This post is a direct response to Phib’s post at his place.
When I get this project over-I am going to do a long post on why the argument that heated political rhetoric does not beget violence is wrong-and forcefully attack those who think they get some sort of a free pass from the ridiculous analogies told again and again to us by our Tri Corner hat wearing friends and all their blogger buddies.
For the record-it is perfectly legitimate to discuss whether the anti-government rhetoric has created a problem for this country, regardless of whatever the particulars of the Tucson shooter turn out to be.
Get over it-the right has gone too far, just as the left did 30+ years ago. Just because both sides did it-does not make it right.
Read:
On Debating Our Debate.
As we debate what kind of rhetoric is and isn’t objectionable, it would help if we could make some specific distinctions and keep some important things in mind. To that end:
Every gun metaphor is not created equal. Military metaphors infuse our talk about politics; the only thing that comes close is sports. The word “campaign” only relatively recently began to be used to refer to politics; its original use referred to military endeavors. But there is a difference between using metaphors that invoke violence (“We’re going to fight this battle to the end!”) and using rhetoric that invokes violence specifically directed at your opponents (like this), or even speaks literally of people arming to take on your opponents or the government (like Sharron Angle‘s infamous discussion of “Second Amendment remedies” to not getting the result you want at the ballot box). One is perfectly ordinary; the other ought to be condemned.
The fact that someone criticizes your rhetoric doesn’t mean they’re “blaming” you for the Arizona shooting. Right now, Sarah Palin‘s defenders are angrily denouncing people for “blaming” her for the shooting, because people have pointed to her now famous crosshair map of candidates she was targeting for defeat in 2010, including Gabrielle Giffords. But no one is saying this guy committed his massacre because he looked at this map. What people are saying is that this kind of thing goes too far. Certain things contribute to an atmosphere in which violence becomes more likely; criticizing those things doesn’t mean you’ve said that in the absence of one particular statement or Web posting this event wouldn’t have occurred.
If you think your rhetoric is above reproach, you have an obligation to defend it on its merits. Naturally, many on the right are going to attempt to turn the criticism of them around on the left: See how they’re playing politics! But if you think it’s perfectly fine for you to say what you’ve been saying, explain why. Attacking the motives of those criticizing you doesn’t qualify.
Asking you to tone it down is not censorship. Over at Slate, Jack Shafer defends inflammatory political speech by saying, in part, that “any call to cool ‘inflammatory’ speech is a call to police all speech.” As someone who has spent many years tangling with conservatives over their rhetoric, I’ve heard this argument a million times. When you criticize some talk-show host for something he said, he inevitably responds, “You can’t censor me!” The First Amendment guarantees your freedom to say whatever idiotic thing you want, but it doesn’t keep me from calling you out for it. No one is talking about throwing anyone in jail for extreme rhetoric, but we are talking about whether people should be condemned for certain kinds of rhetoric.
The rhetoric of violence is not the only kind of rhetoric that encourages violence. The apocalyptic rhetoric we’ve seen from some on the right, most notably Glenn Beck, should be part of this discussion too. When Beck portrays Barack Obama as the head of a socialist/communist/Nazi conspiracy whose goal is the literal destruction of America, he is implicitly encouraging violence. If that really were the nature of the administration, and our liberty really were on the verge of being snuffed out, violence would be justified.
If you’re going to say “Liberals do it too” then you ought to provide some evidence. No one disputes that there has been a tide of extreme and violent rhetoric from some quarters of the right in the last couple of years. But any journalist who characterizes this as a bipartisan problem ought to be able to show examples, from people equal in prominence to those on the right (i.e. members of Congress, incredibly popular radio hosts, etc.) who have said equally violent and incendiary things. ( Skippy note-this is key, finding some mean posters from an anti-war rally does not count. The protests of 2003 are not the same as those of 2009-period)“Harry Reid once called George W. Bush a liar” doesn’t qualify, nor does a nasty comment some anonymous person once left on a blog.
UPDATE!
Clive Crook over at the Atlantic has some good words too:
“What? Surely we can manage subtler distinctions than that. You know, “persuade” is not the same as “command”–that kind of thing. Still, he is right that you cannot legislate civility, and that it would be wrong (as well as plainly unconstitutional) to try. His big mistake, I think, is to see ceaseless anger and contempt as the formula for a healthy polity. Spirited, he calls it.
The problem with anger is that it makes it harder to think clearly. It’s just bad practice. You might not want to outlaw it, but it can’t hurt to understand the drawbacks. Also, in the end, we have to get on with people whose views we do not share. If we work ourselves up into mutual loathing, or antagonize the other guy to the point of incoherence, then we are unable to communicate. We cripple our ability to govern ourselves or live together happily. Even if the result is not physical violence, it is exaggerated political turbulence and discontent. Shafer seems to want as much of these as we can get, without actually coming to blows. Those African countries riven by tribe? They’re so spirited! Basically, aim for civil war, then pull it back just a notch.
It doesn’t sound like “a more perfect union” to me.
Sorry Phib-somethings are just wrong and need to be acknowledged as such. Trying to say that the stupidity of our politics over the last two plus years is all “the left’s” fault-and that this is “exploiting” the situation, is just not right.
And if we need any further proof of the futility of the equivalence arguement– or why there is no passable reason to be “disgusted” with those who are raising our current level of discourse as a subject for discussion-I give you this little tidbit to chew on. ( Because now I have to go back to spreadsheets and try to find a way to allocate a whole boatload of hours……to keep real people from getting screwed).
I don’t really blame conservatives for being upset at liberals trying pin the blame for the Giffords shooting on them, but the furious defensiveness of their counterattack says all that needs to be said about how uncomfortable they are with their own recent history. The big difference between right and left, as I and others have noted repeatedly, isn’t just in the amount of violent rhetoric, but its source. On the liberal side, it only occasionally comes from movement leaders. On the right, it regularly does. It comes from opinion leaders, political leaders, and media leaders, and the more heated they get, the more popular they get. As David Corn says, “Republicans have institutionalized their side’s craziness.” This is the big difference between the two sides, and the right could really stand to engage in a wee bit of soul searching over this.