The Way of the Left

Jay Tea at Wizbang has an interesting insight into some of the enflamed rhetoric being tossed around by the Democrats and Iraqi war protestors:

Shouting into the abyss
A while ago, I wrote about the "heckler's veto," where people are prevented from speaking by being shouted down or threatened. It's a despicable tactic.

And it's a tactic that seems to have evolved. Its practitioners have learned that shouting someone down requires meeting them face-to-face, and that doesn't always work -- especially in silent forums such as online and print discussions.

So they went looking for a way to adapt the heckler's veto to work, and they seem to have found one. If you can't increase the volume of your argument, increase the intensity. Ratchet up the rhetoric. Push everything into the extreme, and hope that the sound and fury of your words will overshadow the lack of substance.

With that tactic, everything becomes easier. Bush isn't a bad president, he isn't woefully wrong, he isn't misguided, he isn't leading us into disaster. He's Hitler, he's Satan, he's evil incarnate. Karl Rove is no longer a cunning political operative, a brilliant strategist, a visionary with a plan that you disagree with. He's Machiavelli, he's the evil genius, he's the puppet master, he's the shadowy power behind the throne. The war in Iraq isn't an error, it isn't a failure, it isn't wrong, it's American genocide and a ravenous lust for oil. And less-than-delicate treatement of prisoners, captured bearing arms against Americans on the battlefield while not in uniform (in violation of the Geneva convention) isn't mistreatment, it isn't questionable, it isn't a cause for concern, it's torture and slaughter and death camps and Gulags and the Killing Fields all over again.

I'm not the only one to have noticed this phenomenon. Jeff Harrell takes a different approach, exploring in depth just how and why this tactic works so well. It's a damned fine read, and Jeff definitely is on to something.

I've mentioned before "Godwin's Law," and I'd like to see it extended a bit. I'd like to see anyone who makes a comparison to some great atrocity in the past be immediately challenged to explain exactly what that great atrocity entailed, and then go into detail showing precisely how the current event compares with the historical one.

I'd like to blame this entirely on the Left, but it's done by those on the Right as well. I've heard numerous people toss around "communist" and "socialist" as insults, believing that they are dropping rhetorical bunker-busters that ought to end the discussion immediately. Unfortunately, they usually just come across as frothing, John Birch No-Nothings and ended up marginalizing themselves.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from Jeff Harrell's essay that Jay linked to:

I hate terrorists with all my heart. I hate the terrorist masterminds who make casual decisions about life and death. I hate the financiers and tyrants who bankroll terrorism. I hate the brainwashed kids from Mauritania and Sudan and Pakistan who aspire toward martyrdom. I hate them all. I watched the towers burn; I am quite comfortable with saying that I hate them all. And frankly, it seems to me that any American who doesn�t hate them all has a pretty seriously mixed-up values system.

If it were up to me, we�d throw every terrorist, even every strongly suspected terrorist, into a big hole, pave over the top, and get on with our lives. Crucifixion of the worst of them strikes me as entirely reasonable. Drawing and quartering, heads on pikes, all the medieval rituals that came to define our culture�s idea of cruelty: These all seem totally appropriate to me.

Which is precisely why I don�t get to make the decisions. As individuals, we members of the West are no better morally than our ancestors were. It�s only as a society that we elevate ourselves above the medieval and call ourselves civilized.

So a balance must be struck. On the one hand, if we descend to public torture and executions and abandon our ideas of justice and propriety, we abdicate our claim to cultural superiority. But on the other hand, if we simply turn the other cheek, the terrorists and their totalitarian Islamist leaders will wipe us off the face of the earth. This war, as much as any war in our nation�s history and more so than some, is a war of survival. If we choose not to fight, our culture will be overwhelmed by the totalitarian Islam that gathers like a wave in the poor corners of the earth, poised to surge out and bury the liberal democracies of the West. But on the other hand, if we fight this war too thoroughly and too well, our culture will vanish because we�ve chosen to abandon it.

We�re traversing a tightrope over the abyss of a new Dark Age.

That�s why I say that Dick Durbin was right. He was right that to the average American what we�re doing at Guantanamo Bay seems horrifying. He was also right to ask the question in the most sacred of all our secular temples, the floor of the United States Senate. He was a small-minded fool, of course, for asking the question in such a careless and irresponsible way. But let us not follow foolishness with foolishness. Let us not slip off the tightrope in either direction. Let us not succumb to the soft bigotry of low expectations and in so doing let all the things that make our culture worth saving slip from between our fingers. And let us not allow ourselves to be crushed under the weight of intolerably high expectations, squeezing our will to fight right out of us. Let us instead choose the narrow path. Let us wage this war with a heavy burden of doubt, questioning always, keeping ourselves perched delicately at the summit of man�s achievement.

Wow -- with writing like that, Jeff gets put on the Blogroll. He nails it exactly...