On Demonization I: The Tactic

The following was written almost a year ago -- that is, before my marriage finally and irretrievably disintegrated -- and posted here. I very much recommend that you peruse the long discussion that followed in the comments...I can't tell you how much I miss the salon Alexandra used to run, though God knows I understand better than anybody how much work running that unique and astonishing blog must have been and how private life can rise up and drive you from the scene for a few months. At any rate, that post was intended to be the first in a series of posts that Alexandra was never able to publish, and which I'm going to go ahead and publish myself here. So here's the first installment, which provides an essential foundation for the posts that follow.

And Alexandra...I sure do miss you and the gang.

From debate on the Senate floor about interrogation tactics at Guantanamo: ...continue reading...

When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here -- I almost hesitate to put them in the record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold....On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

-- Senator Dick Durbin

I recently wrote a post expressing my concern about the prevalence of hate-speech and hate-rhetoric in modern American politics, in which I used Senator Durbin's demonization of the Guantanamo interrogators as an example of objectionable rhetoric. (UPDATE: My friend Jim justly points out that I ought not use Durbin's outburst as a bad example without doing him the justice of observing that a couple of days later -- admittedly only after he had been absolutely roasted for a couple of days by people complainingly about the outrageous demonization represented by his comments, but still -- Durbin apologized. And it was a real apology, if I remember correctly, not a weaseling, "If anybody was offended, then I apologize for offending your ears with the truth" kind of thing. Jim is absolutely right; I should have mentioned that to begin with.) Well, a good friend of mine, who happens, like Durbin, to detest Dubya and to consider Guantanamo to be an indelible stain on our national honor, had a response that interested me very much. She couldn't understand why I would have a problem with Durbin's rhetoric; well, okay. But then, even more interestingly, she in the very same conversation complained about conservatives' referring to liberals as "unpatriotic" and as "aiding and abetting the enemy." That is to say, she thinks that sometimes it's okay to demonize, and sometimes it isn't, though she's vague as to how one is supposed to tell what is good demonization and what is bad demonization.

Fairly deep into the conversation she got somewhat plaintive in her frustration over my (to her) incomprehensible take on Durbin's rant:

Why must [Durbin's contention] be put nicely? Why is not this remark evaluated on the basis of the truth that underlies and causes the occasion?

Why, Kenny.... why, why, why? :)

The conversation petered out shortly thereafter and we've since moved on to other topics. But the more I think about her question, the more I think it's a question worth a careful and detailed answer. The problem is, there are several reasons to say that responsible people do not, except under exceptional circumstances (if ever), resort to that particular rhetorical tactic. So I think what's called for is a series of posts, each one examining in detail a single reason that demonization is a bad thing, something which we as individuals should not engage in and which we as a culture should not deem socially tolerable. My time constraints being what they are, I may not be able to finish the series (I usually don't manage to finish long series of this nature, because the family-of-eleven things, and the job-that's-demanding-enough-for-me-to-be-paid-enough-to-support-a- family-of-eleven things, tend to rise up and derail me). But I can at least make a start, beginning with what I think is most important; and perhaps other people can pick up the baton when I wind up dropping it.

Now, the very first thing to observe, is that my friend gets upset when demonization is aimed at the people she agrees with and likes, but not when it's aimed at the people she disagrees with and dislikes. This would seem to imply that she objects to demonization because she wants to protect the people who are targeted thereby. But this, I think, means that between her perspective and mine there is a great gulf fixed, right from the first step. For by far my biggest reason to urge people not to indulge in demonization, is the damage I believe it does to the person who is doing the demonizing. When I urge Senator Durbin or Paul Krugman not to demonize President Bush, that's not because I'm worried about Dubya's reputation or feelings. It's first and foremost because I am worried about Durbin and Krugman.

In order to understand why I'm concerned on their behalf, we have to make sure we understand exactly what demonization is. It isn't just calling somebody evil, because the whole implication is that you're rhetorically making the person out to be worse than he really is. For example, it isn't demonization to say, "Satan is the devil." That's just the literal truth. Nor is it demonization to say, "Hitler was Hitler," or, "Stalin was Stalin," or, "Pol Pot was Pol Pot," or, "Dubya is Dubya," or, "Teddy Kennedy is Teddy Kennedy."

In other words, demonization involves some form of exaggeration. It is a subspecies of hyperbole, which is exaggeration for rhetorical effect.

Furthermore, demonization has a particular rhetorical effect in mind. I recently criticized Dubya's stubborn refusal to alter tactics in Iraq until long after it should have been obvious that the tactics required changing (as tactics, in wars, always do). And I expressed the basic idea of, "Dubya stubbornly insisted on trying to win the war on the cheap," by accusing him, tongue-in-cheek, of having thought that he could establish a stable and just society in Iraq with "six Marines, a K-9 unit, and some high-tech weapons," or something to that effect.

Now, that's actually not demonization, for two reasons:

1. It's intended for comic effect, i.e., it's intended to amuse, even though I was in the middle of making a serious point.

2. It's meant to be impossible to be taken literally -- nobody with an I.Q. higher than an oxygen-deprived cocker spaniel would really think that the U.S. has fewer than ten military personnel stationed in Iraq.

Demonization, on the other hand, is intended to evoke or to rationalize outrage (which of course the demonizer and his partisans will describe as "righteous" anger); and it is intended to be something that at least a great many people will think can be taken literally or almost so. The two are related because if the exaggeration is so over-the-top as to be absurd, the initial reaction is likely to be laughter rather than anger, and laughter is most certainly not the reaction the demonizer intends to evoke. Indeed, most of the time demonization isn't just intended to evoke anger -- it's usually intended to inculcate hatred.

Now, let's look again at Senator Durbin's outburst on the Senate floor. Unless we want to consider the Senator a liar, we must presume that he is not trying to convince people of anything that isn't true. Furthermore, unless we want to consider him a complete idiot, we must presume that he is aware of several facts:

1. Honest people can disagree with the Senator about whether the actions of the United States at Guantanamo are unethical. Honest people can further disagree about whether those actions are a wise and acceptable means of protecting the American people. It is therefore entirely possible that the President means well and is trying to protect the country against terrorists, acting perhaps foolishly, but with the best and most honorable of intentions.

2. If what the Guantanamo detainees have undergone qualifies as "torture," then the bar that constitutes torture has been lowered very far indeed, as their treatment is only by the most expansive definitions comparable to the actions that most English-speakers imagine when you pronounce the word "torture." Indeed, nothing Durbin describes is as severe as what our armed forces commonly put our soldiers through in training exercises; and you would not be able to find a prison anywhere in Europe or in America in which the inmates are cared for as well. Great care is taken to ensure that no permanent physical harm is incurred (even when the inmates are trying to hurt themselves); nor are there "mock executions;" nor anything that produces pain remotely comparable to that caused by the rack, or by branding with hot irons, or by suspending somebody from handcuffs until their arms pull out of their sockets, or by starving them to the point at which they eat the grass in the prison yard out of sheer desperation, or by yanking out their fingernails with pliars, or by lashing them with a cat-o'-nine-tails, or by forcing them to work an eight-hour day ditch-digging in waist-deep water in winter. It would, I think, be very difficult for Senator Durbin to explain how forcing somebody to listen to loud rap music can qualify as "torture" unless the imposition of pretty much any degree of physical discomfort whatsoever is now to be defined as "torture." So, if we take out the buzz-word "torture" and replace it with an accurate description of the behavior to which Durbin objects, I think the worst description we can honestly manage is "significant but purely temporary physical discomfort."

3. No country in which the putative "despot" can be vilified in the nation's leading newspapers with the venom and frequency with which Dubya is vilified, is remotely a "despotic" nation. No nation whose "concentration camps" involve the extreme measures for ensuring the health and religious freedom of the inmates that is evident at Guantanamo, is remotely a nation that denies the humanity of its enemies.

Yet Durbin thinks that Stalin and Pol Pot are somehow relevant to discussions of Guantanamo. I can't read his mind, but my best guess is that he wants to posit a sort of slippery slope: if we allow "torture," we put ourselves on a path that will ultimately lead to our being no better than the worst and most inhumane regimes of the twentieth century, even if we step onto that path out of the best of intentions.

Therefore, unless Durbin is a fool or a liar, what he intended to say was something like this:

"I know the President means well and is trying to protect the country against terrorists, but his policies are foolish, because if we allow our interrogators to cause significant but purely temporary physical discomfort to their interrogees, this will set in motion a chain of events that ultimately will cause the United States to be engaging in deliberate genocide and operating slave labor camps and death camps that will result in the deaths of millions. Therefore the President should change his policies and cease causing physical discomfort to the prisoners at Guantanamo."

But instead of saying this, the Senator chose, for purely rhetorical purposes, to say that if you were to show an observer a prisoner under interrogation at Guantanamo and another prisoner under interrogation in Stalin's Lubyanka Prison, the observer wouldn't be able to tell which interrogation was which.

So now let us ask ourselves whether the Senator's rhetoric was intended to stir up anger (at the very least) against the President. What do we see when we examine the possibilities?

1. As Senator Durbin well knew, a great many people both in the United States and out were already either enraged about, or predisposed to be enraged about, the subject of Guantanamo; and furthermore, he knew perfectly well that the majority of the enraged were people who had a well-established, settled tendency to hate the President, and specifically to identify Bush (in all grim seriousness) with Hitler.

2. Nothing in the Senator's tone of voice, nor in his phrasing, even hints at any humorous intent.

3. The Senator could not possibly have phrased his accusation in a way that would have made it sound more as though he believed his accusation was literally true. If someone were silly enough to found a belief on the word of a politician, and that someone were to lack the antecedent knowledge of Nazi and Stalinist interrogation techniques necessary to see for himself the absurdity of the comparison, then the Senator would have every opportunity to convince Mr. Gullible that the U.S. guards at Guantanamo really are quite literally equivalent to the K.G.B. interregators at Lubyanka -- and the Senator's audience was an American people whose history knowledge is overwhelmingly gained from the notoriously disastrous American public education system.

4. The Senator's rhetoric and line of attack could be nothing but counterproductive if it were intended to change the mind of the President's supporters, or to win the good will and good opinion of persons who were well-educated, well-informed, and undecided as to the which of the two sides had a better case. Therefore whatever else the rhetoric might have accomplished, it most certainly would not persuade anybody not already predisposed to hate Dubya -- which is to say, it would not persuade anybody who didn't already agree that Guantanamo was an American gulag. If persuasion was the Senator's intent, then the Senator is quite possibly the stupidest person in Washington, D.C., which is saying quite a lot indeed.

5. The Senator's use of demonization does not clarify the issue; it clouds it. Imagine a straightforward explanation of what the detainees were experiencing, one that avoids special pleading by including information (such as the detainees' average weight gain while in Gauntanamo) that the Senator leaves out because it would interfere with his attempt to portray Dubya as a monster, and one that does not implicitly or explicitly impute malicious motives to Bush. (I already imagined one and suggested it, of course, but mine probably doesn't capture exactly what he would say if he were not trying to demonize.) Without knowing for sure exactly what such an explanation would look like, we can at least be confident that it would have laid out the reasons Durbin felt the policy was wrong without attempting to distort the facts by exaggeration. It would, in fact, have made Durbin's point quite a bit more clearly and accurately than Durbin did himself -- and then we wouldn't be sitting here trying to imagine a straightforward version of what Durbin really (on the assumption that he is neither a liar nor a fool) intended to say.

My liberal friend says that "rhetoric such as this is intended to make ideas politically understandable in a less-nuanced way." Now, I don't know exactly what she means by "politically" understandable. If what she means is that the rhetoric was intended to make people feel agreement with Durbin's politics by clouding their understanding, then I think she's quite right, though I think it does a certain amount of violence to the English language to describe someone who is deliberately distorting the facts in order to cloud judgment with emotion as "making ideas understandable." But if she means that Durbin's intent in turning to demonization was to see to it that his hearers had a clearer, more accurate understanding of the behavior he was criticizing and the principles involved, then clearly she is wrong. Rhetoric such as this does not clarify; it muddies.

In other words, the only effect any sensible person could expect the Senator's rhetoric to have, was to take the people who were already convinced that our interrogation techniques were bad, and whip up their anger and hatred against Bush on that account. And I submit to the candid reader that this is always the primary function of demonization as a rhetorical technique.

So either the Senator was doing this on purpose, or else the Senator is an extremely stupid man with no idea of how voters are affected by rhetoric. Now, you may wish to believe that an extremely stupid man who does not understand even the most elementary dynamics of rhetoric upon voters' emotions, could nevertheless manage to campaign effectively enough to win repeated election to the U.S. Senate. If so, why then you may adopt the charitable view that Senator Durbin had no idea that his rhetoric would cause people to be angrier with Dubya than they already were and to hate Dubya more ferociously and unappeasably than they already did. Personally I think such a premise very much strains the boundaries of the believable, but you may see it differently. Alternatively, you may think that Durbin was himself sufficiently ignorant of the actual details of Nazi and Stalinist and Khmer Rouge atrocities, or sufficiently blinded by his own presettled disposition to think the worst of Bush, to have actually talked himself into believing that his statement was practically true on a literal level. This, like my former suggestion, is a way of saying basically that Durbin said what he said because he was a fool.

But if you don't think Durbin was pretty much an idiot, then I think you have to accept that Durbin's rhetorical purpose was to encourage as many people as possible to feel anger and hatred toward Republicans in general and Dubya in particular.

In order to save space, I will proceed with the rest of the post under the assumption that Durbin was not just being an idiot. Frankly, I think idiocy is the most likely explanation. But my friend who wishes to defend him rejects the idiot hypothesis, yet wishes to justify his tactics; and besides the point of the present post is to explore the deliberate use of demonization and whether, and when, it is justifiable. So let's proceed with the assumption, for the purposes of illustration, that Durbin knew exactly what he was doing and did it anyway, and to save space and tedious repetition, I won't keep saying that I myself am not actually prepared to level that accusation in literal fact.

Okay, so Durbin's presumable purpose was to stir up outrage, anger and hatred; and I think we also will assume that he knew that his intended audience would think that his statement was almost literally true. Those two characteristics of demonization are thus both present, leaving us with the question of whether Durbin's speech involved any exaggeration.

Now, there are several different kinds of exaggeration that you can make use of if you wish to demonize. The first, and least objectionable, is to exaggerate in degree only, on a topic in which the question of whether some particular behavior is bad, is not itself a question of degree. Thus, let us say that a person has "lied" to his wife, in that he has told her, "I think you're the most beautiful woman in the world," when in fact he thinks Halle Berry is prettier. If you say that the man ought not be given a position of responsibility at work because, "I happen to know that he has repeatedly lied to his wife," this creates a false impression, even though you could argue that it is literally true.

With such exaggeration we are looking at a fuzzy-logic kind of thing: that is, if there is only a little bit of exaggeration, we might say that demonization was involved, but only mild demonization. If the exaggeration is a whoppin' ol' blue whale of an exaggeration, then we have extreme demonization. One might argue that when Clarence Thomas accused his accusers of attempting a "high-tech lynching," he was indulging in a relatively minor degree of demonization (he wasn't in the least danger of winding up dangling from a tree, though one sees what he was getting at). When Rush Limbaugh refers to "feminazis," we might consider the denomization to be more extreme. And when a teenager complains that his parents' home is "a police state," then he is...well, actually, he's just being a teenager. So, um, bad example. Moving right along...

Slightly more serious is exaggerating the degree of an offense in order to pretend that the target has crossed a critical moral threshold that he did not in fact cross. If you happen to know that a man has fantasized about Halle Berry, and you then say he ought not to be given a position of responsibility because, "I happen to know he's committed adultery," then this is an exaggeration that reaches into the realm of outright falsehood.

Now, the Democrats' view would presumably be that Durbin committed the first type of exaggeration -- that is, that American soldiers have been, strictly speaking, torturing Guantanamo detainees, but that admittedly they weren't torturing them quite as badly as the KGB and the Gestapo and the Khmer Rouge tortured their victims. (Considering that statistics so far would seem to show that it is infinitely less dangerous to be interrogated at Guantanamo than it is to be driven home by Teddy Kennedy; considering that literally millions of people starved to death under both Stalin and Hitler while the average weight change for Guantanamo prisoners, last I heard, was a gain of eighteen pounds; considering that when it comes to inflicting pain and suffering the Guantanamo "inquisitors" strike me as being rather farther from Spanish Inquisition Version 1.0 than they are from Spanish Inquisition Version Monty Python...well, the exaggeration involved here is spectacularly extreme. But the Democrats' premise is that while the degree may be extreme, all the same the exaggeration is still only a matter of degree, not essence.)

Trouble is, you have to be pretty much insane to think that to inflict any physical or emotional distress at all upon another human being counts as "torture," because otherwise you wouldn't even be able to put your child in time out without being a "torturer." Therefore the question of whether a person is a torturer or not may very well be a matter of degree, which means that a person who exaggerates in degree without first having been very careful indeed to address the question of the ethical boundary conditions, is very much in danger of committing the second, and more objectionable, type of exaggeration. There are probably a hundred million people in America who, if they knew exactly what sorts of interrogation techniques had been used at Guantanamo, would say, "Wait a minute, that's not torture." So at the very least, Durbin's technique is meant to make something that is grey look pitch-black.

But let's assume that Durbin (in emulation of Dubya) hasn't bothered to listen to the people who disagree with him, and therefore the Senator thinks that no reasonable person could doubt that what has gone on at Guantanamo is properly described as "torture." In that case, he would not intentionally be committing the second form of exaggeration -- though we could certainly make a case that he was committing the second form of exaggeration and was just too much of an ass to realize it.

This brings us to the third form of exaggeration, which is by far the most commonly used, and by far the most slanderous, destructive, and -- in my opinion -- evil and contemptible. This is the form of exaggeration in which you project upon your target motives that are not in fact the motives that are truly in his heart. The essence of the exaggeration is to take something that you believe he is doing, but that he does not think that he is doing, and implicitly or explicitly accuse him of doing it on purpose.

I pause here to point out, by the way, that if you were to go back over the last several years through all the utterances of the Daily Kos and the Democratic Underground and remove everything they have said that imputes to Bush, without remotely good evidence, evil motives, what you would mostly hear in the aftermath would be the sound of silence. So if this form of exaggeration is bad, then there are a whole bunch of Bush-haters who have a whole lot to repent of. (Not, I hasten to add, that there aren't similar haters on the conservative side as well.)

Now, the most common way to say something like, "Bush is doing all this on purpose," is not to do a Paul Krugman and come right out and accuse Bush of being an evil man who loves evil for its own sake. (The link is to a comment in which my liberal friend quotes Krugman approvingly; as I think Krugman's comment went way beyond the line I refuse to increase his traffic by linking to it myself.) By far the most common way to work this slander in rhetorically is by the following tactic:

1. Find a notoriously evil person who did something that you can claim is in the same class as what you say your target was doing, but who knew exactly what he was doing and did it on purpose. For example, I am a Libertarian who is very clearly aware that everything the government accomplished by law, the government accomplishes by means of violent coercion. So I in all sincerity believe that the use of government coercion to make people think twice before uttering in public sincerely held but politically incorrect beliefs (by, for example, defining "sexual harassment" to include "saying publicly that homosexual behavior is a sin" and then making "sexual harassment" a tort in law), is the same class of behavior as using government force to make people afraid publicly to teach a variant of Christianity other than the officially approved one. Now, if I wanted to inflame passions against persons who were promoting the idea that people ought to be sued if they engage in sexual harassment at work, I might not want to remind people that a lot of the people who support sexual harassment laws are people who mean well but who -- like most Americans -- simply haven't thought through all the implications of their position. So I could use the tactic of demonization and say, "If you didn't know you were in America, you could imagine that you were back in the days of the Spanish Inquisition and its war on heresy."

Do you see what I mean? Torquemada knew absolutely clearly that he was out to use fire and sword and brutal force to drive the people who disagree with him out of Spain, into hiding, or down to the grave. But many people who vaguely support laws about "sexual harassment" because they think people ought to be nice to each other, aren't consciously aware of the fact that what they are really doing is trying to use the government's power to hurt people in order to frighten into silence people whose views they personally find objectionable. For me, then, rhetorically to identify them with the Spanish Inquisition, is a slander and a lie -- for while I might be able to say that their actions resemble, in certain significant aspects, the actions of the Inquisitors, it is pretty much a lie for me to say that their conscious motives are the same as the conscious motives of the Inquisitors. But the whole rhetoric of association is intended to access the emotions that people feel toward the Inquisitors based on what we popularly presume to have been the motives of the Inquisitors and encourage the gullible to feel those same emotions toward other people who do not act from those evil motives.

Let me put it this way: Neville Chamberlain did a lot more to allow Hitler to overrun Europe than did the Duke of Windsor (formerly Edward VIII). But the Duke was an actual Nazi sympathiser; Chamberlain was not. You could call the Duke a "Nazi," and while you would be exaggerating, it wouldn't be a grotesque exaggeration. But if Churchill had attacked Chamberlain as a "Nazi" on the grounds that Chamberlain's policies were likely to lead to Nazi control of Europe, that would have been an appalling slander.

Or again, you may believe that, objectively speaking, abortion is a form of murder. But that doesn't make it right to refer to women who have gotten abortions as "murderers." For the overwhelming majority of those women (at least in America) have honestly not believed themselves to be arranging for another human being to be killed, and are therefore not on remotely the same moral plane as a mother who in cold blood kills a two-month-old baby. They are at most on the moral level of a clueless and careless deer hunter who shoots what he thinks is a deer and then discovers that he has killed his buddy by mistake. There is a big difference between being a fool and being a deliberately evil person; and when a demonizer equates a well-intentioned person with somebody who willfully and deliberately engaged in evil, the demonizer is himself committing an evil act.

That this is what Durbin was in fact doing is, I think, quite clear. I see no good reason to believe that Bush or the Guantanamo interrogators believe that what they are doing is torturing people in the relevant sense of the word; they do not believe that they are doing anything wrong, and they take all sorts of measures at Guantanamo that demonstrate that they do not, in fact, "have no concern for" the human beings under detention. When you feed your torture subjects better than you feed your own soldiers, and when you go to extraordinary measures to respect their religious sensibilities even though it's in the name of that very religion that a significant number of those detained intend, if given the chance, to kill your innocent countrymen, then clearly nobody involved in the chain of command has toward the prisoners an attitude that denies their humanity, or that demonstrates a Stalinesque or Hitleresque utter absence of conscience. I realize that it is very difficult for most Democrats to accept that a person of good conscience might disagree with the Democratic party line about what is moral and what isn't, but the fact that Democrats are notoriously narrow-minded and self-righteous, doesn't change the fact that nobody in the Guantanamo chain of command from Dubya on down is in fact engaging in the sort of willful evil that the Nazis and the Communists and the Khmer Rouge engaged in. (Okay, I admit I'm amusing myself with a little chain-yanking there.)

But people just don't hate the well-intentioned but confused, with the enthusiastic hatred they are willing to direct at the willfully, knowingly evil. So the demonizer, whose point is to stir up anger (at a minimum) and hatred (more often than not), will whenever possible imply that his target's motives are evil. And the easiest and most common way to do this is to slap on his target a label taken from persons whose motives are known to be evil, rather than to try to give any actual reason to think that the target's motives are anything but well-intentioned.

We know how truly vicious this tactic is by simple experience: how does it feel when other people do it to us? Do we like to have our motives misrepresented? Do we like to be painted as thoroughly black at heart when we know that our intentions at least were good? Of course not.

In fact we like it so little that, when even ordinary, simple descriptive words start to take on negative connotations, we start objecting to being called those words. I originally wrote that it is no demonization to say, "Teddy Kennedy is a liberal Massachusettes Democrat;" but then I remembered that, since a lot of Americans now have negative connotations with the term "liberal," liberals appear to be trying to rebrand themselves as "progressives." So I went the safe version.

Do you see what I mean? Take, for example, the fact that (much to the fury of old-school feminists) young women are notoriously reluctant to call themselves "feminists," even when they support gender-based affirmative action, Title IX, abortion on demand throughout pregnancy, and the Equal Rights Amendment. But this is easily explained: the term "feminist" now conjures up, for most people, not a list of political goals, but a kind of person -- among other things, a person who not only hates men, but even hates other women who choose not to hate men. Therefore young women who support the feminist agenda, but do not hate men, reject the label "feminist," because they reject the implications that term has about their motives rather than about the political policies they support.

Here is where the real power of demonization lies. Human beings are notoriously bad at figuring out other people's motives, and if there's anything that experience teaches us, it's that when people try to ascribe motives to people they don't like, they almost always ascribe to them motives that (a) aren't at all what the real motives were and (b) are much worse than the real motives were. You see it in estranged husbands and wives and parents and children: once you get angry with somebody you get very bad at figuring out what their motives are, and once your anger settles into permanent hatred you can be all but guaranteed to get it wrong. If, therefore, I were to attempt to spell out what I thought were the motives of the person I wished to demonize, I would be likely to come up with something as patently absurd as Krugman's utterly-bereft-of-sanity wild-assed speculation about the near-Satanic motives of The Evil That Is Dubya:

Torture, I believe, appeals to the president and the vice president precisely because it’s a violation of both law and tradition. By making an illegal and immoral practice a key element of U.S. policy, they’re asserting their right to do whatever they claim is necessary.

Now anybody who is not himself blinded by hatred of Dubya will, upon reading that, simply say, "My God, Krugman has lost it," and go on about his business. The danger of specificity, you see, is that the more specific you make a charge, the easier it is for your opponents -- or, in Krugman's case, your readers' simple common sense -- to show the absurdity of your charge, thus destroying its effectiveness: instead of hating your target, people merely laugh at you. So you see, it is far more effective simply to slap on some label that drags in the connotation of evil motives, without ever providing an explicit accusation of evil motives against which your target could defend himself. Specifics can be refuted. Vague connotations cannot.

You could, for example, call Republicans "fascists." Not one Democrat in a hundred could tell you what makes a particular system of government "fascist," nor would those hundred Democrats really care. In modern American language, "You fascist," means, "You're a Republican, plus I hate you." Similarly, to call someone a "fundamentalist Christian" now means nothing much more than, "You think that there's a single moral code that applies to everybody and in particular to me, even if I happen to dislike its requirements, plus you are uneducated and probably toothless and at most a short walk from the trailer park...plus I hate you." "Liberal" is rapidly coming to mean something similar on the other side, and of course I've already pointed out what has happened to the term "feminist."

That's the beauty (from the demagoguic standpoint) of labels. And that's the power of demonization.



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Okay, but that still leaves us with our original question: why is this a problem?

It will take five more posts for me to make even a beginning at answering this question...and the first of those may be found here.