Straw man

A straw man differs from Ad hominem, which attacks the person, and from Red herring, which changes the subject. Here the subject stays the same and the opponent's position is replaced. It is also not the same as a fair argument that a position has bad consequences: arguing that a policy would lead somewhere the proponents deny is an argument about the policy, and it becomes a straw man only when the stated position is described as something other than what was said.

The effect on the audience is a feeling that the opponent has been answered and found foolish or dangerous. The opponent is left to correct the record, and a correction is slower and less shareable than the original charge. See Continued influence effect.

Lineage: Informal logic; Luther's 'straw man' (1520s) usage

• Greece, 423 and 399 BC. In Plato's Apology, Socrates tells the Athenian jury that his "older" accusers have long circulated a picture of him, and that "you have yourselves seen" it in the comedy of Aristophanes (the Clouds, first staged in 423 BC), in which he "walks in air" and "makes the worse appear the better cause". Socrates answers: "I have nothing to do with physical speculations" (Jowett translation). The source for this case is Socrates' own defence as Plato wrote it, so it is one side's account of how a caricature was used against him.
• France, 1759. In Candide (January 1759), Voltaire gives the character Pangloss the lines that "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds". The text is built on the optimism associated with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's Theodicy, and mocking Pangloss mocks that philosophy. Whether Pangloss is a fair summary of Leibniz is a question for readers of both authors. A reader who knows the philosophy only from Pangloss meets a compressed and comic version. The case is cited for how the structure works. It is a satire, in a form readers know is exaggerated.
• United States, 1864. The Democratic print in this archive, The abolition catastrophe. Or the November smash-up (G. W. Bromley & Co., 1864, for the McClellan side), captions the Republican passengers "Miscegenationists". The word was coined in a pamphlet published in December 1863 by David Goodman Croly, managing editor of the New York World, and the reporter George Wakeman. It posed as a sincere defence of racial mixing, aimed to turn voters against the Lincoln administration, and was a forgery. A position Republicans did not state was assigned to them and then run against. The print contains a racial slur and caricatures of Black figures, shown as printed.
• United States, 2008. Asked on 3 January 2008 in Derry, New Hampshire, about President Bush's remark on staying in Iraq for 50 years, John McCain said "Make it a hundred." He added that this would be "fine with me, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed", and compared it to the US presence in Japan and South Korea. On 26 February 2008 Barack Obama said the country was "bogged down in a war that John McCain now suggests might go on for another 100 years." PolitiFact rated that statement False on 5 March 2008. In April 2008 the Democratic National Committee released an ad that cut McCain's answer to "Maybe a hundred" and set it against images of war. FactCheck.org said on 29 April 2008 that the ad "twists the sense of McCain's words", and that it was fair to argue that McCain's policy could prolong the violence.
• United States, 2009. On 7 August 2009, Sarah Palin posted on Facebook that under the health-care bill "my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel'". Section 1233 of H.R. 3200 would have paid physicians for voluntary counselling on living wills and end-of-life options. Neither Section 1233 nor any other provision set up a process for deciding who was worthy of care. PolitiFact rated the claim Pants on Fire on 10 August and named it its Lie of the Year for 2009. At a 12 August 2009 town hall, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley said, "We should not have a government program that determines you're going to pull the plug on Grandma", and he later said he did not think the provision would give the government authority to decide who lives and dies. Senator Lisa Murkowski called the death-panel charge baseless.
• Russia, 2022. On 25 March 2022, at a televised meeting with cultural figures, Vladimir Putin said, "Today, they are trying to cancel a thousand-year-old country", and "The proverbial 'cancel culture' has become a cancellation of culture". He compared it to Nazi book burning. The measures that preceded the speech after Russia's invasion of Ukraine on 24 February included the dismissal of the conductor Valery Gergiev as chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic and the loss of a La Scala engagement after he did not condemn the invasion, the cancellation of later Bolshoi Ballet performances at Madrid's Teatro Real, the cancellation of Russian art sales by London auction houses, and the Cardiff Philharmonic's decision to drop Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. Most were aimed at named people and state-linked institutions after the invasion. Some did affect dead Russian composers. The speech describes the whole as a campaign against Russian culture and a thousand-year-old country.

Cases on both sides of one country's politics are given in the same terms: in each, a position was described in a form its holder did not state, and the holder's words or the document were available to check.