Revisiting demonization

Got distracted by a bunch of other stuff (mostly divorce, which couldn't be going worse...next court date now moved back to 28 July, and since there will almost certainly be more than one court hearing, God only knows when the thing will really get finalized), and kind of left the demonization conversation hanging.

I want to respond to some personal criticisms Jim made, not because I object to personal criticisms (I take them seriously and gratefully) but because I think they clarify my point. First, though I want to respond to what I think is the question that matters most to Jim, and which carries very little weight with me, viz.: what do we do to change the sorry state of public discourse in America?

And the answer is: I don't think I can do a single damn thing about it, because who, besides the ten or fifteen people who read this blog, cares in the slightest about what I think? As Ghost Dansing put it bluntly in the first comment thread I ever participated on this topic, "Kenny, I understand what you are saying better than you think. I have to point out that your standards for discourse are your standards for discourse. [emphasis added -- KP] Rhetoric has been around as long as there have be human beings, and for some people unless you raise an exaggerated juxtaposition, they just 'don't get it'."

Now the Ghost and I know each other well and are friends and have wrangled cheerfully back and forth for a couple of years...and her response is basically, "If it bothers you, that's your problem."

So, um, I don't think I'll be changing the dynamics of nationwide political debate anytime soon, and don't plan on wasting my time and energy trying. But if you can figure out how to do it, Jim, I'll cheer you on every step of the way.

What I can do is try to make sure I make my own points in a responsible and charitable manner, and one of the best ways to do that is to publish my own standards of behavior so that in the future if I break 'em my friends can quite rightly blast me as a hypocrite and slap me back into line.

Now, this is precisely what Jim wants to do. So here's Jim's comment in which he explains that it looks to him an awful lot like I'm demonizing Durbin (a classic "physician, heal thyself" argument), which is something I took seriously because, as I say, my main reason for writing the post was precisely to give people license to blast me when I break my own rules.

Now, Kenny, let me point out a couple of things. I first read the start of this post on “All Things Beautiful” I personally think that is why you used the Durbin example -- You were playing to the crowd. Hmmm. Let me also point out you obliquely use comments like “if you were in the left-hand half of the American Left, I suspect that you would react to being called “Osama” with rather less outrage and hurt feelings than if one of your fellow Kossites were to call you “Dubya.”” At what point does this cross over into demonization? After all, you exaggerate, associate with iconic evil, play to your audience, etc. The only thing I can’t accuse you of in this statement, is imputation of evil motives. Except, and until you make the comment about aiding and abetting the enemy and the New York Times. Ok, call out complete, on with other discussion. But I know that since you were doing that for comic effect, it must not be demonization.

Jim is trying to measure me against the following characteristics of demonization that he had drawn from my earlier discussion:

1. Exaggeration, not for comic effect.
2. Imputation of evil motives.
3. Rhetorical association with iconic evil.
4. Playing to an audience known to be predisposed to hatred of the person or group being demonized.

Now, frankly, I'm mystified by the following bit, Jim, and you'll have to help me see where you're going with it:

Let me also point out you obliquely use comments like “if you were in the left-hand half of the American Left, I suspect that you would react to being called “Osama” with rather less outrage and hurt feelings than if one of your fellow Kossites were to call you “Dubya.”” At what point does this cross over into demonization?

In the first place, I can't figure out where the "iconic evil" comes in, unless Jim considers that the Daily Kos has itself achieved that status. And sadly enough, I don't think it's exaggeration, either. Have you read the Democratic Underground or Daily Kos comment threads recently, Jim? Or even HuffPo? I suppose I could be wrong about this, but in that case I'm not intentionally using demonization -- I'm just wrong. So I don't mind withdrawing the comment...but only if somebody can tell me that they've gone and read a week of the postings at the aforementioned three sites and have found anything remotely resembling as much Osama-directed outrage as they've found Bush- and Cheney-directed outrage. No excuses are allowed, in those cyber-neighborhoods, for Bush and Cheney, whom the New York Times opinion page has actually accused of doing evil purely for the sake of doing evil; but for Hamas there is a steady flow of how-can-you-blame-them-after-what-the-evil-Jews-have-done-to-them apologia. Look, Yasser Arafat, for God's sake, won a Nobel Peace Prize, and Jimmy Carter just visited the evil bastard's grave and left an affectionate wreath on it. What do you think the chances are that George W. Bush will ever win a Nobel Peace Prize, or that Jimbo will ever regard Dubya with affection? On the Sunday after 9/11 the primary spiritual guide of the Democratic Party's likely Presidential nominee pretty much said we had it coming, which comes pretty bloody close to excusing the perpetrators, and there are wide swaths of the American public who don't think Obama had anything to do with 9/11 at all; but the wildest speculations on the demonic plans of Bush and Rove are met with wide-eyed, childishly uncritical enthusiasm. So where, exactly, was my exaggeration?

Now let's look at the criticism of my original post as put up over at ATB.

I think it's going a bit far to describe the people at ATB -- a crowd whose most active poster besides Alexandra herself and me was Ghost Dansing, and where liberal Jewish guy Mac Brachman remains Alexandra's most loyal non-Ghost commenter to this day, as a "crowd" devoted to hatred of Durbin -- unless, Jim, by "crowd" you mean Alexandra herself. What I loved the most about ATB was that some pretty diverse opinions came into collision with a remarkably high proportion of light to heat.

But let's grant for the sake of argument that ATB was a "crowd" like the Democratic Party -- which isn't that big a stretch, so I'm fine with granting it. That raises an interesting dilemma: if you want to make a point that you believe desperately needs to be made, and there's a "crowd" that you know will be apt, through malice or ignorant habit, to misapply it, does that mean you have to let the point go unmade? I don't think so. I think the most you can do is make a serious effort to head off misunderstanding -- and if you go back and look at the original ATB post and the comments, I think you can see that I made every effort one could very well have expected to make it clear that I thought Durbin was mostly just being a moron. Also, the comment originally started, not with Durbin, but with the rule that "the first guy who mentions Hitler automatically loses the debate" -- and (a) most of the "Hitler" language for the last eight years has been thrown around by the Kos Krowd section of the Democratic Party, and (b) Durbin's quote was a classic example that had stuck in my mind because of my special interest in the gulag. Jim, would you deny that for the last few years the one person in the entire world who has been accused of being a new Hitler more than any other ten people combined, is Dubya? So the chances that I would take up that topic and not start with some Democrat who was accusing Bush of being Hitler, were pretty small.

But even so, I went to some trouble to make it clear that I thought that generally speaking it was a common tactic that was temporarily ascendant among Democrats but only after having previously been ascendant among Republican Clinton-haters, and at one point in the comments I even explictly pointed out that my opinion of Durbin was more or less the same as my opinion of Dubya -- which can't possibly have been playing to the same crowd, Jim, that you accuse me of playing to in bringing up Durbin in the first place. Here's the paragraph in question, by the way:

On the other topic, though, you [addressing the Ghost] seem to be disagreeing with my theory that Durbin said what he said through fatuous ignorance, and maintaining that in fact he knew perfectly well that he was indulging in demonization. You consider this an exculpation of the Senator, it seems, because you think you have shown that demonization is not evil, and thus you are trying to clear him from the charge of being a moron. Since I do not buy your rationalization of the tactic, if I were to accept your correction, this would force me to stop thinking of him as a well-meaning moron and instead drop him in the vicious-lying-bastard-politician slot. Therefore I think it's more charitable for me to continue thinking of Durbin as I have been so far, which -- ironically enough -- is pretty much the way I think about Dubya.

I think that also should show that I went to a great deal of trouble not to exaggerate. In fact in that comments section I gave an example of what my comments about Durbin would have looked like had I decided to give him a taste of his own demonizing medicine:

If it is possible that a person is engaging in the behavior you detest out of good but foolish intentions, then it might be appropriate to call him a "little Chamberlain," but to call him a "little Stalin" would be demonization.

Now, that Durbin was engaging in demonization (though I think in this particular case he was fooling himself as much as anybody else) is not really open to dispute. He was, quite clearly, engaging in demonization. But demonization was probably Hitler's single most effective propaganda weapon. So if you're going to defend Durbin, my dear Ghost, then you can't very well avoid saying that it's okay to be quite a bit like Hitler in some ways. [The Ghost had tried to say that it was fine for Durbin to say that Bush was just like Hitler, because it was wrong for Bush to be even a little bit like Hitler and therefore, as far as I could follow what she seemed to be arguing, any sort of flaming you wanted to do to Bush was justified by even the faintest resemblance to Hitler.] Indeed you tiptoe up to the very threshold of making that sentiment explicit when you try to excuse Durbin's use of a dishonest and destructive rhetorical technique that happens to have been Hitler's favorite technique as well, by saying, "Politicians use rhetoric." Well, yes, but there's a difference between using rhetoric responsibly and using it irresponsibly. For example:

Responsible:

When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

Irresponsible:

Mr. Lincoln has a very convenient mode of arguing upon the subject. He holds that because he is a Republican he is not bound by the decisions of the court, but that I, being a Democrat, am so bound. It may be that Republicans do not hold themselves bound by the laws of the land and the Constitution of the country as expounded by the courts; it may be an article in the Republican creed that men who do not like a decision have a right to rebel against it; but when Mr. Lincoln preaches that doctrine, I think he will find some honest Republican -- some law-abiding man in that party -- who will repudiate such a monstrous doctrine.

Both Dr. King and Mr. Douglas used rhetoric. Would you say that the former's use legitimized the latter's?

At any rate, for my part, having more sense and integrity than Durbin, I'm not about to say that he is a Nazi just because I caught him engaging in demonization; I think his motives were not very Nazi-esque, even if his rhetorical methods were, and therefore it would be slanderous for me to say that Durbin is a Nazi, or to pretend that if I hadn't known in advance that the person who gave Durbin's speech was a Democrat, I would have assumed from the speech that he was a Nazi propagandist with no respect whatsoever for truth or justice. But by your rule, since he is unquestionably "a little bit" like Hitler, I could feel free to label him a Nazi with a clear conscience. May I respectfully submit that my rule is more likely to promote charity and compassion and compromise and civility in discourse, than is yours?

Again, from my Libertarian perspective liberal Democrats are doing "the same thing" as Nazis or Communists -- that is, they are (or would be if they could get complete control of the goverment) using the government's monopoly on violent coercion, and people's fear of what the government can do to them if they break the laws, in order to promote a political agenda that lots of reasonable people would disagree with and object to if your government were to fail to intimidate them into silence. Insofar as you want to pursue your agenda by expanding the government's power and directing it to the service of your agenda, Ghost, you yourself are more than just a little bit like Hitler and don't mind being so -- but you would object pretty strongly if I were to announce that from now on I would always refer to you as "ATB's resident Hitler." I certainly would object if anybody here were to start calling you "Eva Braun" -- but then I also object when people refer to Dubya as "Hitler."

So I did not exaggerate, and I explicitly defended Durbin's motives, and I explicitly said that it would be ludicrous to attempt to equate Durbin with iconic evil. To me, Jim, that seems pretty much to reduce your criticism to, "You criticised a Democrat in front of Republicans," which, while admittedly something that must be done carefully lest one tempt one's weaker brethren to uncharity, is hardly demonization, I think.

I even provided a version of Durbin's speech, at least as the Ghost appeared to be interpreting it in order to defend it, that (a) I would still have disagreed with, but (b) I would not have considered demonization. Here it is:

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 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.

And, Jim, I think you, given your definition of "torture," could argue that replacing "physical discomfort" with "torture" would still give us a speech without exaggeration, in which case I would grant that it was reasonable for you to excuse him of demonization. (Our disagreement then would revert to being about the proper definition of torture rather than the proper definition of demonization.)

But that's not what he said. He said you couldn't tell the difference between Americans and Nazis or the KGB without nametags because there was no discernible difference between the way the prisoners were being treated. And I think if people look at that original ATB post and the comment thread, and they look at what Durbin said (and later, as you, Jim, rightly have urged me to emphasize, apologized for), what you'll see is precisely the difference between criticism and demonization.

But I'd be interested to know if other people besides Jim agree that I crossed the line... 'cause it's a line I don't want to cross.

NOTE: In this post, I attempted to demonstrate, by the use of Swiftian satire, that Durbin was guilty of gross exaggeration.