(6:57 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Things I am tired of

1. I am tired of people claiming not to understand an argument when clearly they do understand it and just disagree with it. It's nothing but an attempt to position oneself on the side of plain common sense, over against one's opponent.
   
   
2. I am tired of being told that the theological positions I advance do not conform to the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. It's nothing but an attempt to disqualify me from having a right to say what I'm saying, by painting me as a hypocrite ("Look, folks, the guy's registered as a member of a Catholic parish, but the stuff he's saying isn't even in the Catechism!").
   
   
3. I am tired of conservatives deploying the discourse of victimhood and the various devices of postmodernism. Conservative critics of those tactics were right: they are both dishonest and insufferable. Especially obnoxious is the tendency to psychologize liberals for holding the opinions they do.
   
   
4. I am tired of the use of the word "liberal" to denote all non-conservatives. The conservative movement really does represent a narrower range of opinions than the liberal side, because the conservativism that is now orthodox began as a very focussed minority movement. That is a big part of the reason for its success, and over the course of the next few decades, perhaps a similar "liberal" (or "progressive") orthodoxy will come into existence as a potent political force. No such liberal orthodoxy now exists. Pretending that "liberal" denotes the same kind of monolithic force as "conservative" does is completely dishonest, though it has been hugely effective as a rhetorical tool. I know that in many conversations with conservatives, I am instantly typecast as a liberal, and my conversation partners already feel like they know what I'm going to say.
   
   
5. Since this could apply to what I just said: I am tired of the logic of equivalence. What I mean by this is the claim that whatever fault occurs on one "side" must be equally prevalent on the other "side," and that therefore the fault is not worth talking about. If, for instance, I said that the Bush administration lies a lot, the counter-accusation would be that Clinton lied. The real motivation behind this rhetorical ploy seems to be to direct "liberals" to worry about "their guy" before criticizing "our guy" -- that is, the point of such a move is not to posit a moral equivalence between Bush and Clinton (such a thing would be unthinkable!), but rather to undercut the "liberals" as hypocrites who are only concerned about lying when it's the other guy who's lying but turn a blind eye to their own lying compatriots. It's a way of setting an impossibly high burden of proof -- before my accusations against Bush are to be given a fair hearing, I must denounce or disown every dishonest person who could plausibly be called a liberal.
   
   [As a sidenote, to counteract the equivalency attack on my assertion that conservatives already have me typecast: there is a much, much smaller range of "canonical" sources for the shaping of distinctively conservative opinions than there is for the shaping of liberal opinions, and those canonical sources are much more disciplined in conforming to a particular orthodoxy. No such unified sources of aggressively partisan information exist for liberals, and neither is such a univocal media environment even possible on the liberal side, because no parallel to the conservative orthodoxy exists. I am not saying that liberals are morally superior for this reason, just observing that, once again, the "two sides" are not strictly equivalent simply by virtue of being "two sides."
   
   I'm sure there's a very erudite remark waiting to be made about the fact that the conservative movement has basically fabricated a unified "liberal" movement as its own mirror image.]
   
   
6. I am tired, more generally, of the bracketting of the question of reality in favor of the question of partisan advantage. The constant accusation of "liberal bias" and the psychologizing of "liberal" opinions both share the common goal of undercutting the liberals' appeal to facts or reason. Although this tactic would also undercut conservative/Republican appeals to facts or reason if followed to its logical consequences, in point of fact, the accusations of manipulating the facts have been so often used against liberals serve to inoculate conservatives against any similar accusations levelled by liberals against conservatives -- "See, there they go again, trying to distort the facts for their own partisan gain."
   
   
7. I am tired of the rhetorical tactic of answering an accusation by ignoring it and then claiming that the accuser is morally suspect because he is not talking about something else: "All these people who complain about Ashcroft never seem to complain about Pol Pot." "Sure, they feel good about themselves for complaining about the abuses at Guantanamo, but you don't hear them criticizing the genocide at Darfur." Again, it's an impossibly high burden of proof: your complaint will only be given a fair hearing once you have expressed moral outrage at every other possible target.

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