Straw man
Based on Wikipedia: Straw man
In 1952, Richard Nixon was in trouble. The California senator, then running as Dwight Eisenhower's vice presidential candidate, faced accusations that he had illegally pocketed eighteen thousand dollars in campaign contributions. His political career hung by a thread. So Nixon went on television and talked about his dog.
"It was a little cocker spaniel dog," Nixon told millions of viewers, his voice thick with emotion. The dog had been a gift from a supporter in Texas. His six-year-old daughter Tricia had named it Checkers. "And, you know, the kids, like all kids, loved the dog, and I just want to say this right now, that, regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it."
The speech was a masterstroke of misdirection. No one had ever criticized Nixon for accepting the dog. No one had suggested he give it back. His critics were concerned about the eighteen thousand dollars, not the spaniel. But by passionately defending his family's right to keep a pet that no one had threatened to take away, Nixon made his accusers look petty and heartless.
This is the straw man fallacy in action.
The Art of Fighting Imaginary Opponents
The straw man fallacy gets its name from a simple image: instead of fighting your actual opponent, you build a dummy out of straw, knock it over, and declare victory. It's much easier to defeat an argument that no one actually made than to grapple with what your opponent genuinely believes.
Here's how it works in its simplest form. Person A makes an argument. Person B ignores that argument and instead attacks a different, weaker argument—one that superficially resembles what Person A said but is actually quite different. Then Person B claims to have defeated Person A's position.
The fallacy is seductive because it often feels like legitimate debate. The substitute argument usually bears some resemblance to the original. It might be a simplified version, an exaggerated version, or a related but distinct claim. To a casual observer, it can look like a genuine rebuttal. That's what makes it so effective—and so dangerous.
Consider a common example from everyday life. Suppose someone argues that we should reduce military spending by ten percent and redirect those funds to education. A straw man response might be: "So you want to leave our country completely defenseless?" The original argument said nothing about eliminating the military entirely. It proposed a modest reduction. But by pretending the argument was about total disarmament, the critic can invoke fears of national security without addressing the actual proposal.
The Many Ways to Build a Straw Man
Rhetoricians have identified several distinct techniques for constructing straw man arguments, each with its own character and flavor.
The most straightforward approach is simple misrepresentation. You take your opponent's words out of context, selecting quotes that make them sound unreasonable when stripped of their original meaning. A politician might say, "We should consider all options, including raising taxes, before making a decision." Their opponent's attack ad might quote them as saying, "We should raise taxes"—omitting everything that came before and after.
Another technique is oversimplification. Complex positions get reduced to crude caricatures. A nuanced argument about reforming healthcare becomes "they want government to control your doctor." A thoughtful proposal about immigration policy becomes "they want open borders" or "they want to deport everyone."
Then there's exaggeration, sometimes grotesque. A modest proposal gets inflated into an extreme position that's much easier to attack. "Reducing our carbon emissions by fifteen percent" becomes "they want to return us to the Stone Age." "Regulating certain firearms" becomes "they want to confiscate all guns."
Perhaps the sneakiest technique is selection—what scholars Robert Talisse and Scott Aikin call the "weak man" variant. Instead of misrepresenting your opponent's argument, you find the weakest defender of that position and treat their flawed presentation as representative of everyone who holds that view. If you want to discredit a political movement, find its most inarticulate spokesperson, defeat their arguments, and claim you've demolished the entire movement.
The Hollow Man and the Nut Picker
Philosophers Scott Aikin and John Casey identified an even more troubling variant in 2010: the hollow man. This is a straw man argument where the position being attacked doesn't actually exist. No one holds the view; no opponent is on record defending it.
You can spot hollow man arguments by their vague attributions. "Some people say..." But which people? Where did they say it? "Critics argue that..." Which critics specifically? The hollow man conjures imaginary opponents out of thin air, defeats them triumphantly, and moves on before anyone notices that the enemy was entirely fictional.
A related phenomenon is "nutpicking"—a term coined by political blogger Kevin Drum. The name blends "nut" (slang for someone irrational) with "cherry picking" (selecting only evidence that supports your case), while also punning on "nitpicking." Nutpicking means deliberately seeking out the most extreme, unhinged members of an opposing group and presenting them as typical representatives of everyone who shares their general position.
Social media has supercharged nutpicking. With billions of posts floating around the internet, you can always find someone saying something absurd in support of almost any position. Screenshot that post, share it widely, and suddenly your political opponents look like lunatics—even if the person you quoted has twelve followers and their own family thinks they're embarrassing.
The Opposite: Steel Manning
If the straw man fallacy represents rhetorical bad faith, its opposite represents rhetorical virtue. It's called steel manning.
To steel man an argument is to engage with the strongest possible version of your opponent's position—even if that's not quite what they said. You repair their weak points. You remove their easily refuted assumptions. You construct the most compelling case you can imagine for their view, and then you try to answer that.
This might seem like fighting with one hand tied behind your back. Why would you make your opponent's argument stronger before attacking it?
The answer is that steel manning produces better thinking. When you defeat only a weakened caricature of a position, you haven't actually learned anything. You don't know whether the real argument has merit because you never seriously engaged with it. But when you defeat the strongest version of an opposing view, you can be confident in your conclusion. You've stress-tested your own reasoning.
Steel manning also builds trust. People are more willing to listen to your criticisms when they feel genuinely understood. If you can articulate your opponent's position better than they can, they'll take your objections seriously. If you can only knock down straw men, they'll dismiss you as someone who doesn't get it.
Straw Men in the Wild: A Louisiana Legislature Learns a Lesson
In 2001, the Louisiana State Legislature considered a bill (House Concurrent Resolution 74) that condemned Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution as racist. The resolution declared that Darwin's books promoted "the justification of racism" and "postulate a hierarchy of superior and inferior races."
This was a textbook straw man. Darwin's actual views were nearly the opposite of what the resolution claimed. He was a passionate opponent of slavery who wrote extensively against it. He worked to refute the pseudoscientific racism of his day, not to support it. While some later thinkers misused evolutionary concepts to justify racist ideologies—so-called "Social Darwinism"—Darwin himself would have rejected their conclusions.
The resolution attacked a caricature of Darwin's views rather than his actual arguments. Philosopher Christopher Tindale noted that "the portrait painted of Darwinian ideology is a caricature, one not borne out by any objective survey of the works cited." When this error was pointed out during debate, the Louisiana legislature corrected course. The final version of the bill omitted all mention of Darwin and Darwinist ideology.
It's a rare happy ending: a straw man argument identified and removed before it could do damage.
The Red Menace That Wasn't
Not all straw men get caught in time. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, one particular straw man has proved remarkably durable: the accusation of communism.
Time and again, right-wing political figures have attacked moderate proposals—sometimes even moderate conservative proposals—by characterizing them as communist ideology. Universal healthcare? Communism. Environmental regulation? Communism. Progressive taxation? Communism. Labor unions? Communism.
This rhetorical move is a straw man because it replaces the actual argument with something entirely different. A proposal for a public health insurance option is not the same thing as advocating for the abolition of private property and the dictatorship of the proletariat. By pretending that these are equivalent, critics could avoid engaging with the actual merits of the proposal.
The technique worked especially well during the Cold War, when genuine fears about Soviet influence gave the accusation emotional weight. It continues to work today, though its effectiveness varies. The key insight is that the straw man doesn't need to be accurate—it needs to be alarming. If you can make people afraid of what your opponent supposedly believes, they may not stop to ask whether your characterization is fair.
A Prosecutor's Gambit
In 1977, a federal prosecutor made a closing argument in a bank robbery appeal that illustrates how straw men work through fear. Addressing the appellate judges, he said: "I submit to you that if you can't take this evidence and find these defendants guilty on this evidence then we might as well open all the banks and say, 'Come on and get the money, boys,' because we'll never be able to convict them."
Stop and think about what this argument actually claims. It suggests that ruling in favor of these particular defendants would make it impossible to convict any bank robbers, ever. That's an extraordinary claim. Legal precedents simply don't work that way. A ruling on one set of evidence, in one specific case, doesn't invalidate all other bank robbery prosecutions.
But the straw man argument wasn't designed to be logically sound. It was designed to create anxiety. By exaggerating the consequences of a ruling, the prosecutor hoped to make the judges afraid to decide against him. The actual legal question got lost in apocalyptic visions of banks standing defenseless against criminals.
The History of a Name
Interestingly, while the technique is ancient, the name "straw man" is relatively modern. The earliest clear description of the fallacy comes from Isaac Watts, an English theologian and hymn writer (he wrote "Joy to the World"), who described it in his 1724 book Logick:
"They dress up the opinion of their adversary as they please, and ascribe sentiments to him which he doth not acknowledge; and when they have with a great deal of pomp attacked and confounded these images of straw of their own making, they triumph over their adversary as though they had utterly confuted his opinion."
Watts captured the essence perfectly three hundred years ago: constructing "images of straw" that can be easily confounded, then celebrating victory over an opponent who never held the demolished position in the first place.
However, the term didn't become standard vocabulary in logic textbooks until much later. Scholar Douglas Walton traced its first appearance as a formal fallacy to Stuart Chase's 1956 book Guides to Straight Thinking. Even Hamblin's influential 1970 text Fallacies—considered a classic in the field—doesn't mention it as a distinct category.
The phrase "man of straw" itself dates back centuries. The Online Etymology Dictionary traces the meaning of "an easily refuted imaginary opponent in an argument" to around 1620. One folk etymology claims the term comes from men who would stand outside courthouses with straw in their shoes, signaling their willingness to serve as false witnesses for hire. This origin story is colorful but probably false.
A Burning Reformation
Martin Luther, the German theologian whose criticisms of the Catholic Church launched the Protestant Reformation, complained about straw man arguments five hundred years ago. In his 1520 treatise On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther accused his opponents of misrepresenting his position on the Eucharist—the Christian ritual commemorating the Last Supper.
The Church claimed Luther was arguing against a particular way of serving communion. Luther protested that he had never made such an argument; in fact, his opponents were the ones advocating for that position. They had dressed up an imaginary opponent and attacked it rather than engaging with what Luther actually wrote.
Luther's Latin text doesn't use the phrase "man of straw." But when the Philadelphia Edition of his works was translated into English in the early twentieth century, translators recognized the tactic and used the by-then-familiar term. The fallacy had been around for centuries; the name was finally catching up.
The British Cousin: Aunt Sally
In Britain, the same fallacy sometimes goes by a different name: Aunt Sally. This comes from a traditional pub game, still played in parts of England, particularly in Oxfordshire. Players throw wooden sticks or "battens" at a post, trying to knock off a small wooden skittle balanced on top—the "Aunt Sally."
The metaphor works the same way. Instead of engaging with your real opponent, you set up an easy target that's designed to be knocked down. The British variant adds a hint of pub-game amusement to what is, after all, a form of cheating in argument.
Why It Matters Now More Than Ever
We live in an era optimized for straw man arguments. Social media rewards outrage and punishes nuance. A careful, qualified argument gets no engagement; an exaggerated caricature of your opponent goes viral. The incentives all push toward misrepresentation.
Political discourse has become increasingly tribal. When we encounter arguments from "the other side," we're primed to interpret them in the least charitable way possible. We assume bad faith. We hear what we expect to hear rather than what was actually said. Our opponents do the same to us.
Talisse and Aikin, the scholars who identified the "selection form" of straw man arguments, noted that this variant has become increasingly common in modern political debate. They argued that learning to identify it is crucial for improving public discourse. We can't have productive disagreements if we're not even disagreeing about the same things.
Recognizing straw men requires a particular kind of discipline. When you encounter an argument that seems obviously wrong, pause. Ask yourself: Is this really what the other person believes? Or have they been characterized by someone who wants me to dismiss them without thinking?
The same discipline applies when you're constructing your own arguments. Before you attack an opposing view, make sure you're attacking the real thing. Can you state your opponent's position in a way they would recognize and accept? If not, you might be building a straw man without realizing it.
This is hard work. It's much easier to fight imaginary enemies. But the easy path leads nowhere useful. Only by engaging with real arguments—the strongest versions of positions we oppose—can we hope to understand the world better or change anyone's mind.
Nixon kept his dog and won the vice presidency. But his critics were still right about the eighteen thousand dollars. Knocking down a straw man doesn't make the real argument go away. It just delays the reckoning.