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In many on-line debates, a well-informed and well-reasoned argument is met with the greatest scorn, often in the form of responses decrying the arrogance of the person making the argument. These responses are almost always devoid of substance, a string of z’s or a sarcastic announcement that the opponent obviously isn’t intelligent enough to have an opinion. Often a request is made to cease making such well-informed and well-reasoned arguments, to protect those who feel intimidated by them from having to be challenged so discourteously.
Putting the best face on it, one can argue that there is some merit in this objection, that everyone should feel safe to express their own opinion, and that intimidating arguments, such as those found in courts or the halls of academe, are not appropriate in the forums of public discourse. But this fails to understand the value of free speech, its purpose, and what is lost when we are more concerned with protecting arbitrary opinions from factual and rational challenges than we are with, together, arriving at the best informed and best reasoned conclusions.
Those who are most ideological and least analytical are most committed to a view of public discourse as being the futile “exchange” or arbitrarily held and inflexible dogmatic convictions. Those who are most analytical and least ideological are most committed to a view of public discourse as being a robust debate between relatively well-informed and well-reasoned arguments. Among the fundamental meta-debates underlying all other issue-specific debates is the between these competing narratives, with one side favoring entrenched dogma courteously left unchallenged, and the other favoring an increasingly disciplined process of discovery.
There is an ongoing battle on such forums whether we should be more committed to lowering or raising the level of discourse. It might seem odd that anyone could argue that we should lower it, but many implicitly do. It does a disservice to our nation and to our shared challenge of self-governance to take such a position. As uncomfortable as rational debate might be –particularly to those who are least rational– it must be the ideal toward which we continue to aspire.
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Many of us are motivated by the desire to affect the world in a positive way. Everyone engaged in political activities on any level believes in their ability, working with others, to affect people’s beliefs and actions, at least on the margins. And, indeed, the fact that change is constant, and that some of that change is in part a result of intentional social movements demonstrates that intentional actions by some can affect the beliefs and attitudes of others, at least on the margins.
Most political activities and discourse target the turbulence on the surface of our shared existence, focused on passing this or that bill or getting this or that candidate elected. But the most successful and memorable movements have reached deeper, stoking either our humanity or our inhumanity, our generosity or our selfishness, our reason or our irrationality. Their focus has generally been narrower than the one I am suggesting (hatred, prejudice and discrimination toward specific groups, or ending hatred, prejudice and discrimination toward specific groups), but they are memorable for being more sweeping in breadth and more profound and lasting in effect than more superficial political struggles.
In many ways, there is a deeper political struggle that is less attended to than the more superficial issue-specific causes to which we address our attention and energies: the struggle between, on the one hand, our more primal inclinations, our bigotries and hatreds, our fear and anger, our irrational tribalistic dogmas, and, on the other, our “higher consciousness,” our compassion and imagination, our hope and aspiration, our generosity and humanity. Each year, around Christmastime, a small barrage of meta-messages celebrating the latter is repeated (e.g., A Christmas Carol, It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 24th Street), and these meta-messages resonate with many people, who enjoy having those centers of their mind and spirit stimulated. We feel good seeing hope and love prevail.
One part of my proposed social movement (see A Proposal: The Politics of Reason and Goodwill) is based on the constant, strategic and intentional creation, identification, dissemination and use of such meta-messages to “soften the ground” for more superficial political discourse, to stimulate the centers of the mind more conducive to the passage of rational, humane, compassionate and generous public policies. This is a movement that occupies a largely unexplored and untapped region between culture and politics, a region usually addressed only by religions, and usually enveloped in a lot of noise not related to what I’m talking about here. But what if a motivated group of people, organized to do so, targeted the zeitgeist itself, stoking and stimulating those areas of the human mind that respond in emotionally gratifying ways to messages of generosity and hope and inclusiveness? And did so in conjunction with related narratives about a commitment to disciplined reason in service to those values?
I understand the skepticism about such a movement, because we think of all of the people who will not be responsive to it, and how Quixotic it seems to be. But it’s clear that over the course of a period of time (a generation or so), similar movements a little narrower in scope and in conjunction with haphazard cultural reinforcing messages have been dramatically successful, by moving people on the margins. The Civil Rights Movement and the Gay Rights Movement are two prominent examples. Under the influence of social movements with political agendas and accompanying proliferation of cultural narratives reinforcing their agenda (e.g., TV shows “normalizing” in the collective consciousness the world these movements were striving to create), dramatic change in the zeitgeist, in the course of about a generation in each case, was accomplished.
What if we combined all of this into a single, coherent, intentional social movement? What if we created a movement whose purpose is to promote disciplined reason and imagination in service to humanity? The fact is that there are relatively few Americans who, if pressed, would explicitly reject the value of working to be more rational and humane people, despite the fact that there is a large faction that implicitly and in effect does reject both reason and humanity. But politics, at root, is a competition of narratives, a battle over human consciousness, and given that we are at a time and place in world history in which few would explicitly reject the value of reason and humanity, that narrative already has an advantage in the competition of narratives. What we need to do is to put meat on its bones, to make sure that that which is, and that which is not, reason in service to humanity is easy to identify and easy to relate with. And the successful movements to which I’ve referred give us shared cognitive, cultural material with which to do so.
America lags behind the rest of the developed world in this cultural progression because of a set of memes, a narrative, which creates a “safe haven” for bigotries and irrationality, an emotional packaging of them which gives them a veneer of nobility. That fortress of ideological delusions continues to resist the progress of reason and humanity. And those who are committed to reason and humanity simply take on the armies sent forth from that fortress, leaving the fortress itself intact. We need to get out our corps of engineers and work on undermining the battlements themselves, work on revealing what’s really hiding behind those walls of faux-patriotism and abused “liberty”. And we need to do so in an organized, strategic and intentional way.
I believe in the human ability to organize to accomplish great things. And I believe it’s time to organize to try to affect the zeitgeist in an intentional way, working to stimulate and liberate our collective genius, to stimulate our compassion and humanity and to lay bare and unprotected the cultural pathologies that stand in the way of our collective genius and our compassion and humanity. It’s time to work in a conscious and organized way at becoming a more conscious and humane people.
Many things have led to this moment, and have made it ripe for all rational and humane people to stand up and speak with one voice, and do so in an effective way. The struggle between those driven by fear and loathing on the one hand and those driven by hope and humanity on the other has come to a head. Both forces are at or near a peak. And those who preach hatred, those who preach irrationality, those who preach implicit inhumanity, are an embattled faction, with only residual influence on the zeitgeist.
When a fresh and inspirational young candidate was elected president in 2008 on a wave of hope and a widespread desire for the kind of change I’m referring to, the resistance rallied, fear and hatred rallied, irrationality rallied. It is a desperate and embattled opposition, crying out in the death throes of a failed ideology. We need to stop letting their anger and irrationality penetrate us, and need to smile at it indulgently, saying, “you are the past, and we are the future.”
Because by doing so, we can make it so.
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Part I: The Economy.
1) Every modern, prosperous, developed nation on Earth, without one single exception, has a large administrative infrastructure and has had a large administrative infrastructure in place since prior to participating in the historically unprecedented post-WWII expansion in the production of prosperity. Every single nation on Earth that lacks a large administrative infrastructure is an impoverished nation. No nation without a large administrative infrastructure has ever achieved post-WWII levels of prosperity and economic development. The claim, then, that such a large administrative infrastructure, which the far-right refers to as “socialism,” is incompatible with prosperity, is the precise opposite of what the empirical evidence suggests: It appears to be not only compatible with prosperity, but absolutely indispensable to prosperity.
2) Economic theory and empirical observation make clear why this is so: Due to the consequences of “transaction costs” (the costs of market transactions, such as gathering information or organizing interested parties to act as single market actors in public goods scenarios), government involvement in the modern market economy is a vital component of a robust and well functioning economy, and its absence ensures that centrally located market actors (who benefit from “information asymmetries”) will game markets to their own benefit and to the public’s often catastrophic detriment. The government helps to reduce transaction costs by investing in infrastructure and human capital development that involve a combination of high immediate costs and very long-term though extremely high benefits that is not conducive to reliance on private investment.
3) In the immediate wake of the implementation of New Deal policies, we had four years of historically unprecedented GDP growth, that only declined again immediately after budget hawks similar to the American far-right today pushed through a more conservative fiscal policy.
4) What finally ended the Great Depression and set the country and world on the most dramatic expansion of prosperity in the history of the world was the most massive public spending project in world history : WWII, in which the United States ramped up its industrial engine by producing enormous quantities of sophisticated heavy military equipment that was conveniently destroyed as fast it could be manufactured, demonstrating that even unproductive production can stimulate an economy, suggesting how much more economically beneficial investment in infrastructure can be.
5) Our period of greatest economic growth (the 1950s and 1960s) was also the period of our highest marginal tax rates, when we did, in fact, make massive investments in infrastructure (such as our interstate highways system) and scientific and technological research and development (such as the space program and the government sponsored advances in computer technology, both of which generated a plethora of economically enormously beneficial developments).
6) In the immediate wake of the stimulus spending by the Bush and Obama administrations, declining GDP turned to growing GDP and an accelerating rise in job losses turned into a decelerating rise in Job losses, literally turning the corner from the deepening collapse authored by eight years of Republican economic policies to gradual recovery within months of the resumption of a Democratic administration and sane economic policies.
7) Virtually no economists, liberal or conservative, recommend fiscal austerity during an economic contraction, and yet Tea Party lunatics, drenched in the false belief that a long-term deficit and debt problem is an immediate crisis, insist on policies that virtually every economic model shows actually INCREASES our debt while crippling our economy.
8) The overwhelming majority of professional economists do not agree with the Tea Party economic paradigm, and The Economist magazine called it “economically illiterate and disgracefully cynical.” 80% of American economists in a 2008 survey favored Democratic Party over Republican Party economic policies (and that was BEFORE the rise of the Tea Party!).
9) The Tea Party Congressional faction famously blackmailed the country with fiscally and economically nationally self-destructive default on our financial obligations (by threatening to refuse to raise the debt ceiling, which has never before been contentious and in most developed countries is automatic), in order to secure continuing tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans which even conservative economists called “indefensible.” Even though this catalyzed a damaging downgrading of our national credit rating, they seem poised, in 2013, to repeat the same self-destructive and irresponsible behavior.
10) The two greatest economic collapses of the last 100 years in America were both immediately preceded by the two highest peaks in the concentration of wealth in America in the last 100 years (in 1929 and 2008, respectively), both of which followed a decade or more of the kinds of “small government” policies favored by the right today. Following the 1929 collapse, we learned from our mistakes and used government to create a more sustainable economy. Following the 2008 collapse, the far-right has continued to try to inflict continuing economic harm on the nation, insisting on continuing the same policies which caused the economic collapse in the first place.
11) Yet despite these many compelling facts, those on the far-right not only continue to believe what is contradicted by reality, but are 100 percent certain that their ideological dogma is the indisputable truth, and are smugly dismissive of those who disagree with them.
Part II: The Constitution and the Foundational Values of the Nation.
1) The Constitution was drafted and ratified to strengthen, not weaken, the federal government, after ten years of living under the toothless Articles of Confederation. “The Federalist Papers,” a series of op-ed arguments for ratification of the Constitution written by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, largely made the case that an adequately empowered and centralized federal government was essential to the viability of the new republic. (“Federalism” was originally used to designate the political doctrine favoring a strong federal government, but has been converted by the modern right-wing to refer to the political doctrine favoring a weak federal government.)
2) Despite the frequent refrain that government taxing-and-spending is an act of federal tyranny and “unconstitutional,” the fact is that Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 of the United States Constitution grants Congress the unqualified power to tax and spend in the general welfare, the Constitutional provisions limiting that power being the ones that define our electoral process, by which we the people get to decide, through that process, whether our representatives’ interpretation of “the general welfare” is one we the people agree with. So, if “socialists” vote in a “socialist” president who taxes and spends to provide universal healthcare, or to address issues of poverty or disability or other acts of humanity as a people, that is not unconstitutional, it is not an infringement on anyone’s liberty, it is not an abuse of federal power, but is, rather, Congress doing exactly what it was empowered to do.
3) While claiming to be the great defenders of the Constitution, right-wingers are in fact the great antagonists against the Constitution, because they reject the process by which we have resolved disputes over constitutional interpretation for over two centuries (Judicial Review) and fight to reduce the Constitution to a meaningless Rorschach Test which each ideological faction claims to support whatever that ideological faction favors, thus destroying the Constitution as a functioning document.
4) While pretending to be the great bulwark against tyranny, they in fact pose the greatest threat of tyranny and against our rule of law, by insisting that they are prepared to overthrow the government if they disagree with it, and by insisting that their “liberty” requires that we siphon political economic power away from our constitutionally and democratically constrained government organized to serve the public interest and into large private corporations that are not constitutionally and democratically constrained and are organized to serve the interests of the few who own the most shares rather than of the public in general (a transferal of power to corporate interests which is essentially the definition of “fascism”).
5) The claim to be the true representatives of the will and spirit of the Founding Fathers is almost the diametrical opposite of the truth, for several reasons. For one thing, the “Founding Fathers” did not have one simplistic ideological “will” that could be so easily represented. Ben Franklin, for instance, believed that all private wealth beyond that necessary to maintain oneself and one’s family in modest fashion should revert to the public “by whose laws it was created,” by means of very high luxury and inheritance taxes. Thomas Paine believed in redistribution of wealth, through the agency of government, from the more wealthy to the less wealthy. Alexander Hamilton believed in a very strongly centralized federal government. The two things that bound our Founding Fathers together and that, in the final analysis, they universally agreed on is that people can and should govern themselves through the use of their own reason and in service to their shared humanity, and that compromise was an essential tool in doing so, two things that the modern far right most vigorously rejects. In other words, the far right, by idolizing caricatures of the Founding Fathers, does the opposite of emulating them as rational and humane people striving to create an ever-more rational and humane society.
6) While power has indeed shifted from the states to the federal government over the course of our history, at the same time (and in part by that very mechanism), real protections against the potential tyranny of government have grown far stronger than they were even at the time of the founding of the nation, when states’ rights were paramount. As stated above, the first major step in that direction was the Constitution itself, replacing the toothless Articles of Confederation with a federal framework with a strong federal government.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, at the beginning of the 19th century, made another step in that direction, instituting the doctrine of “judicial review,” which gives the Court the last word in legal and constitutional interpretation, thus ensuring that our short and ambiguous founding document has, for functional purposes, a single unambiguous interpretation that we accept as a matter of law.
The next major step was the Civil War, which increased federal power to protect the rights of individuals (in this case, slaves) from the oppression of more local (state) governments and private property owners. The New Deal nationalized our sense of economic purpose and shared fate, and our participation in WWII took that spirit abroad and ramped up our economy even further. The Eisenhower administration taxed and spent with impunity, and put in place an enormously beneficial infrastructure which led to decades of historically unprecedented growth. The Civil Rights movement, Court holdings, and Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts all continued the use of the federal government to protect individual rights against state and private violation. Kennedy used the federal government to land a man on the moon, increasing our technological prowess in ways that have also been highly beneficial. And, finally, the federal government was instrumental in the development of information technologies which have created enormous prosperity.
In the meantime, the Civil Rights amendments to the Constitution and the Court’s interpretation of the Bill of Rights have led to an extraordinary extension of our liberties and of the vigor of their protection. The Bill of Rights came to be applied as a bulwark against state and local as well as federal intrusions of individual rights and liberties. The provisions came to be read with increasing rigor, requiring ever greater due process protections (which the faux-liberty-loving right have generally opposed with equal vigor), discovering a penumbra “right to privacy” that isn’t actually explicitly stated in the Constitution, and, in general, providing ever increasing protections for individuals against governmental exercises of power.
But rather than rejoice in this advance of liberty and prosperity, the right imagines that any intrusion on private property interests and their hoarding of private wealth is the real affront to individual liberty and human rights, just as their slave-owing ideological forebears did.
Part III. Morality, Humanity and Self-Congratulatory Historical Revisionism.
1) Right-wingers dismiss the plight of the poor, most of whom work long hours in low-paying jobs, as a function of their own defects and laziness, and insist that it is morally unacceptable for us as a society to assume any shared responsibility to address social issues such as poverty, hunger, homelessness, the special needs of the disabled, and unnecessary and unjust human suffering in general.
2) They do so despite the fact that every other developed nation on Earth has done a far better job than us of reducing poverty, reducing economic inequality, and reducing the myriad social problems associated with poverty and economic inequality.
3) They revise history so as to define every historical movement that is now broadly condemned to have been “left-wing movements,” such as their conversion of Nazism –a political ideology and regime which hated communists, labor unions, intellectuals, journalists, the poor, and “foreigners” living within the country, favored policies which concentrated wealth and power into constitutionally and democratically unconstrained corporate hands, and relied on an ultra-nationalism stoked up with lots of jingoism and “patriotic” rhetoric and imagery– into a left-wing movement, and their main argument why this is so is because “National Socialism” has the word “Socialism” in its name (much as the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, a Soviet client state, must have been a Democratic Republic, since it’s right there in the name, right?).
4) They revel in the (accurate) facts that the Republican Party freed the slaves while the Democratic Party was closely associated with the KKK, always implying that that alignment continues today. They neglect to mention (or recognize) that, in the wake of The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which LBJ (a Democrat) was as closely associated with as Obama is with The Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), southern whites (and northern white racists) abandoned the Democratic Party en masse and migrated to the Republican Party, which is why implicit and explicit racism now resides almost exclusively in the Republican Party, with the map of Tea Party strongholds closely corresponding to the map of the Confederacy, and with so many Tea Party policy positions containing so much implicit racism (e.g., voter suppression laws, opposition to any form of affirmative action, hyperbolic disdain for the first African American president, contempt for Latin American migrants, etc.).
Part IV: Guns, Violence, and a Reactive rather than Proactive Society.
1) The United States has the second highest homicide rate among 36 OECD nations (beaten only by Mexico, which “benefits” from a constant flood of our firearms crossing the border to fuel their problem), from 2 to 25 times the homicide rate of 33 of the 35 other OECD other nations.
2) In both domestic comparisons of homicide rates across all jurisdictions and cross-national comparisons of homicide rates in developed countries, there is a positive correlation between per capita legal gun ownership and homicide rates.
3) The overwhelming majority of firearms used in the commission of crimes in The United States are put into circulation by initially being legally purchased in those states with the laxest regulations, and entering the black market from there, through which they are distributed to all locales in the country due to the complete absence of any obstructions to the transportation of good across state and municipal borders.
4) As a statistical fact, a legally, privately owned firearm is many times more likely to be involved in EACH of the following than to be successfully used in self-defense: suicide, accidental shooting death, mistaken shooting death (not an accidental discharge or hunting accident, but an intentional shooting at an innocent person mistaken for an intruder or a threat), crime of passion and use as part of a cycle of domestic violence.
5) As a statistical fact, a firearm in the home has a greater likelihood of being the instrument of death of a member of the household or of an innocent visitor than to be used in self-defense, and the owner of a firearm is more likely to be the victim of gun violence than a non-owner of a firearm.
6) We, as a nation, have the highest absolute number and highest percentage of our population incarcerated of ANY nation on Earth, making us in a very literal sense the least free nation on Earth.
7) This high incarceration rate is in part a function of a right-wing retributive orientation, which believes that the world is neatly divided between the “good guys” and the “bad guys,” and that if the good guys are just better armed against the bad guys, and lock the bad guys up or execute the bad guys, we’ll be a more peaceful and law-abiding society as a result.
8) The right, in other words, believes that the more we threaten one another –with decentralized deadly violence, with incarceration, with capital punishment– the more we will reduce violence against innocent victims, despite the empirical evidence that the opposite is true.
9) When an unarmed black teen walking home from the store (Trayvon Martin) was shot to death by an armed vigilante out looking for people to “defend” himself against (George Zimmerman), the right tried to dismiss this as irrelevant to the question of whether being an armed society of fearful and angry people out looking for people to “defend” themselves against is really such a good idea. They insisted that if it was legally self-defense in the moment of the use of deadly force (as it may or may not have been), then there can be no basis for criticizing the policies and ideology that encouraged the creation of the need to use deadly force, neglecting to recognize the fact that the entire encounter was a function of Zimmerman choosing to go out with a gun and look for people to “defend” himself against, and neglecting to notice the implications of his choosing to “defend” himself against an unarmed black teen walking home from the store. Following this incident, numerous right-wing posts on Facebook showed “scary” black criminals as some kind of a justification for whites going out with guns, pursuing unarmed black teens, and shooting them to death.
10) Those societies that have a more proactive and less reactive orientation –that recognize that we affect the propensity and ability to commit violent acts by the cultural milieu that we create together, that recognize that taking better care of one another and providing more social justice and less destitution, and making access to instruments of deadly violence less rather than more easy , by reducing the flood of instruments of deadly violence and the idolization of instruments of deadly violence which in part define our society— have far lower rates of deadly violence than we do, far lower rates of incarceration, far lower rates of poverty and other social ills, healthier and (according to self-report survey studies) happier populations.
11) Unfortunately, the far-right in America insists that to recognize our interdependence, to be an aspirational and hopeful rather than fearful and angry society, to be proactive and caring rather than reactive and retributive, would be an affront to their “liberty,” and thus opposes such progress in an obviously preferable direction, a direction which is more humane and productive and life-affirming.
Part V: Their Ideology’s Historical Predecessors.
1) The abuse of the concept of “liberty” to mean the liberty to benefit disproportionately from an unjust system which results in a grossly unjust distribution of wealth and opportunity, the identification of the federal government as a threat to that “liberty” and a tyrant because of it, is an ideology that has existed as long as our country has existed.
2) This conflation of the concepts of “liberty” and “property,” and the related reduction of “liberty” to a socially irresponsible license to exploit and oppress others for one’s own benefit, was originally the ideology of Southern Slave owners, who insisted that their liberty to own slave was being threatened by the tyrannical federal government, an ideology explicated in John C. Calhoun’s “Union and Liberty,” in which he argued that the “minority” (southern slave owners) had to be protected from the majority who were trying to infringe on their “liberty” to own slaves.
3) It continued to be used by Southern Segregationists, who argued that any attempt to end Jim Crow and ensure the civil rights of discriminated against groups would be an infringement on their freedom.
4) In fact, when LBJ was instrumental in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the result was the movement of racists from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, where they now reside.
5) Rand Paul said that he would not have been able to support the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The abolition of slavery (even to the point of having to use years of military force) and the passage of laws protecting African Americans and others from discrimination in the public sphere were both federal governmental exercises of power.
6) The Right currently favors Jim Crow-like voter suppression laws based on a discredited pretext, dismisses as irrelevant the shooting death of an unarmed black teen walking home from the store by an armed vigilante out looking for people to defend himself against, opposes laws which address a historical legacy of an inequality of opportunity in America which disproportionately effects those categories of people who have been most historically discriminated against, speak in words and tones highly reminiscent of our nationally embarrassing McCarthyist witch trial era, and, in general, demonstrate that they are simply the current incarnation of an old historical perennial.
7) When confronted by those who disagree with them, people they constantly vilify and refuse to engage in any constructive national discourse with, they react with great hostility, their primary argument generally being that the act of presenting the factual and logical and moral errors in their ideology to them is an insult that cannot be tolerated.
Part VI: Their Short-Sighted, Socially Disintegrative and Globally Destructive Ideology.
1) Those on the far-right dismiss as a bastion of liberal bias precisely those professions that methodically gather, verify, analyze and contemplate information, thus insulating their dogma from any intrusion of fact and reason. (It’s no wonder, then, that only 6% of American scientists self-identify as Republican, and only 9% as conservative, compared to 55% as Democrat and 52% as liberal. 14% identify themselves as “very liberal,” over 50% more than those who identify themselves as merely “conservative.)
2) By doing so, they are able to dismiss scientific insights into the potentially catastrophic impact we are having on global natural systems through our unchecked accelerating exploitation of Nature in service to our immediate appetites and avarice, an exploitation which is converting us from fellow symbiotes in a sustainable biosphere into deadly parasites killing the host on which we are feeding.
3) Consistent with the general tone and tenor of their entire ideological package, this rejection of methodological thought and short-sighted commitment to immediate self-gratification, at the expense of others, at the expense of our planet, at the expense of our future, is an expression of a primal unmindfulness rather than the more mindful engagement with the world that we are capable of. It is a vestige of primitive inclinations rather than a progress into a more fully conscious existence on this planet. It is the rejection of the shared human endeavor that had begun to define us, a shared reaching for what we are capable of creating together, a shared commitment to reason and humanity.
Conclusion.
This is, of course, a very partial list of the logical, factual, and moral fallacies that define the modern Far-Right. It is a single folly comprised of innumerable dimensions, including the failure to invest in children and families and communities, to value the health and welfare of our population, to have compassion and respect for those who migrate towards opportunity and do our hardest and least pleasant jobs for us for the lowest wages. It includes the disdain for gays and lesbians and transgender people, for Muslims and atheists and all those who differ in any way which triggers any number of deep and hateful bigotries. It includes the movement for an American Theocracy similar to those in the Middle East, in which Fundamentalist Christians strive to turn the state into a vehicle for their tyrannical religious fanaticism.
All of these multiple dimensions of far-right-wing folly and barbarism are part of a single, coherent package, an ideology of fear and hatred, of a variety of in-group/out-group biases and bigotries, an ideology which insists that we must not govern ourselves in ways which promote human welfare but only in ways which react brutally to the failure to do so, an ideology which eschews more effective and less costly preventions in favor of less effective and more costly reactions to problems left to fester and grow. It is an ideology which refuses to allow us, as a society, to invest in our future, to recognize our interdependence and our responsibilities to one another as human beings, and to work together intelligently and humanely in service to our collective welfare.
They’re on the wrong side of fact, the wrong side of reason, the wrong side of morality, and the wrong side of history. And they’re smug about it. We, as a nation and a world, do need a moderately conservative voice to be a vital participant in our national dialogue, but we all need to subordinate such ideological leanings to a shared commitment to being rational and humane people, wise enough to know that we don’t know much, working together to do the best we can in a complex and subtle world. While all of us fall short of that commitment to some degree and at some times, when factions form that demonstrate a consistent determination to be the diametrical opposite of rational and humane participants in a shared national endeavor, those factions become the problem we must solve rather than participants in our effort to solve it.
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Here is my most recent comment on the conservative gun-idolater thread that has inspired many of my recent posts, in response to the somewhat correct allegation that it has devolved into nothing more than a shouting match:
A shouting match between fact and reason, clearly stated, on the one hand, and blind fanatical dogma, repeated endlessly despite being debunked (e.g., the constant insistence that any and all gun regulation is by definition an infringement of your Second Amendment rights, despite a universal rejection of that notion by Constitutional scholars, including uber-conservaitve Justice Scalia, as quoted above), on the other. You live in a world of fabrication in service to crude prejudices and bigotries and belligerence toward the world, and abhor those who stand for reason and for humanity. You invent your own caricature of the law and of the Constitution, your own caricature of history, your own reality, and then laugh like jackals when confronted by the reality you have simply defined out of existence.
You can persist, pretend, and posture to your heart’s content; it will only serve to convince those who are already as lost as you in your own shared arbitrary ideological delusions that the idols of your tribe are undisputable absolute truths, and to convince those who are not that you are yet another dangerous, violent cult posing as a political ideology. The fact that you are a large and well-established cult does not make you a benign one, or even one of mixed value. You are organized ignorance and brutality, a familiar perennial of human history, always popping up anew, with one shared constant: Rabid anti-intellectualism. You share that with the Inquisition, the Nazis, the Soviets, the Khmer Rouge, and Islamic terrorists, to name a few. You are on the side of ignorance and tribalistic ideological brutality, in opposition to reason and humanity.
The most telling distinction is that, by your own account, precisely those professions that methodically gather, verify, analyze and contemplate information are the ones you dismiss as bastions of liberal bias, without ever addressing why that would be so. Why would there be a positive correlation between the professional processing of fact and logic, on the one hand, and liberalism, on the other? The answer, while complex, is rooted in the fact that active and curious minds, immersed in observation and thought and the use of disciplined reason, tend to arrive at conclusions diametrically opposed to your dogma, because your dogma stands for the opposite of such modes of thought.
You stand in opposition to fact and reason and a commitment to humanity, which is why you simply ignore and dismiss the avalanche of statistics debunking the obviously absurd notion that there is no connection between our overabundance and overly easy access to instruments of deadly violence in comparison to other developed nations, and our extraordinarily high rates of deadly violence in comparison to other developed nations.
And the fact that there is a statistical correlation between laxity of gun laws internationally and homicide rates? The fact that the overwhelming majority of guns used in the commission of crimes in the US are put into circulation by being bought in those states with the laxest regulations? The fact that for every use of a gun in self-defense, one is used multiple times in a suicide, multiple times in a crime of passion, multiple times in an accidental shooting; the fact that a gun in the home INCREASES the likelihood of a member of that householder dying of a gun-inflicted wound; the fact that a gun-owner is more likely to be shot than a non-gun-owner, are all, to you, “spurious statistics” that you dismiss with the casual misuse of the word, thus never having to consider or acknowledge inconvenient realities. That’s not rational. It’s the intentional preservation of ignorance.
No, the problem is not just, or even primarily, a function of our gun culture; it is, more broadly, a function of extreme individualism, of the reactive rather than proactive orientation to our shared existence that you impose on us, of the social disintegration that you confuse for “liberty.” Our Founding Fathers were committed to the construction of a wise and just society; you are committed to its destruction.
The fact that you are certain that the Constitution verifies every last ideological conviction you happen to hold, and that therefore the thousands of legal and constitutional scholars over the last two hundred years who would and have argued subtle and complex points about that Constitution and how to interpret it are all wrong, are all irrelevant, because you know the one absolute truth, is the voice of ignorance, the voice of fanaticism, the voice of irrationality. You argue legal positions that are dismissed or challenged by almost all legal scholars, economic positions that are dismissed or challenged by almost all professional economists, historical positions that are dismissed or challenged by almost all professional historians, and not only commit the intellectual error of clinging to those positions as favored by reason, but insist that they are incontrovertible absolute truths. That is not the voice of reason, but rather of irrationality.
Of course you couldn’t stop engaging me, because you can’t stand to leave fact and reason disinterred and visible to all any more than I can stand to let you shovel unchallenged the dirt of your ignorance and barbarism over it once again. You have to bury the facts; you have to bury the rational arguments; you have to bury any authentic understanding of human history or economics or sociology; you have to bury any humane orientation to the world, because none of those supports your blind ideological fanaticisms.
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On a Facebook thread condemning President Obama for signing the Continuing Resolution with a rider protecting Monsanto from law suits, my defense of the President (pointing out that he really had to sign the CR and that all bills that come to his desk have unsavory riders in them) received some vitriolic responses from a couple of rabbidly anti-GMO activists. When I then mentioned that I am more agnostic on the issue of GMOs themselves, because I don’t think the evidence weighs so unambiguously against them as these particular activists maintained, their vitriol was ratcheted up even more.
As a result, I made the following post on my own Facebook page:
Here’s an interesting lesson in political advocacy: Don’t go out of your way to alienate people who share your general concerns but honestly differ on the particular analysis. On a thread about “Monsanto-gate,” when I mentioned that I’m agnostic about GMOs due to the many benefits on the plus side of the leger (reduced erosion, reduced pesticide and herbicide and fertilizer demands, thus reduced run-off and groundwater contamination, increased food production per acre, increased resilience, etc.) and the relatively few on the negative side, two anti-GMO zealots attacked with such venom that, despite myself, I’m a bit less agnostic now: I’m more pro-GMO than I was before!
It reminds me of a line from Robert Whitaker’s “Anatomy of an Epidemic,” about the harm done by overprescription of psychiatric drugs. He mentioned that the pharmaceutical industry could have paid the Scientologists (and Tom Cruise) to take the position against psychiatric drugs that they did, because it made a basically rational position look like one that only fanatical zealots support.
A long and productive discussion ensued, at the end of which, in response to various comments on both threads, I wrote the following:
Human beliefs and emotions are much like viruses, spreading through the population more or less robustly for a variety of reasons. The British biologist Richard Dawkins dubbed these cognitive-emotional viruses “memes,” because they mirror genes in how they reproduce and spread and evolve.As a general rule, memes that are motivated by hope and love and compassion are good ones to spread, and memes that are motivated by fear and hatred and anger are bad ones to spread. This isn’t always true, because some fears are legitimate, but whenever a meme is or a set of memes are spreading due to fear or anger, it’s a good time for folks to step back and be very, very introspective and self-critical about what memes they are latching onto and spreading. The human tendency toward panics should always give us pause and make us question our own certainties and our own “hysterias” (despite the sexist etymology of that word, there’s no other that quite captures the same flavor of meaning).As some of you know (and as I hope not to rehash here in relation to the specific issue I referred to), I think that we are overly certain even about some things for which there is considerable evidence, because though the world is extraordinarily complex and subtle, we tend to gravitate too quickly to certainty and dwell too briefly in uncertainty. We have to be careful not to let wise uncertainty become an unwise position against action based on the best available knowledge, but we should not feel the need to be certain in order to act, a psychological need which is exacerbated by the political demand to take strong positions. (A person who advocates for a political position while admitting to uncertainty undermines him-or-herself in public discourse.)In a more rational world (or with more rational participants in a conversation or debate), the opposite is true: Too much certainty undermines one’s credibility. On the original thread, one commenter (not one of the two belligerent ones) suggested that we are breeding super-pests with GMOs, because of their genetically built-in pesticides. (As an aside, I’m not sure how GMOs do this more so than the traditional use of pesticides does it, and would think that GMOs might do it less so.) Then he made what I consider a rhetorical mistake: He insisted that it was a certainty, and clearly and indisputably a catastrophe in the making.It’s a good point and a legitimate concern, but I am not convinced that it is quite as dispositive as he assumes. For instance, as he noted, the same argument can be made for the use of antibiotics, and, indeed, controlling the worldwide overuse of antibiotics has become particularly urgent for this very reason. But I would not consider it to have been a good thing to have nipped in the bud the use of antibiotics by a movement informed with such foresight a century or so ago.I tend to look at the world a little differently, through a more inclusive and organic paradigm which sees even human foibles as catalysts in a much larger evolutionary process. Yes, it’s true, the more dramatic our manipulations of nature, the greater the risk of catastrophic cascades, but it’s also good to remember that people have been predicting the human-induced destruction of the world for millennia. The world has always been on the verge of catastrophic collapse, with every new innovation throughout human history. Every single time.The reality of complex dynamical systems is that they’re very adaptive. They reorder themselves around even dramatic changes. That’s not to say we should be blithely indifferent to the potential consequences of our actions, but it does provide an often overlooked counterpoint to the ubiquitous predictions of inevitable catastrophe.My point here is that we would benefit from more uncertainty, and more interest in exploring the complexities and subtleties of the world we live in. The two women who were extremely vitriolic and offensive with me were that way because I had challenged an article of faith, and when you challenge people’s articles of faith, they become very angry. We could use less anger in the world, and we could use fewer articles of faith. Then, from that foundation of wise uncertainty, we could have the most informed and informative of national debates on all topics of importance to our shared existence, and do a far better job of aligning our policies to those which are best recommended by reason in service to humanity.
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The following is a response to a Facebook commenter who insisted that legislators are no longer obeying the dictates of the Constitution:
First, we have to start with a clearer understanding of the real nature and purpose of the US Constitution.
Despite right-wing claims to the contrary, it’s purpose was not primarily “to limit the federal government,” but rather to define and strengthen it. Yes, part of defining it involves limiting it, but the modern notion that that was the primary purpose is, in a sense, the exact opposite of the historical reality. The Constitutional Convention was called due to the inability of the toothless Articles of Confederation to bind the nation together and overcome internal collective action problems. The Constitution was drafted to strengthen the federal government and impose a consolidating federal rule of law that had teeth. “The Federalist Papers,” which are a series of op-ed pieces by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay arguing for ratification of the Constitution, are mostly arguments about why a strong federal government is necessary.
The drafters were not all of like mind, but were in fact sharply divided on multiple issues (slavery being the most famous one). Franklin, for instance (who was the senior statesman of the new nation and second in respect commanded among the Founding Fathers themselves only to Washington), favored very high inheritance and luxury taxes, and a redistribution of private wealth beyond that necessary to maintain oneself and one’s family in modest fashion to the public sector for use in public projects and benefits (not to the poor, a form of public redistribution Franklin didn’t particularly favor). Hamilton and Adams favored a very strong central government, with a national bank and national control of economic and fiscal policy. So the modern reduction of the Constitution, beyond its letter, to one ideological camp’s insistence of what “the intention of the founding fathers” was is a convenient fiction and not very helpful.
The drafters of the Constitution did not generally expect it to survive more than a generation or two, knowing that changing times and circumstances would increasingly challenge its relevance. The fact that it has survived 225 years is a miracle, and should be considered with an awareness of how dramatically challenged and attenuated the foresight of these brilliant but merely historical and mortal individuals really has become.
The Constitution is not a precise document. It is very short and general, intentionally, so that legislators then and in the future would have room within it to operate and respond to circumstances. Many terms are not precisely defined (such as “due process,” for instance); there is wide space for interpretation of many clauses. The jurisprudence of this nation is a function of that ambiguity and that range of possible interpretation.
Ironically, one of the least ambiguous clauses in the Constitution is one that the right is most eager to re-interpret out of existence. Article I, Section 8, clause 1 states, without qualification, that Congress is empowered to tax and spend in the general welfare. This clause clearly means that it is left to our democratic (“electoral,” if you prefer) political processes and not to the Constitution or to foundational law to determine how much and in what ways citizens are taxed (as long as it is uniform) or how much or in what ways government spends in service to the general welfare. And yet the right constantly cites taxing-and-spending as their evidence of a “tyranny” that is an affront to our Constitution. It’s one of many ideological absurdities.
Because of this ambiguity, the Constitution would have been nothing more than a political football, a Rorschach Test for each partisan or ideologue to imprint their own preference upon, and thus something the meaning of which no one ever agreed on and therefore that each party, once in power, would interpret and implement according to their own preferred –and frequently highly stretched- interpretation. In other words, without a procedural anchor for interpretation, without a “last word” (short of the public’s “last word” to amend it), there could have been no functioning Constitution at all. Thankfully, Chief Justice John Marshall, in Marbury v. Madison, at the beginning of the 19th Century, managed to institute the procedural anchor of “judicial review,” which empowered the courts, and, as a last resort, The Supreme Court, with the final authority in Constitutional interpretation. By that mechanism, we have an “unambiguous” Constitution, at least in the functional sense.
And that brings us to your error. You think that the state and federal legislatures no longer are operating within the constraints of the Constitution because your own interpretation, ideologically tinged and at times grossly distorted, does not conform to current practices. But you don’t have the final word on legal and Constitutional interpretation; the Court does. And while I disagree with many of its holdings, they are usually if not always legally defensible, and usually if not always very thoroughly reasoned and articulated. (I might endorse one more layer of oversight, in which the academy of constitutional scholars has some ability to call the Supreme Court to task on any particular holding, if it appears to be an egregiously indefensible holding, due to the possibility of a completely politicized Court, no longer committed to the faithful application of legal analysis to questions of law, and a need to be vigilant against that.)
What you prefer, that the Constitution always be interpreted as you see fit, is not a defense of our Constitution, but rather a frontal assault on it, because every ideologue of every stripe desires the same thing, though their respective interpretations are in diametrical opposition to one another. A real commitment to our Constitution, and to the rule of law that it forms the anchor of, is to also remain committed to our procedures for giving that Constitution a functional viability, the most crucial of which is judicial review.
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The following is an unedited and unabridged (other than to exclude the names of the participants) exchange that I engaged in on Facebook this morning. I share it because I think it illustrates the underlying dilemma in public discourse, that rational arguments cannot penetrate the fortifications of entrenched dogmatic displacements of reality.
In this case, an argument one poster made about what they perceived to be liberal hypocrisy was thoroughly debunked by a close examination of the two cases being compared, and of the legal and Constitutional issues involved. That examination was then ignored, a repetition of outright error in the representation of what the Constitutional protection of speech entails (and doesn’t entail) clung to, and the ideologues went blithely on their way, not in mere error, but in entrenched and, in a sense, intentional error.
An opportunity was provided, in the course of the exchange, for the original poster and fellow commenter to make a narrower and more defensible argument. Instead of either accepting this opportunity or admitting that they’re argument was in fact the broader and more indefensible one, they both proceeded to conflate the two, baiting-and-switching between them, using the more defensible one as a trojan horse (that I had provided them with!), but still trying to smuggle in the less defensible one along with it (while insisting that they weren’t).
This is an illustration of the two-pronged real political and cultural divide in America today: 1) That between dogmatic ideologues of any stripe, and those who attempt to consider the challenges we face in a systematic and rational way; and 2) that between those who, on the one hand, think in more tribalistic terms, with more narrowly defined in-groups and a broader array of out-groups, and a variety of biases and attributions that favor in-groups and disfavor outgroups, and those who, on the other, are more inclusive and more humanistic. The overall tendency is for those who are more dogmatic to be more tribalistic (though not always so), and those who are more analytical to be more humanistic.
Commenter 1:
I find it ironic that the people advocating equal rights for all today, were the same people trying to destroy the Chik-fil-A people for exercising their free speech rights last August.
Simply put, these “rights” advocates were upset at the free speech offered by those associated with the restaurant and didn’t approve of the result of first amendment rights. Do they support equality for all or do they not?
I would take these folks more seriously if they were more consistent in their own personal walk. As someone once said, “My eyes see better than my ears hear”.
Steve Harvey:
Respectfully, there are demonstrable flaws in your reasoning. You have to put the following facts together (as in a syllogistic argument) to see them:
1) “Free speech” refers to freedom from governmental infringement, not private. It does not mean that protected speech is protected from the consequences of offending others. If you were to preach racial hatred, and your business were to suffer because too many potential customers found that offensive, that would not be an infringement on your right to free speech, but rather a consequence of your choice in what to say.
2) Beginning with the Civil War, abolition of slavery, and the 13th and 14th Amendments, we as a people began to identify certain liberty issues that do involve protection from private oppressors as well as from the government (and from state and local as well as from federal government). Perhaps the clearest expression of this came with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when we (through our Representatives) passed legislation which protected African Americans from certain kinds of private sector racial discrimination, such as discrimination in hiring and in choosing who to serve.
3) Unless you want to argue either that speech should be protected from the private and otherwise legal reactions of those who are offended by it or that we should not extend equal rights protections against certain identifiable categories of people to protection against private sector discrimination, comparing instances of these two issues is comparing apples and oranges: One does not involve protection from otherwise legal reactions to speech by private citizens, and the other does include protection from otherwise legal forms of discrimination on the part of private citizens.
4) At this point, that isn’t even the issue (though it soon will be, and occasionally has been). The arguments being considered by the Supreme Court today involve the constitutionality of governmental discrimination against a category of people; can the state (yesterday’s case) and federal (today’s) government constitutionally discriminate against homosexuals by denying them the right to marry one another? It doesn’t involve protection from private sector discrimination at all, whereas your contentions about the Chick-Fil-A reaction involve private citizens choosing not to patronize an establishment whose advocacy for discrimination they find offensive, and encouraging others of like mind to do the same. So, at this point, you are comparing an issue of governmental discrimination against a class of citizens with an issue of private sector reaction to the choice of political positions of a business establishment. The two issues are logically incomparable on multiple dimensions.
5) In the near future, the question of private sector discrimination against gays will come front and center. When it does, it still won’t be comparable to the Chick-Fil-A example, for the reasons given above: One involves a private sector reaction to speech it finds offensive, and one involves private sector discrimination against a systematically discriminated against category of people. You can try to make the argument at that point that the category of people should not be protected from private sector adverse reaction, because others have the right to find their choice offensive, just as in the Chick-fil-A example. The counterargument is that they are different species of cases, because one involves the reaction of private citizens to speech it finds offensive in individual cases, while the other involves systematic discrimination against a category of people on the basis of who and what they inherently are. We can have that debate, but there is absolutely nothing logically or ethically inconsistent between maintaining the position that Chick-Fil-A should not be patronized by people who respect the rights of gays and the belief that the rights of gays to be protected from private sector discrimination should be the law of the land.
Commenter 2:
Steve Harvey: It is incredible! Free Speech is OK as long as you agree with it. Hummm….Otherwise it is discrimination…. Let’s see I have sworn an oath to support the constitution and that includes all of it! Not just the parts I agree with and that includes all opinions, not just those that I agree with. If you don’t like what a private business is doing or saying, then don’t go. If you don’t like what you see on TV then turn the channel or turn it off.. It applies equally to all, regardless !
Commenter 1:
Simply put, the “equality” bunch wants…rights equality. Except for those they don’t agree with. Thats where “rights” end. When it comes to the protected free speech from the Chick-fil-A CEO, the equality crowd tried to mow him down into silence. They don’t care about equal rights for all. They care only about equal rights for those that share their world view.
Odd. I just don’t remember the “equality for all” crowd making noise last year in defending Chick-fil-A and their right of free speech. Hummmmm. Why is that? Couldn’t be that they don’t really want everyone to have the right of free speech do they?
Steve Harvey:
Again, “free speech” refers to freedom from governmental infringement, and I staunchly support it in all circumstances, whether I agree or not. But it does not mean that a person is protected from the adverse reaction of others to what they choose to say. A boss will not be prosecuted for firing an employee who routinely says to him, “Good morning, asshole.” That’s not what free speech means. No one violated Chick-fil-A’s Constitutional rights, because there was no governmental infringement on their right to free speech. Had there been, I’d stand side-by-side with you in opposition to that Constitutional violation.If Nazis rally, others can speak out about how offensive they find it, and can refuse to patronize the businesses of those Nazis. People are free to be offended, and to choose what businesses to patronize or not in part on the basis of what they find offensive. The first Amendment does not protect people from non-governmental consequences of their speech. Your repeated and persistent insistence to the contrary is disingenuous and annoying.Conversely, the Constitution DOES protect the equal rights of all under the law. I laid it out very systematically, and made very clear the distinctions you are choosing to ignore. You can continue to pretend they don’t exist, but that becomes at this point not an error in comprehension, but an assertion of self-imposed ideological delusion. I’ll unfollow this now, because clearly fact and reason will gain no foothold here.
Commenter 1:
I don’t read anyone making the point that no consequences arise from free speech or expression. That’s a separate argument not related to the first amendment.
Commenter 2:
Never Once has anyone said that standing for your rights would not produce adverse affects. That being said, Standing for your right as a business owner to refuse service to anyone will have an effect on your business, it is up to you and your freedom to decide whether to make that stand or not. IE: Dixie Chicks and their low sales, they chose to speak out and it had an effect on their record sales. Again, if you don’t like what the Chick-fil-a people are saying, then just as the Nazi’s you may be offended, that is your right. Do with that as you please, but don’t tell me or anyone else that they violated anybodies rights!! That is asinine, I don’t have the RIGHT to Chick-fil-A or any other service offered by a private company. Wow. It is your right to express your opinions but you need to take and should take responsibility for that opinion, even if it means less business. It is mind-boggling how you have twisted the reality of our freedoms.
Steve Harvey:
Let’s make a distinction here: there were a few cases of local governmental action against Chick-fil-A which I agree that, arguably, were a violation of First Amendment free speech rights (it depends, again, on whether we interpet equal protection laws to extend to gays, in which case a business that not only speaks but discriminates against members of that group would be in violation of the law. I don’t know whether Chick-fil-A discriminated in its practices). But you seemed to be referring to the more widespread public reaction to Chick-fil-A, which is in no way a violation of Chick-fil-A’s rights.
Other people’s free speech rights allow them to speak out against speech they disagree with. If you are isolating your remarks to governmental action against Chick-fil-A, then you have a limited point, though it applies only to those who vocally supported those governmental actions, not to all those who spoke out against Chick-fil-A’s position and political actions.
So, are you both referring ONLY to those who both advocated GOVERNMENTAL ACTION against Chick-fil-A, and not all those who simply spoke out against Chick-fil-A’s political position? If so, I apologize for having misunderstood you. Or are you saying what you appeared to be saying, and then denying it while repeating it? In that case, I stand by my above comments about entrenched and intentional irrationality.
Commenter 1:
Quit playing dumb in an effort to sow discord. You know the point of the post. Keep throwing out straw man arguments if you wish. Unlike the equality crowd, I won’t try to silence you.
Steve Harvey:
No, I thought I knew the point of the above post, but I’m seeking clarification. Are you referring only to those who support government action against Chick-fil-A, or to all those who exercised their own First Amendment right and spoke out against Chick-fil-A’s political activities against gays? If the former, then you have a point, about those people only. If the latter, then you don’t, for the reasons I expressed. If you can’t say which, then you are trying to insulate a debunked argument from the rational and legally informed argument that debunked it. Take your pick.
Commenter 2:
WOW….Ok, it applies to both….Wouldn’t be an issue if the PEOPLE SPEAKING out weren’t calling for government action against Chick-Fil-A. When they are confronted with the pure truth, that is that I/WE/WHOEVER has the right to say whatever they want as long as it isn’t violating anyones rights. Unfortunately, these people, see themselves as the ones and the only ones who have a right to express an opinion and on top of the demand government intervention simply because they feel they are right and the other is wrong. If anyone can’t see that then they need to pull their heads out of the sand…well I was thinking of another place..Simple truth, if Chick-Fil-A violated the law, then they should be held accountable with due process, not simple jumping in by anyone no less the government.
Commenter 1:
Remember the Mayors of several large cities were pronouncing that they would never again allow a Chick-fil-A to be built in “their” city? Sounds like government suppression of free speech rights to me. Once again, where was the “equality for all” bunch on that discrimination?
NOTE: This discussion is not about gay rights. It’s about equal rights. Including free speech, shared inheritance, hospital visits etc. I’m just challenging some hypocritical behavior.
Steve Harvey:
You have to pick one or the other: Either you insist that it implies to both, and therefore that the freedom of speech of those who oppose chick-fil-A’s policies aren’t protected in your view, or it applies only to those who advocated governmental action. You are stating two mutually exclusive positions at the same time, in order to defend your main one which is in error from the fact that it is in error by switching to the one that isn’t just long enough to insulate yourself from the counterarguments against the one that is. And so, I return to my statement above: Fact and reason will gain no foothold here.
As I said (Commenter 1), if you’re referring only to those mayors and to those who supported their position, then you may have a point. But you keep trying to expand that point to those who aren’t those mayors and didn’t support their position. I am only asking you to make clear which it is, which you are consistently refusing to do, in order to cling to a debunked argument.
Commenter 2:
exactly! Freedom of speech and equal rights. Not a difficult concept unless you chose to twist it to deny others of theirs!
Steve Harvey:
You’re not challenging hypocritical behavior, but rather challenging perfectly consistent behavior by making what is itself a hypocritical argument and then trying to insulate it from criticism by switching back and forth between that hypocritical argument and a more valid one.
Are you arguing that it is hypocritical to have spoken out against Chick-fil-A’s anti-gay agenda, and to have supported the equal protection of gays’ right to marry, or aren’t you? If you aren’t, all you have to do is state that you did not mean to imply that those who spoke out against Chick-fil-A and encouraged others of like mind not to patronize them are hypocritical for also supporting equal protection of gays’ right to marry. End of discussion. If you can’t make that clarification, simply and explicitly, then it is you, rather than those you are accusing, who are the hypocrites here. (Not least for suggesting that my arguing against your false accusation of liberal hypocrisy in this case is an act of “sowing discord,” as if the accusation itself was no such thing.)
Commenter 1:
Steve: The “equality for all” tribe did not simply speak out against CFA, they tried to silence them and destroy their livelihood. Yet again, you present a straw man to try to change the argument.
Steve Harvey:
Steve, again, you can characterize the speech of those you disagree with as “trying to destroy the livelihood” of those they are speaking out against, but if it is not the government doing so, it is still their First Amendment free speech right to do so.
In an act of real (as opposed to imagined) hypocrisy, you are dismissing Chick-fil-A’s contributions of large sums of money to groups that organize to prevent the advancement of gay rights as harmless “free speech” which is to be protected not just FROM government, but also BY government against others who would also exercise their own free speech rights, while insisting that the free speech of those others is an attempt to harm the party with whom you are more ideologically aligned.
Reason and logical consistency are simply not on your side here, and you can either continue to tap dance around that, or, improbably, exercise your own rational faculties and admit that that is the case and that you have made a logically fallacious argument. Your misuse of the term “strawman,” to dismiss an argument that is precisely on-point and precisely directed at what you actually and clearly are arguing, does not remedy the logical fallacies of your own argument.
It is you, and not I or other liberals who criticized and encouraged one another not to patronize Chick-fil-A, who are engaging in hypocrisy here, by insisting that free speech protects Chick-fil-A from adverse reactions among potential customers but does not protect the right of those who simply criticize and encourage others of like mind not to patronize an establishment dedicated to anit-gay political activism, and that speaking out against and boycotting a business for anti-gay political activism while advocating for legal recognition of 14th Amendment equal protection rights for gays’ right to marry is somehow hypocritical. There is no “strawman” argument in that response to your post, just a cogent and incisive debunking of your own inconsistencies.
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This 9News interview of Governor Hickenlooper (CO) is likely to excite a lot of commentary and speculation (and already has begun to), especially under the circumstances. I think it’s important to view it in context: Hickenlooper’s friend and cabinet member was just murdered by, as it turns out, the son of an old friend of his, a lousy and emotionally trying situation for any person to be in, and especially an elected official.
As a public official, microphones are in his face constantly, every word and reaction scrutinized. He has, in general, learned to do what all successful politicians learn to do: Parse words, censor himself to a far greater extent than most have to, and restrain his reactions. Under the personal and public stress of this high profile murder of a friend by the son of another friend, knowing that this is exactly the kind of tantalizing scenario that the press and the public both salivate over, he was asked repeatedly (despite a complete lack of any evidence to suggest any involvement) whether he had anything to hide, something that would offend most people to some extent, though, as a politician, he’s expected to be accustomed to this and not to show his annoyance. Instead, he had a quintessentially human moment, and simply expressed his exasperation. It’s not evidence of malfeasance, but rather of having had his endurance worn down by events, and having let the mask of perfect political restraint slip for a moment.
People claim they want their politicans to act more like regular human beings, but never tolerate it when they do.
But I think the outrage toward Jace Larson (the journalist asking the questions) is exaggerated as well. While I consider the governor’s reaction perfectly acceptable, and HIS outrage perfectly justified, that doesn’t mean that the rest of us should turn this into yet another pile-on, with yet another sacrificial victim. In an orgy of human folly, some (mostly because of ideological predisposition) want to pile-on the governor, and others (also mostly because of ideological predisposition) want to pile on the journalist. I suggest that there is no need to pile on anyone here.
Yes, this is not my ideal of journalism. Yes, I wish we, including via our journalists, focused more on the subtleties of complex policy issues and less on tantalizing innuendo. BUT, journalism is a market-driven enterprise, and the market demands a certain degree of this. That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t encourage and attempt to reward those news agencies that resist these market pressures and raise the level of our discourse another few notches, BUT to act as though a journalist who annoyed a sitting governor by asking an unnecessarily provocative question repeatedly violated the norms and values of his profession would be to give too much credit to the profession of journalism as it is currently constituted, and too little empathy to the difficulty of being a professional journalist in a market that expects persistent interrogation from reporters, even over non-issues that are legitimately offensive to the subject of the interview.
My suggestion to everyone is to let it to go, and to encourage others to do the same. This is not a public policy issue. This is not a scandal, neither in the governor’s office nor in 9News’s office. To those who try to turn the governor’s response into a pretext for fomenting innuendo about his imaginary involvement, shoot them down sharply and incisively. To those who try to turn journalism’s general failings into a pretext for crying for the blood of this unfortunate young broadcast journalist, do the same.
Click here to buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards for just $2.99!!!
The cloudscape glowed in the streaming light of the sun, whorls and tufts poised in a floating dance of fluid form. Strains of ethereal music drifted with strands of luminous mist among hovering puffs and whimsical foam behemoths.
Draped only in these wafting wisps, dazzling muses lounged on the tiers of a fountain carved from the froth. Feathered wings unfurled with an occasional flourish. Cerulean locks swirled in the gusty breeze. The spray of light laughter laced the air. Whether basking in a rain of radiance, or beneath the celestial canopy sparkling with thickly sprinkled specks of fire, there was always a gathering on the cloud-paved plaza, a mingling of sounds rising and falling like distant waves caressing a rocky shore.
“Welcome, Lord Evenstar!” the Chorus sang in unison, as Azhanli, alighting on the lip of the fountain, lowered her passenger onto the tier just below her own. Azhanli had asked the ancient wizard to join them, and ferried him there herself, for he had shared in the story to be told today, and would tell it again in the tongues of men when the world of Sarena’s vision had come to pass.
Azhanli was to conduct this day’s Chorus, for she too had been a part of the tale about to be told. Perched on the fountain’s edge like a sphinx posing her riddle to those gathered round, she orchestrated the various voices chiming in. Mellifluous chatter coalesced into a symphony of nuanced tones and gestures.
The whirling mists responded. At first, mere shadows of shapes emerged, and windswept whispers barely heard. The skin tingled with hints of crisp morning air. Twilit tints peeked through the veil of shifting vapors. Then a salty spray could be discerned, and hollow, echoing calls.
Plumes hardened into rugged cliffs, their heights haloed by dawn’s first blush. The cloud-carpet before them melted into a dull tide clad in tatters of fog, paying ceaseless homage to the chiseled sentinels of the land, salaaming in furies of foam at their feet. Gulls glided above the roiling surf, screeching a forlorn and ominous ode to the mysteries of sea and shore. The dark shroud of night had been just cast aside, revealing the naked spirit of day.
But brilliance blossomed without delay, clothing that spirit in splendor. The Ilyarian plaza became a shimmering panorama, flowing by as if seen through eyes aloft on the wind. Islands and coastal palisades rose starkly from the ocean waves like monuments to the gods. The sun-flecked sea danced in ecstasy below. Nestled within the land’s lush folds life sprouted and throve, rivers plummeted from mountain springs, leaves quivered on swaying boughs. And people strove, weaving tales of Nature’s own.
The soaring overture dove toward a sunbaked country far from the rolling swells, to a wedge of red rock overlooking a small village. A lone figure stood there, cleaving the warm dusty wind like a figurehead maiden mounted on a stone prow. Long black hair fluttered, a banner on the battlements, a sail in search of distant shores. And eyes dark and bright as starlit skies gazed into the golden haze of the horizon, reaching out across the vast expanse before them….
(For more vignettes excerpted or derived from my novel, “A Conspiracy of Wizards,” please see The Hollow Mountain, The Wizards’ Eye, “Flesh Around A Whim”, and The Cloud Gardener. Also see The History of the Writing of “A Conspiracy of Wizards” and About “A Conspiracy of Wizards”. To purchase an electronic copy of the novel, click the link below.)
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One of the subtexts running through the current meta-debate between the Left and the Right is a constant volleying back and forth of accusations and refutations of racism. The Left accuses the Right of racism for a variety of reasons that I partially capture below. The Right indignantly denies it, retaliating with accusations back, insisting that “playing the race card” is the real expression of racism.
Personally, I think this discussion is generally overdone and often distracting, but the thread of validity in the criticism by the Left of the Right, and the reinforcement of irrationality and counterfactuality in the Right’s response, motivates me to give it a comprehensive treatment.
First, it is important to explore the concept of “racism” itself. If, by “racism,” we mean only explicit, overt, self-conscious antipathy toward members of another race, then I’d say that only a small minority of politically active people of either major partisan camp are “racist.” The vast majority denounce such crude racism, and the extant but dwindling population of such unreconstituted racists in the population at large are not a significant political force anymore.
Before I turn to the more implicit forms of racism that I think do continue to play a significant, if not central, role in political affairs, I’d like to emphasize that I think that the ideological thread most prominent in right-wing thought isn’t racism proper at all, but rather what I’ll call “quasi-racism,” an intense in-group/out-group bias, informing a set of beliefs and positions that are very tribalistic, and very dismissive of “the other.” The antagonistic attitude toward numerous non-racial outgroups (though sometimes with strong racial associations), such as gays, Muslims, undocumented immigrants, foreigners in general, the poor, atheists, and, basically, anyone who isn’t perceived to be an in-group member, is one of the most prominent defining characteristics of modern right-wing thought.
Explicit racism, however, is not absent from the right-wing echo-chamber. On a Facebook thread following one posting of the statistic that a gun in the home is 43 times more likely to be the instrument of the death of a member of the household than to be used in self-defense, for instance, one commenter responded to another by referring to “a group of n*****s raping your boyfriend” (the point being that you’d want to have a gun handy in that apparently representative scenario). On another thread at another time, a southern Tea Partier included among the problems besetting us “ungrateful blacks.” These are not isolated examples: While such explicit expressions of racism are not the norm, they recur at a constant rate on such threads, always, of course, by right-wing commenters slipping over a line many others approach without crossing.
In the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, there was a Facebook wall post of a news story about a trio of “scary” black violent offenders, apparently being used to make the argument that it is understandable that armed vigilantes should go out in their neighborhoods and pursue unarmed black teens walking home from the store –even if the price of such “liberty” is the occasional shooting death of one such unarmed black teen– because, in their unself-aware but deep-rooted world view, it’s rational to be afraid, it’s rational to presume that a hoodie-wearing black teen walking through your neighborhood is up to no good, and so it is, implicitly, rational to provoke a deadly encounter with said black teen under those circumstances.
In other words, the right-wing insistence that it’s a non-issue that their ideology can lead to instances of overzealous vigilantes pursuing and killing unarmed black teens walking home from the store is an astounding illustration of an underlying –and effectively racist– defect in their ideology. (The contention that it’s a non-issue because it was allegedly self-defense on the shooter’s part neglects the fact that the alleged need for self-defense was indisputably created by the decision to go out with a gun and pursue the arbitrarily “suspicious looking” unarmed black teen in the first place.)
These same people champion Jim-Crow-like voter suppression laws (on a discredited pretext and repeatedly struck down by the courts as unconstitutional), use code words like “Chicago politics” and “ACORN” and other allusions to blacks-as-inherently-corrupt, advocate discrimination against Muslims (and denial of their first amendment freedom of religion rights), frequently vilify and denegrate Hispanics, want to deny civil rights to gays, and, in general, are committed to a tribalistic orientation to the world, in which the small in-group of overwhelmingly white, mostly male, almost exclusively Judeo-Christian bigots opposes the rights and aspirations of the myriad out-groups surrounding them, denying the reality of a legacy of historical injustices and of current inequities, fighting for a regressive, aggressive, compassionless, irrational, barbaric society, in which those who feel well-served by the status quo (or, more precisely, by the status quo of a previous era) fight to recover an archaic -if all too recent– social order more preferential to their in-group statuses.
And they do so by disregarding fact and reason; by dismissing as bastions of liberalism precisely those professions that methodically gather, verify, analyze, and contemplate information (which, as a liberal, I take as a complement and as an affirmation of how much more rational our ideology is than theirs); by selecting, revising, and ignoring historical data to serve their fabricated ideological narrative; by ignoring the weight of professional economic theory and analysis (prompting the free-market-advocacy Economist magazine to label them “economically illiterate and disgracefully cynical”); by cherry-picking, reinterpreting, and selectively disregarding constitutional provisions and phrases in service to that same ideological narrative; and, in general, by defying fact and reason in service to ignorance and bigotry.
Whether we emphasize the racist overtones, the more explicit in-group/out-group tribalism in general, or just the prevailing ignorance and brutality of their ideology, the final evaluation is the same: It’s a perfect storm of organized irrationality in service to implicit and explicit inhumanity. And it’s not who and what we should choose to be as a people and a nation.
So, how much racism is there on the far right? It’s a moot point; the racism is enveloped by so much more that is the very cloth from which racism is cut that the accusation of racism is too narrow a focus and too much of a distraction. Emphasizing the broader irrational inhumanity that defines this ideological camp both captures and goes beyond the identification of the racist overtones within it.
(For more on these themes, see The New Face Of American Racism, The Tea Party’s Neo-”Jim Crow”, The History of American Libertarianism, The Presence of the Past, Godwin’s Law Notwithstanding, Basal Ganglia v. Cerebral Cortex, Basal Ganglia Keeping Score, and “Sharianity”)
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