… Who Hate

[Admin note:  there are a couple of links in this piece to opinion websites at which a liberal amount of profanity is allowed – and used.  I provide a warning in the text about the worst of these.  I won’t make links like these a habit; in this case, the character of the comments at the websites in question is important to the point I am making, and I want readers to be able to judge for themselves.  The profanity itself is not really the point – but it’s there, so take precautions accordingly.]

A meme is emerging on the left that American conservatives (that is, Americans who are politically conservative, not specifically the “American Conservative” movement) are increasingly filled with dangerous hatred and rage.  New York Times columnist Charles Blow sets figures on gun-purchase background checks in the context of this manufactured meme, and concludes that the “mind and mood of the right” are “…apocalyptic.  They feel isolated, angry, betrayed, and besieged.  And some of their ‘leaders’ seem to be trying to mold them into militias.”

“For some,” Blow says, “their disaffection has hardened into something more dark and dangerous [than harmless talk].  They’re talking about a revolution.”

I am particularly struck at being vectored onto this column by Bruce Thornton – classicist, author, and regular contributor at Victor Davis Hanson’s website – because said vectoring has occurred in the same week as a relevant and very interesting exchange at a Peter Wehner piece, posted at Commentary’s “contentions” blog.  Wehner’s theme was the polarizing influence of Obama on American politics.  A correspondent of a more left-wing bent engaged others, in the reader exchange at this post, on his concern that he is seeing an increasing level of hatred and anger in adherents of both the right and the left.  The following are a few key excerpts (all emphases mine):

Wehner states – “Is a record-setting divide among Democrats and Republicans as such an early point in [Obama’s] presidency really the change we were told we could believe in?”

No, this wasn’t the intended goal, but there is nothing that Obama can do about this. Most republicans won’t give him a chance – simply because of ideological differences and the now emerging psychological disorder referred to as “Obama Derangement Syndrome”. Most democrats now realize that there is no ability to work effectively with republicans (particularly those afflicted with ODS), so they’ll therefore throw their entire support behind Obama. This gap between the electorate can not be successfully bridged. The people truly hate and despise each other, if we’re to make a judgement solely by the comments to editorials on all of the blogs now circulating…

I’m seeing a lot of talk about revolution, insurrection and succession by those on the right. While this is just talk for now, there are a lot of people talking the talk. Even my old highschool buds talk this stuff and it’s caused a real divide in our former friendships.

*Back to ODS, that fellow in Pittsburgh that just killed 3 cops for fear of losing his guns – now that is one who suffers the disorder. I fear that we’ll be seeing more outrageous acts like this from those on the right that have succumbed to this paranoia. I for one do not want our police officers to continue to be massacred by deranged folks on the right who are suffering this disorder…

…is now the time to seriously consider a “national divorce”? I’m not joking. You don’t want to be governed by my kind (environmentalist, diplomacy instead of war, pro civil rights, pro gay rights, etc…), just as I don’t want to be governed by your kind. There is no middle ground on many of these issues. Rather than fight it out in a modern era civil war, we should perhaps consider an alternative which would mean dividing the nation into new geographical entitities. It will be hard, and there would have to be large-scale internal population migrations, but in the end if it would yield a far more peaceful co-existence – then this should be an option on the table.

…as a nation we have a residual “red state electorate” that is becoming increasingly frustrated with this contracting condition. This frustration, along with the outrageous hyperbole from the right-wing propaganda machine is generating ODS within this red-state demographic. With the inability to win elections, many of the fringe element red-staters are proposing another more sinister option. I’m not just reading this on the blogosphere, but hearing it myself from old friends that I can no longer relate with. I referenced the case of the Pittsburgh killings earlier. This guy is a hero to those paranoid ODS victims. I don’t want to live in nation with these archaic types. Nor do they want to live with us. I see no acceptable option but a divorce.

I feature these excerpts because they are some of the more thoughtful I have seen that attempt to describe a perception of anger, fury, and even homicidal rage – “derangement” – on the part of the political right.  They at least have been assembled without profanity, which (as diligent readers will see later) is a relief.

Several observations compete for top billing, so I will take them in no particular order.  First, I note that in terms of who is talking about radical solutions and the cutting off of some Americans from others, there is a rather large tu quoque opportunity lurking here.  A geographic “divorce” for America?  This is hardly a pedestrian proposal.  It does, quite tellingly, rely on the ahistorical and irrational assumption that a divided set of former united states, with new boundaries inside the old ones, would be left alone by the rest of the world to work out their relations in peace.  Chopping up the USA would immediately energize the “Reconquista” movement, both inside America’s current borders and in Mexico, and the consequences would radiate outward from there.

Between the idea of “tea party” demonstrations to signal political dissatisfaction with the trend of government, and serious consideration of a geographic “divorce” for America, I don’t see an advantage for sanity in the latter.  But this leads to another observation, which is that the hatred-and-anger meme is definitely a case of “I’m OK, you’re deranged.”  As the liberal author of these posts writes, “You don’t want to be governed by my kind (environmentalist, diplomacy instead of war, pro civil rights, pro gay rights, etc…), just as I don’t want to be governed by your kind.”  Yet the “derangement” is on the side of the right – which won’t give Obama a chance “simply because of ideological differences.”

It would be one thing for the author to acknowledge that ideological differences are matters of principle on which we all plant our stakes, and decide at some point not to “give” opponents a “chance.”  Certainly this can be said of radical environmentalists, and everyone else on the left.  But he doesn’t do this, and it is clear, from the overall context, that he is positing the ideological differences of the right with the left as a source of derangement, in the way the differences of the left with the right are not.  Having ideological differences with Obama, to the extent of not being willing to give his policies a chance, is evidence of anger, frustration, incipient derangement, unwillingness to accommodate others as required by civic peace – perhaps unfitness to coexist in the same national polity.

The demonization of dissent – ideological dissent as derangement, or as too likely to be conjoined with it – is based on tendentious interpretations.  This is a third point, and one that Bruce Thornton addresses perfectly in his takedown of the Charles Blow column.  Thornton disassembles each one of Blow’s examples in support of his hatred-and-anger argument, and shows them to be meaningless for that rhetorical purpose.  Chuck Norris wrongly attributing fascism to a conservative worldview – a facile but faulty association almost everyone alive today was taught in school – is not, for instance, proof that the conservative right is itching for a gunfight.  (In fact, it seems downright spurious for Blow to have adduced that example at all, since it really doesn’t make any point he wants to make.  All it does is get “Chuck Norris” and “fascism” into the same sentence.)

Our “contentions” correspondent used only one example:  the unhinged cop-shooter in Pittsburgh.  But to buy this incident as emblematic of how conservatives, Obama opponents, and/or gun-owners think, or intend to act, requires a whole weltanschauung’s worth of assumptions that can be knocked down one by one.   Conservative gun-owners are indeed worried that Obama’s administration intends to denature the Second Amendment – and for good reason.  But the vast majority of conservatives have no intention of acting in a criminal manner, any more than the vast majority of left-wing Bush opponents intended to assassinate George W. Bush – or even would have applauded such an action – because a filmmaker or novelist fantasized about it.  The man in Pittsburgh was obviously a loon, not a fellow sufferer with other conservatives of a homicidal “Obama Derangement Syndrome.”

Conservatives who favor gun rights are, instead, disseminating information, putting out analysis of the positions and programs of Obama’s administration, and urging each other to contact their elected representatives.  Some are buying guns now that they project not being able to buy later, based on the trend of Obama’s policies.  Only if you think the armed citizen is a threat to civic order per se do you see this as a pernicious or frightening development.  But that view is not at all self-evidently valid.  Indeed, it is the opposite of the view held by our Founders, who considered it essential for a free citizenry to be armed.

One has to expose his underlying premise that being armed is, in and of itself, evidence of derangement, or of intent to disturb civic order, to automatically associate the Pittsburgh shootings with conservatives in general, with Obama opponents in general, or with gun-owners in general.  That premise may not be unhinged, exactly, but it is certainly not in any mainstream that does not also have to accommodate the long tradition of peaceable, responsible citizen ownership of guns in the USA.  Merely buying and owning firearms do not constitute acts of anger, hatred, or derangement.

That many on the left would assert, however, that they do, raises a fourth point about the “contentions” reader’s commentary:  that those on the left, in Reagan’s humorous formulation, “know so much that isn’t so.”  Too often they also seem to know it in a self-satisfied way that admits of no countervailing evidence or argument.  I was struck by the laundry list of things the left thinks it “knows” about conservatives, iterated in this recent Dailykos post (Warning:  heavy profanity at this link) in which the author asked readers to speculate on where conservatives could go – if they left the United States – to be politically comfortable.  In the reader responses, we see the assumptions that conservatives hate, and cannot bear to be around, non-white humans; that they prefer lawlessness, except when imposing religious law to the detriment of women and minorities; that they are rapacious, greedy, and determined to steal; and that they insist on illiteracy and ignorance.  The entire American South is asserted to be benighted in this manner, and Somalia and Singapore are – hilariously – posited to be the best places for conservatives to go, the one because it is lawless and in disorder, the other because it is a place of comparative hyper-order.

Well, no one is suggesting that what leftists are so sure they know is logically consistent.  The interesting thing one gathers from the onerous task of reading through more than 600 snarky, juvenile comments is that there cannot be very many of these people who actually know any conservatives personally – or at least who are aware of knowing them.  To persist in believing the things they think they know, one has to be around no conservatives in one’s daily life.  Conservatives are just people, some with better characters than others, and are focused little at all on “hating” others, but much more on preserving an idea of personal liberty, and small and accountable government, that they regard as the best option for human organization.  Certainly liberal positions make conservatives irritable, as they calculate what the implementation of those positions would do to their lives and prospects; but this is hardly evidence of derangement – unless your position is that not agreeing with liberal positions is, itself, evidence of derangement.

That is what we keep getting back to:  a unilateral assumption that where conservatives have ideological differences with the left, they are suffering a form of psychosis.  Now, I want to be fair to the “contentions” correspondent whose comments are quoted here, and recognize that he attributed an alarming level of hatred and anger to both sides of the political divide, not just the right.  Those who are interested can read all his comments at the Wehner piece link (it will be obvious from the quoted passages here which reader’s thread to follow).  But this fifth point is actually an insidious and dangerous one, and not only because it posits an equivalence where there may or may not be one.  Readers here will have to decide about that equivalence for themselves; the issue that weighs on me is the “contentions” correspondent’s concern that “hatred” and “derangement” at both ends of the political spectrum have a vague, unspecified aspect of actionability about them:  something “we” (the law?  the federal government?) should be doing something about.

In the spirit of empiricism, I visited some contentious topics addressed at left- and right-wing blogs in the last couple of weeks, to see what this alarming level of political contumely actually involves.  I find the endless strings of foolish “nyaah-nyaah” comments just about unbearable, at websites like these, and rarely read them, but this was for research.  One of the left-wing website threads I will suggest here is the Dailykos topic linked above.  Here are two others:

- Steven Weber (yes, the actor) on the dying GOP, at Huffington Post

- Democratic Underground’s most recent list of Top 10 conservative idiots

On the right, I have selected the following links:

            - Ann Coulter’s weekly column, this one an Obama-prompted “goodbye” to America-as-we-have-known-her

            - Allahpundit at Hotair.com on the left’s reaction to the “tea party” movement

            - David Limbaugh at Townhall on Obama’s “not a Christian nation” comment in Turkey

My impressions from this sample:  first, there is a great deal of juvenile foolishness at all the websites.  Among the left-wing sites, Huffington Post appears to have the advantage in terms of a higher percentage of relevant, thoughtful commentary – and that in spite of the tone of Steven Weber’s original post.  The right-wing sites linked here disallow the profanity, although I am sure there are others that don’t.  I don’t know if I would call the amounts of ad hominem inanity equal at the various sites; but it does occur at all of them, and the percentage of it among reader comments may well be dependent on the type of site, as well as its political bent.  My sense is that there is a greater incidence of actual give-and-take, across-the-aisle argument between readers at Townhall, in particular, than at any of the left-wing sites.  HuffPo and TH had the highest “substantive argument” quotient:  that is, readers commenting on ideas and arguing principles, as opposed to merely bashing those of the opposite political persuasion.

Reading the comment strings at all of these websites brought to mind once again the Optimistic Conservative’s axiom that the “sound of freedom” is loud, obnoxious, cacophonous, and often repulsive.  On an aircraft carrier, the crew that lives and works directly under the flight deck calls the jarring, deafening gyrations that attend the launch and retrieval of jet aircraft the “sound of freedom” – and it’s a good metaphor.  The sound of political freedom is mostly unpleasant.  The whole point of freedom is to guarantee our own rights to liberty by tolerating – within wide boundaries – what others do with theirs.

This was the unabrogable principle on which our Founders gave us a government with separation of powers, checks and balances, and a Bill of Rights.  They knew at least as well as we do that given the freedom to dissent, people will.  They did not assign any sort of romantic, inherent virtue to dissent:  that was left for later philosophers.  The Founders were pragmatists who preferred order, and demanded that dissent have a constructive purpose, and be meaningful.  But they assumed, a priori, that there would be dissent over political ideas within the American polity, and the very constitution of our government was designed to accommodate it – without disintegrating before it, or reverting to the stifling of dissent.

There is a grave danger in suspecting or demonizing the motives for dissent, and associating principled dissent within an electorate with derangement.  Some of the people who opposed Bush’s domestic surveillance measures in the GWOT even behaved as if they might in fact be deranged – but this did not make their objections worthless, or inherently unhinged.  It is not at all deranged to worry about the power to intercept phone calls, without applying first to another branch of government, in the hands of the executive.  Presidents from Wilson to Clinton should have taught us that.  Assuming that an actual crime has been committed, merely because the conditions for one are foreseen, is not a responsible approach – but that doesn’t make the foreseeing of the conditions for crime less of a valid issue.

If we apply this criterion to the earlier example of gun owners and the Second Amendment, where they clearly are is at the stage of foreseeing the conditions in which the federal government, under Obama and the current Congress, could violate it.  This is not a form of derangement, any more than it was evidence of derangement when people saw how warrantless wiretapping could create the conditions for violation of the Fourth Amendment.  A substantive and principled argument could be made in either case.

Only if you take as a premise that the Second Amendment does not guarantee what federal judges have affirmed that it guarantees – and that it should not – can you simply dismiss the valid concerns of gun owners, and attribute to them “derangement.”  The invoking of “derangement” here is actually a disguise for ideological or policy differences:  the buried premise is that it is only sane to think like an advocate of gun control.

It is vital, in the coming days, that we not buy into the idea that major portions of the American electorate have simply gone insane.  A leftist attributing this pathology equally to the left is merely using the most insidious of approaches to demonize political dissent altogether.  I do not think our shipmate back at the “contentions” thread had insidious intentions; I take him as serious, and doing the best he can to parse the political environment.  But I do, most definitely, take him as wrong, in terms of how imminently dangerous it is that a lot of people disagree with each other.

The opposing thoughts of others are not things that we need to preemptively defend ourselves against, nor is opposition in political thought a form of evidence that anyone is engaged in arming himself for attack.  If any among us had reason to suppose this latter to be the case, it might certainly be supporters of the second Bush’s administration, whose opponents relentlessly accused Bush of all kinds of absurd crimes, called him and his supporters long lists of unpleasant names, engaged in sometimes-hysterical demonstrations that posed threats to the physical safety of other citizens, and trash-talked like rap musicians crossed with fake wrestling stars.

Some conservatives registered a natural alarm and revulsion about this; but as many words as we can justly say about a loss of civility, and even adult perspective, in the conduct of American politics, we would be sealing our own doom by agreeing, even a little, that the vicious cacophony of politics requires redress by a sort of parental supervision of our political interactions.  It is not the ideas of personal liberty that survive when any government – even government by the people – is given the power to set the kind of boundaries in question here.  Whenever we insist on not hearing what we don’t like, it’s our own liberty that is undermined.  Vilifying political opposition as a pathology of derangement is simply a roundabout way of demanding not to have to hear what we don’t like.

I have, quite honestly, not seen any conservative writers suggest that the left’s style of political dissent requires either suppression, or even mere “supervision” (other than the basic sort we expect of the police anyway).  Nor have I seen conservatives falling for the “both left and right have deranged elements” argument.  I earnestly hope we will keep it that way.  It is not really much of a concession for someone on the left to acknowledge that radical leftists who propose to assassinate or torture George W. Bush are over the top.  Keep in mind, it’s not the contention of the right that this fringe element represents a scary trend in the entire Democratic electorate.

 It would be a very great and unwarranted concession for someone on the right to agree that the nut in Pittsburgh who killed the policemen is representative of a trend in the ranks of the right.  I do not.  False-equivalency concessions like this are dangerous, and must be refrained from.  We must not let ourselves be backed into agreeing that any sort of arbitrary action needs to be taken, over the evidence of polarization and dissent in our electorate.  You and I do not need to be controlled or herded for our own good – or for the public peace – merely because we see the idea of liberty more as our Founders did, and less in the terms used to deconstruct it by 20^th century philosophers.  I am prepared to extend that principle to opponents on the left, and continue to focus the efforts of the right on the lawful, constitutional means consistent with checks and balances on government, such as elections, legislative maneuvers, judicial appointments, and – in the case of voting fraud, bribery, and other methods of subverting constitutional processes – law enforcement.