his opponents view he uses demogogues to misrepresent the argument. The way Wallace bashes the government makes it seem like they are doing everything wrong and not protecting the people. The easiest way out of a sticky situation is to place blame on someone, therefore Wallace is giving the people someone to point fingers at. In some ways this tactic makes his audience feel hopeful because to find a solution you must first discover what the problem is. If the problem is the government, then they now know what needs to be changed.

Weakness:

Roberts Miller states, “interlocutors must defend their standpoints with relevant forms of argumentation.” However in the beginning of Wallace’s speech he compares his safety in Washington D.C. to a terrorist attack by saying, “I was safer in a B-29 bomber over Japan during the war in an air raid, than the people of Washington are walking to the White House neighborhood.” Instead of defending his standpoint and discussing why he is in the right he attacks his opponents and puts them into a bad light. According to Roberts Miller, Wallace is “Misattributing an argument (such as accusing someone of being on the side of terrorists for disagreeing with the United States), or distorting an argument (such as presenting the weakest version) constitutes violations of this rule.” This is Wallace’s biggest weakness, instead of talking about how the government is doing wrong for Alabama he should be talking about how he can make it better and going into more depth about the benefits of segregation.