The call for civility in public debate has become a cliché. The argument is straightforward: if people just made their arguments with less heat, less anger, and more reason, everything would be fine. We would all get along. But it’s not that simple. It is not a case of anger augmenting the argument, it is a case of anger replacing the argument. The rise in anger and apocalyptic language on the right tracks the quality of the argument inversely. How better to hide behind a ludicrous argument than with some red-faced screaming with dark overtures? And the crazier than argument, the more extreme the rhetoric. Glenn Beck, anyone?
Take a cold dispassionate look at the positions of the right over the past few years. The financial crisis was not caused by excess leverage and risk-taking on Wall Street that led the global economy to tank. It was caused by loans forced onto poor people and minorities by corrupt government entities, egged on by ACORN. The problem was not too little regulation, but too much, led by a socialist president. The massive expansion in the deficit did not reflect a recession-led collapse in revenue and rise in automatic spending like unemployment benefits, but a wild spending spree on “big government” projects. The loosening of fiscal policy (both automatic and discretionary) made the recession worse, not better. The high debt is the leading cause of low growth, even while interest rates remain at an all-time low. Cutting taxes doesn’t increase the deficit. Spending money on unemployment benefits makes the recession worse, while giving tax breaks to the richest makes it a lot better. Government interference in health care is evil, except when it is a single-payer system called Medicare. The Affordable Care Act represents a government take-over of healthcare, instead of an attempt to being the uninsured into the private insurance net through the use of subsidies and an individual mandate. What was Republican orthodoxy in healthcare as late as the 1990s is now a totalitarian attempt to suppress freedom. The Affordable Care Act would mean bureaucrats deciding which grandmothers to kill, while the current system of massive rationing by cost is simple the market in action. Climate change is a conspiracy, with a large-scale doctoring of the data, and also because it was very cold last winter.
I could go on and on and on. It is of course a natural human instinct to see no flaw in your own position, and nonsense in the positions of others. But what has happened over the past few years on the right is an disintegration of intellectual honesty that is almost unprecedented in modern times. With no light, only heat can win the day, especially when the media have utterly forsaken their public watchdog role. If it is a giant socialist plot to destroy civilization, and lock everybody up in soviet-style gulags, then the policy details seem suddenly irrelevant, don’t they? It can be an effective strategy. But this strategy has consequences. Dark consequences.
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