Friday, October 04, 2002

Ted Barlow's been posting on venom from right and left directed against the other side. I think something has been lost as the discussion progressed - the issue is not just which side has the most or biggest blowhards, but the specific content of the kinds of criticisms both sides are willing to make.

It's easy and sloppy to tar people in self-identified groups with the worst actions of their worst people. It's easy to say "conservatives this" and "liberals that," and when one side does that it is easy for the other side to cry foul.


But, the problem with the post by Bill Quick which started off the latest round in this endless discussion is not that he said that liberals and Democrats are all stupid, or mean, or even corrupt and evil. It's that he, in effect, said that everyone who pulls the 'D' lever at the ballot box hates America, hates the constitution, hates the country, wishes terrorists would eat all of our babies, and wishes that America were completely different from the ideals it has had since its founding. In short, he incorporated the standard meta-narrative of conservative discourse for decades - liberals and Democrats are unpatriotic.

This charge is particularly powerful and sinister because it is made in an attempt to undermine the ability of 50+% of the country to even have a say. No I'm not crying censorship (so stop saying that!), but if you impugn the patriotism of 'the other side' you destroy their ability to enter into the fray of political discussion. If what you say is motivated by a hatred of America, then you of course should not be listened to.

The Right, as a movement, has been successful in tilting the narrative in this way because their identification with "conservatism" allows them to lay claim to being the guardians of "true America." They regularly employ a false nostalgia for a greater past that never was, and for national traditions that never really existed, to promote their vision as a return to the past greatness which has been corrupted by the immoral forces of change. That the 50s (1850s or 1950s, you judge) provides the model for this in many eyes, despite the obscene racial injustice of that time, should sound the warning bells for this particular fraud.

I won't call Bill Quick a fascist. Probably this, as Brian Linse (AintNoBadDude) has suggested, is simply his opportunistic overture, but this kind of rhetoric is the kind employed by the authoritarian nationalist movements of past and present. It is echoed in Bush's "with us or against us" rhetoric, and his claims that the opposition party cares not for national security, and it is echoed Bill Bennett's patriotism police. It is echoed in current attempts to rehabilitate fascism's past and put a friendlier face on it for the present. It is echoed in the false idealization of the "heartland" by the likes of Andy Sullivan, and it is an echoed in a country where for too many months criticism of the president was equated by many with treason and when even now international criticism of that president's policies is labelled "anti-Americanism."


The problem is not simply that the Right employs nasty rhetoric, it is that a common undercurrent of the rhetoric is that liberals wish to destroy all that makes our country great. Tell us we're wrong, tell us we're stupid, but don't tell us that our belief that going to Iraq is perhaps the wrong way to go about the "war on terror" arises out of our desire to see the terrorists win. Don't tell us that our concern for civil liberties springs from the same desire. And, definitely do not pretend you have a monopoly on patriotism, good works, love for country, flag, constitution, mom, and apple pie.

[note: I've tweaked this in minor ways since I've posted it, but haven't changed anything of substance.]