Argument by Repetition

45 Argument by Repetition

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. Her tax‐free cash income alone is over $150,000.

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

An argument by repetition (ABR; also known as argumentum ad nauseam, ad infinitum, or proof by assertion) is a fallacy in which the speaker repeats a claim, phrase, story, or image over and over again in place of supporting evidence, hoping that the sheer recurrence will lead to persuasion. According to Nonsense: A Handbook of Logical Fallacies, this 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).

In its most stripped-down form, the argument follows a simple logical structure:

• Person 1 makes claim X.
• Person 1 repeats claim X.
• Person 1 repeats claim X again.
• Person 1 repeats claim X many more times.
• Therefore, claim X is true.

Consider how this plays out in casual conversation: “‘Kill, Blood, Gore’ deserves the Oscar for best picture. It’s the best film. No other movie is as good. This movie is great.” No reasons are offered, only a restated assertion. The words change slightly, but the underlying claim stays the same—and so does the lack of proof. Another typical example is the repeated insistence that “There is an all-powerful, all-good God. God is powerful and good. There is a supreme being that is all-powerful and all-good. God is real.” Rearranging words or substituting synonyms does not transform the claim into new evidence, nor does it make the proposition any more likely to be true.

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, presents an individual case as a symbol of welfare recipients cheating 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.” Repeated “falsehoods,” in this account, can become familiar enough to seem credible. 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. Nazi propaganda used repeated antisemitic lies to mobilize hostility. Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, repeated the narrative of an “International Jewry,” supposedly responsible for launching World War I to kill all Germans. Herf links such propaganda with the persecution and murder of Jews (Herf 2006, 3). On a meta note, the phrase “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself” was attributed to Goebbels in the Publications Relating to Various Aspects of Communism (1946), by United States Congress, House Committee on Un‐American Activities; however, the account supplies no primary source for the attribution. The phrase is consistently seen attributed to him, and so, by repetition, it’s believed to be his.

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 about her crimes and the political uses of her story. 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.

Repetition can emphasize a point, aid memory, or bring a discussion back to an unanswered question. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech uses repeated phrasing for rhythm and emphasis. Those uses do not make repetition itself a fallacy.

The error occurs when recurrence substitutes for support: hearing the same claim again supplies no additional reason to accept it. Argument ad nauseam describes repetition to the point of exhaustion, or literally, nausea. To assess it, identify the claim and ask what evidence or reasoning is offered beyond its repeated assertion.