The Clash of Absolutes
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about our current political dialogue is the speed with which both sides resort to abstractions that represent absolute, unarguable positions to characterize their argument. Frequent Emphasis Added commenter Brian Duffy peppered his most recent retort to my critique of the Wall Street Journal’s interpretation of the election results with various categorical remarks: “Nancy Pelosi is against freedom…”, “The patriots who voted on November 5th…”, Bush has “the moral clarity to define evil and attack it.” Ordinarily, I’d write this off to Brian’s characteristic rhetorical style – and maybe, in his case, that’s what it is. But I hear more and more of this coming from people who are paid to provide reasonable perspectives on political situations, and it’s a highly disconcerting development.
On Brian’s points, obviously, patriots of all stripes voted for candidates of both parties on November 5th, in roughly equal numbers. Would anyone deny that the people in Georgia who voted for decorated veteran Max Cleland were any less patriotic than those who voted for Saxby Chambliss, who as far as I know has rendered no distinguished service to this country? Nancy Pelosi may oppose certain freedoms – such as the freedom of certain individuals to pass multi-million dollar estates to their heirs entirely untaxed, or the freedom of corporations to operate with no regulation other than what the market will not let them get away with – but she supports others, such as a woman’s freedom to choose. Bush has so far managed to control the foreign policy debate by reducing complex issues to simple formulas of “evil-doers” and an “axis of evil,” but it’s debatable that he’s doing the country any favors in the long term by replacing the measured language of diplomacy with shoot-from-the-hip self-righteousness, whether or not it reflects that “clarity” with which he views the situation. I don’t mean just to pick on Brian. Nicholas Kristof pointed to the same set of problems in the discourse of the Left last month in the Times. [archived article, payment required]
Rhetorical excess has always been endemic to politics. Supporters need to feel they are fighting for something important, and rush to cloak their often-humdrum, occasionally self-serving policy objectives in the language of higher virtues. It’s also a good way to drum up support among people who can’t be bothered with the details. Ideology provides a bright color-coded road map to know who your friends are. Right now, however, you get the sense that both sides believe their own most extreme positions to an alarming degree, and that there is neither the hope nor the desire for productive compromise on either side. The almost bloodthirsty desire for absolute victory – and I must say I see this more on the part of the Right than the Left – is nearly unprecedented in our political history and not really a very promising development in the current situation, where we need the benefit of all views and opinions to help solve some extremely challenging problems.
The consequences of the “my way or the highway” view are clear. When opponents are not just wrong but evil, unpatriotic, and against freedom, any action against them becomes justified. Sometimes – very rarely, as in World War II, or our current struggle against al-Qaida – this degree of commitment to conflict is required. More often, however, what begins as a lazy desire to avoid engaging intellectually in legitimate debate or justifying emotional but rationally-suspect positions, ends in a witch-hunt where honest differences of opinion are criminalized and people expressing themselves freely are subjected to grievous oppression. Neither side is innocent of these ugly tactics, and both sides feel entitled by virtue of the sins of the other to pursue their course with complete, ruthless abandon.
We don’t have the talent to waste in this kind of zero-sum disputation. The solution begins by toning down the rhetoric and recognizing that neither side has a monopoly on virtue, no ideology explains everything perfectly. The rhetoric of absolutes is the language of emotion, of fanaticism. That is always the wrong way to govern. But we can only turn away from it by foregoing the gratification of seeing our adversaries in total defeat. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear very likely right now.
10:26:53 PM 
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