This little passage illustrates a lot of things. I will take Mr. Yglesias as representing a prominent (predominant?) strain in liberal thought, since it doesn't matter much what one person such as he thinks, but I think he is not unusual. Since his attitude is common, I will say "Liberals think..." below, even though I know some liberals do not demonize conservatives and are appalled by Al Gore, Al Franken, Michael Moore, Ted Kennedy, and such company.But liberals care about character, too. We think that when a president submits budget after budget after budget based on deception, that that demonstrates poor character. We think that when the purpose of these budgets is to shift the tax burden off the wealthy of today to the poor of tomorrow that that demonstrates poor character. We think that when you promise a "Marshall Plan for Afghanistan" and don't deliver that that demonstrates poor character. We think that when you de-fund housing vouchers while spending tens of billions on subsidies for large pharmarceutical companies and agribusiness concerns that that demonstrates poor character. And we think that when you launch a war of choice and then grossly mismanage it that that demonstrates, well, poor character. It is immoral -- grossly immoral -- to pursue policies that have made the lives of billions of people around the world worse than they could have been.
Thomas Sowell, in "Conflict of Visions", notes the demonization of enemies as a trait of the "unconstrained vision". Oddly enough, liberals, with all their talk of compassion, have a hard time putting themselves in other people's places. Conservatives, on the other hand, being in America in the "constrained vision" camp, do not attribute wrong policy views to moral deficiency, but to simple foolishness. For liberals, conservatives are not stupid, but evil.
1. Liberals think that conservatives are not just wrongheaded, but evil-- or, at least, morally deficient. Being a conservative is not just stupid, but immoral.
2. An implication is that liberals are not especially interested in discussion and argument. There is no liberal Rush Limbaugh or William F. Buckley. Why discuss an issue with an opponent who understand perfectly well what is right, but takes the opposite position because he is evil? Conservatives are to be fought, not persuaded; they are like cockroaches.
3. Since most Americans do, in fact, disagree with liberals on many issues and prefer Bush to Gore, we must conclude that most Americans are grossly immoral. Taking this a step further, democracy is a bad thing, and decisions should be made by judges and other people who are not grossly immoral.
4. While advocating conservative policies is a sign of poor character and gross immorality, lying and adultery are not. Those are just a person's actions, which are private. A person's actions in his private life are just his personal preferences; it is only wrong political beliefs which are immoral.
5. As an implication of point (4), a liberal politician can never have bad character or be immoral so long as his talk and his votes are liberal. This explains why liberals did not think of what Senator Packwood or President Clinton did as sexual harassment. When liberals criticize someone for sexual harassment, they really are criticizing what he is thinking, or what they believe he is thinking, not what he has done. They trusted Packwood and Clinton's political thinking, and so did not mind their actions.
6. We have here an example of the importance of Confucius's "rectification of names", which I blogged about on June 25. "Poor character" and "Immorality" have become synonymous with "Conservative wrong beliefs". People often have a hard time making distinctions between different kinds of "bad". Here, the liberal wants to say that conservatives are bad, and so he says they are immoral. But it is quite possible for someone to have utterly false beliefs and not be immoral; to confuse the two is to lose sight of the different ways in which someone can be bad.
Conservatives do not have this view. They disliked Clinton not because he was a
dangerous
liberal-- he was on the right wing of his party, and he was comfortably ineffective at
pushing his policies-- but because of his bad character. That was the only motivation
for impeachment,
which if successful would have helped Gore win the 2000 election.
It seems appropriate to quote something Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) said on
June 25.
What I think is interesting is that if you call actual fascist dictators like Saddam
Hussein fascist, you're regarded as over-the-top by some of the same people who don't
mind using such terms to describe their own fellow citizens who simply disagree with
them.
The reason may be that Saddam Hussein merely tortured and killed, without making
conservative statements on American political issues. Torture and killing are like lying
and adultery-- not the important part of character and morality, in the Yglesias
philosophy, and not part of being fascist. Rather, a fascist is someone who believes
homosexuality is wrong or that social security should be abolished.
The left demonizes. While even the most extreme conservatives have not called liberals "communists" for these past 40 years (was Clinton ever called any names at all? Gore- Lieberman's "Sore Loserman" is all I can think of offhand, which is actually pretty accurate), it is not uncommon for liberals today to compare conservatives to Hitler. But if you say that George W. Bush is as bad as Hitler, then you are saying that Hitler was no worse than George W. Bush. You minimize the evil of Hitler, as I discussed on June 24. Liberal ignorance of history combines with mean-spiritedness and sloppy use of terms all together in such comparisons.
Am I demonizing liberals myself in writing this? I think not. I may be overgeneralizing-- that is an empirical question-- but I am focussing on a particular aspect of liberal behavior and trying to analyze it. If liberals were to launch serious inquiries into whether Bush's policies are similar to Mussolini's or Hitler's, then even if they came to the bizarre conclusion that Bush really was a fascist, I would not call it demonization-- just stupidity. Demonization is not harsh criticism, but labelling without thought.
UPDATE, later that day: Quite a few people are noticing the nasty liberal namecalling. Below is quite a number of examples from James Taranto and John Leo.
Via
WSJ Best of the Web, , I
hear that the Albany (N.Y.) Times Union says
First came the Sept. 11 attacks, of course. But then came something every bit as
dangerous. For almost three years, the U.S. government has maintained a policy of
response that leaves the Constitution as a casualty. The Bush administration has
detained suspected and potential terrorists in a way the law doesn't allow.
Do these people actually think detaining terrorists who aim to murder thousands is
"every bit as dangerous" as actually murdering thousands? What planet is Albany on?
A column about "Fahrenheit 9/11" by the Washington Post's normally mild-mannered [R]
William Raspberry makes clear just how pathological Bush-hatred has become:
Why did the mostly liberal crowd at last week's Washington premiere--people who like
to think of themselves as thoughtful and fair-minded--applaud so unrestrainedly?
They applauded, I suspect, for much the same reason so many members of the black
Christian middle-class applaud the harangues of Black Muslim minister Louis Farrakhan.
Some of his facts may be wrong and some of his connections strained, but his attitude is
right. What's more, he'll say in plain language what nice, educated people cannot bring
themselves to say: The man is a devil.
Calabresi, former dean of the Yale Law School and a moderate liberal, became the 3,267th
Democrat to compare George Bush to Adolf Hitler. As Bush-is-Hitler rhetoric goes, the
judge's effort was comparatively mild. He said Bush's rise to power was strikingly
similar to the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, with the Supreme Court (in Gore v. Bush)
illegitimately propelling him into a damaging presidency.
...
The Hitler insults started with the Communist press, the pro-Communist "peace"
organizers of the anti-war marches and assorted free-lance crazies of the hard left.
Some months ago I did a column showing how almost every prominent member of the Bush
administration had been identified with some Nazi or other. (This process continues --
Karen Hughes is said to be the new Goebbels.) At the time, some readers complained that
I had filled out the column by citing a few weird and marginal Internet lefties. There
was some truth in that, but now it appears that the loonies have succeeded in pushing
previously rational and stable Democrats toward sputtering Bushies-are-Nazis insults.
...
Senator Robert Byrd, for example, says George Bush reminds him of Hermann Goering, thus
forfeiting much of his heralded reputation for political seriousness. There are many
strong reasons for opposing the president, but connecting him to Goering is not one of
them.
The Rev. Andrew Greeley, a Chicagoan with three careers (Catholic priest, sociologist,
soft-porn novelist), depicts Bush as a demagogic Hitler figure who has carried America
over to "the dark side." George Soros, the eccentric billionaire Bush-hater, says Bush's
rhetoric reminds him of the Third Reich. Last week Al Gore, in a speech denouncing Bush,
used the term "Brownshirts" (i.e., Nazi street thugs) to refer to Republican computer
teams who respond to criticisms of the president and the war in Iraq.
One hallmark of the new mainstream Hitler rhetoric is that the speakers typically try to
soften the accusation right after making it. Greeley said, "He is not another Hitler.
Yet there is a certain parallelism." Calabresi said he was "not suggesting for a moment
that Bush is Hitler." No, course not. That was probably the furthest thing from his mind
when he decided to link Bush with Hitler.
...
As a test of the state of "Bush the Nazi" rhetoric, I went to Google and typed in "Bush
is a Nazi" and got 420,000 hits, well behind "Hitler was a Nazi" (654,000 hits) but then
Hitler WAS a Nazi and had a 75-year head start.
...
President Clinton did fairly well in the Nazi sweepstakes (158,000 hits, but that's only
20,000 references for each presidential year, compared to 120,000 annually for the 3 1/2
year incumbency of George Bush.)
... a new Bush video, and it is outstanding. Titled "Kerry's Coalition of the Wild-Eyed,
" it links Kerry with the extremism currently rampant in certain sectors of the
Democratic Party. It shows Al Gore howling, "How dare they drag the good name of the
United States through the mud of Saddam Hussein's torture prison!" and Howard Dean
screeching, "I want my country back!" It also has a clip of Michael Moore's Oscar
acceptance speech and the two ads from MoveOn.org comparing Bush to Hitler. Upon seeing
it, all I could think was, "It is about time!"
...
William Kristol recently noted how inept the Bush Campaign has been at using such
extremism as a weapon against Kerry:
Kennedy last month hyperventilated about Abu Ghraib: "We now learn that Saddam's
torture chambers reopened under new management: U.S. management." Kerry, asked about
that statement the next day, said, "He's my friend and I respect him, but I don't agree
with the framing of that." The framing? But that was that -- no follow-up from the Bush
campaign to wrap that comment by his buddy Ted around Kerry's neck and to cause him days
of discomfort.
Here are some questions that the Bush Campaign should encourage the press to direct at
Kerry. "Does your wife support MoveOn.org?" "Will you or Teresa attend any more
MoveOn.org events?" "Do you denounce the MoveOn.org ads comparing President Bush to
Hitler?" "Do you agree with MoveOn.org that President Bush 'deliberately misled' America
about Iraq?" And if they are in a really mischievous mood, the Bush Campaign could
suggest asking, "Did your wife give you any of the Condoleezza Rice Crispies Bars"?
Here are some other questions that the Bush Campaign should propose: "Back in November,
George Soros said 'When I hear Bush say, "You're either with us or against us," it
reminds me of the Germans.' Do you think that is appropriate, Senator Kerry?" "Al Gore
recently compared Bush's staff to 'Brown Shirts.' Should Gore apologize for that remark?
" "After seeing Michael Moore's movie Fahrenheit 9/11, DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe
recently said that he believed Moore's premise that Bush invaded Afghanistan not to
avenge the terrorist attacks but to ensure that a natural gas pipeline could be built
there. Do you agree with Terry McAuliffe?"
James Taranto comments on this:
Also on Best of the Web:
John Leo writes,
David Hogbergwrites
in the American Spectator:
[permalink: 04.06.29a.htm]
... Teresa Heinz-Kerry visited a Kerry/MoveOn house party in San Francisco last
December. At the party she handed out an "Asses of Evil" pin that contained the pictures
of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft. Later she "took a call" from her Senator husband, who
proceeded to speak to the assembled group. On the way out, she took some "Condoleezza
Rice Crispies Bars" with her. (Does the NAACP know about this? And would it even care?)
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