Once again, the letters page of The Fresno Bee was filled with foolishness this morning. So I decided to go online and push back. And then, on one letter, this comment appeared, from someone using the alias “All_American“:
Sarah [Palin] is a scholar bar none when put up against any liberal. She knows what being an America is supposed to look like. She actually loves the constitution. What a novel idea! What liberal even likes the constitution? I have never seen or heard of one.
Liberals have and will always mock a true American because they in their hearts want us destroyed. I believe that with all that is within me. They want to put the constitution in the shredder and have their Ayatollah or Darwin likeness rule. Profound freedom haters!
Mock on you low life liberals. Public opinion is looking at you with disgust. You will soon be back in your closet too afraid to face the country you have tried to destroy.
Just let that sink in. Sarah Palin is a scholar who loves the constitution. Liberals—all of them, whoever they are—belong in a closet, “want to put the constitution in a shredder and have their Ayatollah or Darwin likeness rule,” and are “freedom haters.” “Public opinion” is a person: it looks upon “liberals” with disgust.
Despite what others may think, I would not call myself “liberal” or “conservative.” I see no value in ideological assertions, as a matter of principle, that individual freedom is always good or that traditional methods of social organization should always be favored. We should think critically about how our predecessors organized their society and be willing to stomach a reasonable amount of risk that discontinuity, or changes in the ways we do things, will upset our stability—based on our thoughtful and educated risk that we have a greater likelihood of increasing our stability. And if thousands of years of contemplation by people all over the world struggling with the relationships between free will, determinism, and happiness have taught us anything, it should be that limitless freedom is a recipe for disaster: when we consider the tension between individual and society, we cannot forget the benefits of society for individuals, and the reasonable costs to individuals of maintaining that society.
There are ideologues on both ends of the spectrum, people who’ve decided to promote an idea no matter what facts may block the path to ideological purity. But there is a reasoned middle ground, where facts about our immeasurably complex world should make us question the viability of every ideology. We need social welfare programs and tough law enforcement. Serious problems like crime and poverty need to be addressed at both ends of their occurrence, including strong measures of prevention and real consequences when prevention fails. We need a strong sense of freedom, so people will recognize their ability to contribute and innovate, to everyone’s benefit, but freedom needs to be tempered by the inherent limitations on individuals when they choose to reap the benefits of social organization.
In the middle of all that, the Constitution has surprisingly little to say. And most reasonable people can find ways to disagree about what it does say. Did the Constitution set us off in one direction, setting only the limits of our innovation going forward? Or is the Constitution our guiding star, the fixed destination for our national journey? Either way, the Constitution provides a central—though increasingly indeterminate—text that maintains the center of our national conversation. It seems likely that we will one day set that document aside and draft another, which will precipitate another progression into indeterminacy. The meaning of any document will never last forever. And as someone who does a good amount of writing, I can attest to the possibility that even a text written by a single author can have meanings that the author never imagined or intended. But I have never any American, liberal or conservative, seriously suggest that we should put our Constitution, or any constitution, into either a literal or a metaphorical shredder.
We can deal with conflicting ideas, if the conversation continues, if our constitutional center—whatever it means—will hold. But there is a real world, with real people, whose lives can be thrown into terrible disarray without any good reason when ideas lose contact with facts and ideology takes hold at the seat of power. And those people who disconnect their ideas from facts pose a greater danger to the livability and longevity of our society than people who commit atrocious acts of intentionally disruptive violence. When the national discourse takes leave of reality, we will quickly find ourselves susceptible to all forms of manipulation, unmoored from anything that would prevent us from destroying ourselves. Without facts, without curiosity, without the drive to learn about our world and each other, our society—and all of the benefits it gives us—will quickly crumble under the weight of our stupidity.
People like “All_American” are getting louder, and they want to take over. They believe that “liberals” (whoever they are) want to destroy our society, but their refusal to temper their ideological views with facts makes their movement ignorant, shrill—and powerful. It’s much easier just to claim that “liberals” hate freedom, or that they want to take your money, than it is to engage reality with facts and reasoned discourse. But we will pay a steep price if they win—not in taxes, but in the loss of our freedom, our intelligence, our happiness, our economic strength, and our moral authority. I would rather pay taxes and struggle against the forces of ignorance that will always threaten to overtake our political system.
And here is how we struggle: by promoting education and reasoned collaboration among citizens, by finding people like “All_American” and pushing them to engage their minds with us and the rest of the world, by thinking critically and skeptically and teaching our children and young people to do the same, by pursuing knowledge without limitations but using it only with caution. The forces of gleeful ignorance and dangerous selfishness threaten to ruin the great society we have built, but we cannot let them succeed.
Like most threads at their site, that is a depressing one.
Over the last couple of decades, I’ve concluded that those who self-identify as conservative are much more likely to go aggressively on the ad hominem attack. They often use mocking humor and rude tactics in argument. I believe Limbaugh and his ilk wrote the playbook on that one. Liberals, unfortunately, have gradually evolved into a humorless and passive bunch. The troubles Obama is having now reflect this.
The one area where liberals seem to have a strong advantage is in language skills. The letter writer in the Bee is a glaring example.
These ideological arguments make me weary. And it’s not going to ease up anytime soon, probably not in our lifetimes. Even a unifying event such as 9/11 did more to divide us as a nation than to unite us.
-Volly, gloomily
I see no reason to believe that conservatives have a corner on the ad hominem attack; their liberal counterparts are just as shrill. Liberals can certainly be humorless, but they are not passive: they are ineffective, which is different.
And I disagree that liberals have a strong advantage in language skills. For decades, conservatives have controlled the debate by whipping up a stream of emotionally-charged labels that obscure the truth but garner enormous support from the public.