If you want to find the best schools for your children, find out where Jonah Goldberg went. Then send your kids somewhere else.
Today’s he’s calling for public schools to be eliminated, because they’re bad and private schools are better. I went to public schools. My kids went to public schools. If Goldberg went to private schools, he’s a walking contradiction to his own argument.
Daniel Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page. He’s a major tool for the Right, in other words. He says people in Spain don’t want to talk about politics.
Here, roughly, is the whole of a response from a right-of-center gentleman to a query about the current state of Spain’s politics, around a dinner table in a noisy, modern Madrid restaurant: “Well, yes, the Zapatero government.” Pause. “It’s painful, quite painful.” Pause. “It’s really not something one wants to talk about.” The rest of one’s heretofore voluble dinner companions mutter assent. Let’s discuss something else.
How like New York, where at this stage of our politics, Democrats and Republicans coexist to the extent they agree not to discuss George Bush, Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz or much of anything deeper than the celebrities of presidential politics.
Clearly, Mr. Henninger is being invited to the wrong parties. I’ve spent plenty of time with New Yorkers lately, and they’ll talk about Bush, Iraq, and Paul Wolfowitz loudly and lustily at the drop of a hat. You don’t even have to drop the hat, in fact.
But of course, I mostly hang out with other liberals. If there were a few genuine conservatives around — Mr. Henninger is proof there’s at least one in New York — I might hold my tongue. It’s like seeing that someone’s fly is unzipped; you don’t know whether to say something or, out of politeness, pretend not to notice.
That Henninger himself is a tad unzipped comes out in a subsequent paragraph. According to him, American political culture was wonderfully healthy and genteel until the 2000 elections.
It has been argued in this column before that the origins of our European-like polarization can be found in the Florida legal contest at the end of the 2000 Bush-Gore presidential campaign. That was a mini civil war. With the popular vote split 50-50, we spent weeks in a tragicomic pitched battle over contested votes in a few Florida counties. The American political system, by historical tradition flexible and accommodative, was unable to turn off the lawyers and forced nine unelected judges to settle it. So they did, splitting 5-4. In retrospect, a more judicious Supreme Court minority would have seen the danger in that vote (as Nixon did in 1960) and made the inevitable result unanimous to avoid recrimination. A pacto. Instead, we got recrimination.
I know you’re hyperventilating right now. Take deep breaths.
From that day, American politics has been a pitched battle, waged mainly by Democrats against the “illegitimate” Republican presidency. Some Democrats might say the origins of this polarization traces to the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton. After that the goal was payback. To lose as the Democrats did in 2000 was, and remains, unendurable (as likely it would have for Republicans if they’d lost 5 to 4).
And Mr. Henninger wonders why people don’t want to talk about politics with him? Mr. Henninger, the problem is not “American politics.” It’s you.
Achieving “moral clarity” is easy. First, take a firm and inflexible position on a moral question. Then, studiously ignore any factors that might call that opinion into question. If the factors refuse to go away, make up lies to neutralize them.
See? Nothin’ to it.
If you are foolish enough to take all facets of an issue into account, you risk not being clear. In fact, the more gut-level honest you are about a messy, unpleasant issue, the less clear you are likely to be. And this is a problem for conservatives, who by nature cannot stand ambiguity. One of the most basic traits of conservatives, in fact, is a compulsion to sort the world into rigid binary categories — right and wrong, good and evil, white and black. Any muddling of categories sends them into nervous fits. But once all things and all issues are properly sorted, they can relax and bask in their moral clarity.
Liberals, on the other hand, are far more interested in being fair. Conversely, they hate unfairness. Conservatives will refuse to see whatever suffering or injustice their binary sorting might have created. Indeed, they get mightily annoyed when you bring such things to their attention. But to liberals, any system of “morality” that is unfair to anybody is not moral at all.
The liberal compulsion to balance scales can be taken to extremes. At the far end of the continuum there’s a tendency to assume that which is powerful and privileged must be evil, and that which is downtrodden and poor must be righteous. This is the leftie version of moral clarity. In the real world the powerful are not always in the wrong, however, and the poor are not always innocent. And I felt compelled to write this paragraph because I’m a liberal. I have to be fair.
I bring this up because of a couple of op eds about abortion published this week. The first, by Hugh Hewitt’s blog partner Dean Barnett, was in the Monday Boston Globe. Barnett places much importance on the “great moral question” of when life begins, which I’ve said many times before is a stupid question. Barnett then explicates the abortion issue with the most narrow and rigidly linear logic imaginable and concludes that abortion is immoral. But in true conservative style, he leaves out anything that might complicate his equation. Like women. Digby writes,
This is not the first time I’ve heard this argument and it’s always quite compelling to hear a man make such a stark and simple logical argument about something which others seem to find so complicated. I suspect that is because there is one person involved in this great moral question who is rarely mentioned in such pieces. In fact, if you read the whole thing you will find that this man has managed to write an entire article about fetuses, pregnancy and abortion without even noting in passing the fully formed sentient human being involved so intimately in this that the whole argument takes place inside her body.
The “great moral issue” of when life begins is fascinating I’m sure. Much more fascinating than whether the state can compel people to bear children against their will. But I guess that’s an argument for another day. Today, we are talking about the meaning of “life” and that has no bearing on the vessel that contributes its DNA and lifeblood, incubates it for nine months inside itself and potentially bears its siblings. Certainly that vessel’s personhood and agency is irrelevant to the much greater issue of blastocyst rights. Why even bring it up?
Of course Barnett couldn’t bring it up. It would have muddied his moral clarity.
I spent a large part of Monday composing a response to Barnett and zapping it off to the Globe, but since I haven’t heard back by now I assume my response was rejected. I don’t want to post it here because I plan to tweak it a bit and try to get it published elsewhere. Most of the points I made were in this old post, anyway.
The other op ed I want to discuss was in yesterday’s Washington Post. Michael Gerson says Rudy Giuliani’s stand on abortion is “muddled.” These days it is muddled, because he’s been trying to explain his pro-choice record in a way that won’t spook the social conservatives, and in doing so he’s twisted himself into some amazing rhetorical knots.
But to Gerson, the only reason Giuliani fails the moral clarity test is that he breaks the first rule of wingnut abortion logic. To his credit, Giuliani doesn’t leave out women. Gerson writes,
In early debates and statements, he has set out his views on this topic with all the order and symmetry of a freeway pileup. His argument comes down to this: “I hate abortion,” which is “morally wrong.” But “people ultimately have to make that choice. If a woman chooses that, that’s her choice, not mine. That’s her morality, not mine.”…
… But the question naturally arises: Why does Giuliani “hate” abortion? No one feels moral outrage about an appendectomy. Clearly he is implying his support for the Catholic belief that an innocent life is being taken. And here the problems begin.
How can the violation of a fundamental human right be viewed as a private matter? Not everything that is viewed as immoral should be illegal; there are no compelling public reasons to restrict adultery, for example, or to outlaw sodomy. But when morality demands respect for the rights of a human being, those protections become a matter of social justice, not just personal or religious preference.
I’m sure you see what Gerson is doing here. He frames the issue as one of “rights of a human being,” and then without explanation or excuse he awards all of these rights to the fetus, thereby changing the woman’s status from “human being” to “major appliance.”
Gerson then dredges up the ghost of Dred Scott and tells us that in his debates with Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas declared slavery to be a “right” protected by the Constitution, whereas Lincoln based his argument on “faith” and “conscience.” That’s an oversimplification of the position of both men, but I’ll leave that for another post. Gerson continues,
Giuliani’s doctrine of individual sovereignty goes much further than did Douglas, logically preventing even states from restricting abortion. And this raises a question about Giuliani’s view of the law itself: Can it be a right to violate the basic rights of others? Given American opinion, progress toward the protection of unborn life is likely to be incremental and partial. It would be foolish to prosecute women who have abortions — and the law struck down in Roe v. Wade did nothing of the kind. But recognizing these limits and realities is different from asserting that the law should have nothing to do with the defense of the weak.
Ah, where to begin? I’ll skip past the point where Gerson renders recognition of the humanity of women into a “doctrine of individual sovereignty,” although there’s plenty of social pathology to be be mined there. Instead, let’s go straight to the claim that the “law struck down by Roe v. Wade” did not punish women. This statement is false on several counts.
First, according to “Lessons from Before Roe: Will Past be Prologue?” by Rachel Benson Gold (Alan Guttmacher Institute, March 2003), among the several state laws struck down by Roe v. Wade, fourteen made obtaining an abortion a crime. Women were sometimes convicted; often they were given a choice between prosecution and testifying against the abortion provider. I’m still searching for information on the penalties provided in these laws, but one suspects some punishment was involved.
Second, it’s simple fact that many nations that ban abortion today impose criminal penalties on women who obtain abortion; see old Mahablog posts “Under the Rug” and “Under the Rug II” and also Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times column of April 7, 2004. Kristof wrote,
To understand what might happen in America if President Bush gets his way with the Supreme Court, consider recent events in Portugal.
Seven women were tried this year in the northern Portuguese fishing community of Aveiro for getting abortions. They were prosecuted — facing three-year prison sentences — along with 10 ‘’accomplices,’’ including husbands, boyfriends, parents and a taxi driver who had taken a pregnant woman to a clinic.
The police staked out gynecological clinics and investigated those who emerged looking as if they might have had abortions because they looked particularly pale, weak or upset. At the trial, the most intimate aspects of their gynecological history were revealed.
Think that can’t happen here? Remember the Kansas attorney general who subpoenaed abortion clinic patient files so he could go on fishing expeditions for crime?
And then there’s the mountain of testimony and data revealing the suffering, mutilations, and painful deaths endured by women who don’t have access to legal abortion. For just a few examples see Molly Ginty, “Life Before Roe v. Wade” and Marianne Mollmann of Human Rights Watch, “Abortion lessons from Latin America.â€
In researching this post I came across an article by Heather Boonstra titled “The Antiabortion Campaign To Personify the Fetus: Looking Back to the Future” (Alan Guttmacher Institute, December 1999). Bookstra examines anti-choice rhetoric to reveal how it renders embryos into children. At the same time, of course, women are rendered into toasters. Earlier this week, Scott Lemieux discussed claims from the Fetus People that they want to “protect” women from their own irrational choices.
Jill Filipovic points us to this Times article about the new strategy to justify using state coercion to force women to carry pregnancies to term by claiming that women are too irrational to know what’s good for them, and offers a modest proposal. I would also urge you to read Reva Siegel and Sarah Blustain (see also here.) Quite simply, these justifications are premised on 19th-century conceptions of women as not being rational agents. And such justifications evidently underpin a great deal of anti-choice discourse and policy (most obviously seen in the fact that the official Republican position is that abortion is murder but women who obtain them should be entirely exempt from legal sanctions.)
So, we come full circle. Michael Gerson claims Giuliani’s pro-choice arguments are “muddled” because Rudy must believe an embryo is human but not deserving of human rights. Gerson wants to make abortion a crime, yet the person initiating that crime cannot be guilty of it; only the people who enable her are subject to prosecution. Women are thus passive instruments in the hands of others; we cannot be free-willed captains of our own fates. Your average embryo, on the other hand, is just one “Mommy and Me” class away from running for Congress.
I do occasionally run into pro-choice people trying to clarify their moral judgments by downgrading the fetus to something like a tumor. It’s rare, but I have seen it. Anyone who doesn’t feel some regret at the elective termination of a pregnancy is a bit out of touch with humanity, also. Abortion is a difficult issue; making it simpler by blurring the reality of it is not being honest. And anyone who sees a bright, clear line between right and wrong needs glasses.
People at any stage of development are not mathematical equations. We lead messy lives entangled in webs of relationships and responsibilities. We are infused with dreams and delusions, and limited by what we can bear and what we cannot. Not every problem we face has a painless solution. But unless there is a compelling civil reason to get government involved, the people who need to make moral decisions are the ones who must live with the consequences.
And if you long for unambiguous clarity, go balance your checkbook.
Andy Sullivan is shocked at the anger of righties.
The hysteria on the far right (is there any other sort any more?) about the immigration bill is remarkable to me. It’s not that there aren’t obviously good arguments against amnesty; it’s the fever-pitch mania that drives these people. I have to say I find it baffling – not the position as such but the anger and rage.
Lord, Andy, what planet have you been living on lo these many years? The American Right has been a cauldron of destructive emotion for decades. Get past anger, rage, and hysteria, and you find contempt, hostility, resentment, greed, jealousy, bigotry, paranoia, self-pity, and fear. Everything — and I mean everything — the Right is about springs from a bubbling stew of negativity.
Of course, I’m not telling you readers anything you don’t already know. It’s just that it stuns me whenever someone who has been running with these mutts steps away and realizes — suddenly — they’re rabid. (Hello, reality?)
Not that you’ll ever get the bulk of the Rabid Right to admit this. One of their favorite conceits is that their opinions are based on logic and rational analysis, while lefties operate purely on emotion. Projection, anyone?
Awhile back a Pew Research poll concluded that conservatives are “happier” than liberals. How did Pew come to this conclusion? Conservatives say they are happy more than liberals say they are happy. As George Will noted,
A survey by the Pew Research Center shows that conservatives are happier than liberals — in all income groups. While 34 percent of all Americans call themselves “very happy,” only 28 percent of liberal Democrats (and 31 percent of moderate or conservative Democrats) do, compared with 47 percent of conservative Republicans. … Republicans have been happier than Democrats every year since the survey began in 1972.
Will goes on to speculate why conservatives are happier, but leaves out the obvious (to me) reason for the poll results. Conservatives on the whole are less introspective and more conformist than liberals. Thus, they are more likely to say they are happy because (a) they’re in denial about their own unhappiness, and (b) that’s what they think they’re supposed to say.
Andy goes on to say that rightie views on immigration policy are “obscured by emotion.” Do tell. Then he says,
But I do want to address David Frum’s smear that I am now part of a “Blame America First” crowd, because I think our experience in Iraq and the huge damage we have done to our image in the Arab world requires us to rethink some aspects of our war-policy – like torture and open-ended involvement in the Iraqi civil war. I’ve been extremely clear that I believe that the US did nothing to “deserve” 9/11. But Frum tries to smear me anyway.
In fact, unless Andy linked to the wrong Frum post, Frum didn’t smear Andy much at all. The primary smear was aimed at Ron Paul; Andy was smeared by association. But righties cannot countenance disagreements with their opinion, no matter where the disagreement comes from. It is unfathomable to them that an opinion differing from theirs might be based on facts and logic. No one may disagree with a rightie without getting his morals, character, and motivations called into question.
You see that in the Melanie Morgan-Jon Soltz encounter of the past week. Morgan’s “intellectual” position is based on a self-perception that she is standing alone on moral high ground. In her mind, she represents the people who really love America and support the troops and Soltz does not. Her part of the “debate” consists entirely of her drawing that (imaginary) distinction between herself and Soltz. That Soltz may, in fact, love America and the troops as much as she does is utterly beyond her comprehension. (And, of course, it’s possible a psychological dissection of Morgan would reveal her devotion to America and the troops is less than pure, but I’ll leave that alone for now.)
I like to think that, once upon a time, politicians from across the political spectrum could work together and come to rational decisions about governing America. Surely there must have been stretches of time in which most people understood that their political opponents did not “hate America” but just had different ideas about what was best for America. Of course, there were also times in the past that were less than congenial; the Civil War does come to mind. Politics has been rife with demagoguery, corruption and backstabbing ever since man invented government. But I can’t believe our form of government could have survived as long as it has, and our nation accomplished what it has accomplished, if national politics were always as poisonously partisan as they are now.
I have a jaundiced view of all political ideology. Rather than ideology, my political positions are based on values that shape my understanding of the relationship between citizens and government. Beyond that, I’m open to whatever might be good for America. Decisions about whether government should expand or shrink, whether taxes should go up or down, whether armies should be engaged or not, depend entirely on the situation and circumstances we face at the time.
Further, I do not believe any one person or group or faction ever has all the answers. Where people of many diverse perspectives can reason together, there you can find pragmatism and maybe even wisdom. But where only the like-minded are allowed to speak, there you find fools. And that’s a finger I’m ready to wag at the Left as much as at the Right, wherever applicable. But our government has been dominated by extremist and fanatical right-wingers in recent years, which makes dealing with them our immediate concern.
My beef with most of the American Right is that they don’t think. Their worldview is as rigid and unquestioned as if they’d received it from God carved on stone tablets. Their reaction to everything and everyone outside the rightie tribe is entirely visceral. Whatever ain’t with ’em is agin’ ’em, in their view. And it matters not how much experience and empirical evidence piles up to prove their policies don’t work. Their minds will not change. Whether you’re talking about “supply side” economics or the Iraq War, a true rightie can no more admit to a mistake than a fish can tap dance. And, yes, they anger me, because for some time now these fools have been in charge. I am not angry because they disagree with me; I am angry because of the control they have over my country and my life.
A couple of years ago Digby compared today’s American Right to defenders of slavery — mostly Democrats — before the Civil War. She quoted long passages of Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union address of 1860 in this post. Lincoln described his political opponents in ways that seem all too familiar to us today. If you have time, go to Mr. Lincoln’s speech, scroll down about halfway to the sentence “And now, if they would listen – as I suppose they will not – I would address a few words to the Southern people” and read from there, and I think you’ll see what I’m talking about. Digby comments:
Lincoln had a keen understanding of the problem and he logically framed it in moral terms regarding the subject at hand, slavery. As it turns out this was not simply about slavery. It was about a deep and abiding tribal divide in the country that was originally defined by slavery but metatisized into something far beyond it, even then. Southern “exceptionalism†was always justified by its culture, which was assumed to be unique and unprecedented.
You can apply Lincoln’s arguments to any number of current issues and come out the same. There is an incoherence of principle that we see in every section of the republican party, the willingness to call to State’s Rights (their old rallying cry) when it suits them and a complete abdication of the principle once they hold federal power — while still insisting that they believe in limited government! They blatantly misconstrue the plain meaning of long standing constitutional principles and federal policies (such as Brit Hume’s abject intellectual whorishness in the matter of FDR’s beliefs about social security privatization) and show irrational, rabid anger at any disagreement. They see Democrats as “traitors†fighting for the other side, just as the Southerners of the 1850’s accused the “Black Republicans†of fomenting slave revolts. They brook no compromise and instead repay those who would reach out to them with furious perfidy unless they show absolute fealty to every facet of the program. It is loyalty to “the causeâ€, however it is defined and however it changes in principle from day to day, that matters.
The challenge to us is to wrest control of government and media away from the lunatics without becoming as crazy as they are. We must stop the Right from stomping on us, the Constitution, and democratic principles without becoming rigidly intolerant of all conservative points of view. The goal is not to impose our point of view but to level the playing field so that we have as good a shot at selling out ideas to the public as anyone else. And if we define “conservative” in the more traditional way — someone who is cautious about raising taxes, spending government money, and making big changes generally — then I believe strongly that conservative perspectives should be represented in government. Although I share the values of progressivism, in my experience progressives are just as capable of hatching dumb ideas as anyone else. You always need people around to blow whistles and challenge groupthink.
The title of Andy Sullivan’s post is “Circular Conservative Firing Squad Update.” The conservative coalition is, indeed, cracking up. For years an alignment of diverse and often contradictory factions — social and religious conservatives, neocons, paleocons, libertarians, survivalists, corporatists, bigots generally, and probably others I can’t think of — have banded together under the “conservative” banner. This coalition wasn’t held together so much by shared ideas and values as by shared resentments (and rage, anger, hysteria, paranoia, contempt, hostility, etc.). Those negative emotions were the only elements they all had in common. As long as they were fixated at hating Them (e.g., Communists, liberals, Islamofascists, France) they weren’t looking at each other all that closely.
But no more. The signs of impending rightie doom are all around us. For example, Hugh Hewitt accuses Peggy Noonan of bigotry. And Jerry Falwell is gone. Frank Rich notes,
Though Mr. Falwell had long been an embarrassment and laughingstock to many, including a new generation of Christian leaders typified by Mr. Kuo, the timing of his death could not have had grander symbolic import. It happened at the precise moment that the Falwell-Robertson brand of religious politics is being given its walking papers by a large chunk of the political party the Christian right once helped to grow. Hours after Mr. Falwell died, Rudy Giuliani, a candidate he explicitly rejected, won the Republican debate by acclamation. When the marginal candidate Ron Paul handed “America’s mayor†an opening to wrap himself grandiloquently in 9/11 once more, not even the most conservative of Deep South audiences could resist cheering him. If Rudy can dress up as Jack Bauer, who cares about his penchant for drag?
The current exemplars of Mr. Falwell’s gay-baiting, anti-Roe style of politics, James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, see the writing on the wall. Electability matters more to Republicans these days than Mr. Giuliani’s unambiguous support for abortion rights and gay civil rights (no matter how clumsily he’s tried to fudge it). Last week Mr. Dobson was in full crybaby mode, threatening not to vote if Rudy is on the G.O.P. ticket. Mr. Perkins complained to The Wall Street Journal that the secular side of the Republican Party was serving its religious-right auxiliary with “divorce papers.â€
Yes, and it is doing so with an abruptness and rudeness reminiscent of Mr. Giuliani’s public dumping of the second of his three wives, Donna Hanover. This month, even the conservative editorial page of The Journal chastised Republicans of the Perkins-Dobson ilk for being too bellicose about abortion, saying that a focus on the issue “will make the party seem irrelevant†and cost it the White House in 2008. At the start of Tuesday’s debate, the Fox News moderator Brit Hume coldly put Mr. Falwell’s death off limits by announcing that “we will not be seeking any more reaction from the candidates on that matter.†It was a pre-emptive move to shield Fox’s favored party from soiling its image any further by association with the Moral Majority has-been and his strident causes. In the ensuing 90 minutes, the Fox News questioners skipped past the once-burning subject of same-sex marriage as well.
Oh, my.
A few years ago, George W. Bush became for righties the embodiment of an extended middle finger waved at everything they loathe (resent, fear, rage against, etc.). They more he smirked, the more he signaled the world and the Democrats they could kiss his ass, the more righties loved him. But today no less than Michelle Malkin herself sees the Finger turned on her.
The word for today, boys and girls, is dolchstosslegende. And since righties really don’t know how to process disagreement in a civil manner, they’re about to turn on each other with all the hysteria, anger, rage, etc., they used to reserve for us.
Pass the popcorn.
John Hawkins of Right Wing News is a little behind in his cultural literacy, and thereby misses the significance of the stabbed-in-the-back (dolchstosslegende) motif and its importance to the Third Reich.
No public Schadenfreude, please.
Update: OK, maybe a little Schadenfreude. Let the Teletubbies wave “bye bye.”
See also The Carpetbagger.
Update 2: It’s a shame that we bloggers aren’t as careful with facts as the professional journalists.
Today a number of rightie bloggers are complaining that a conservative student newspaper at Tufts University has been found guilty of “harassment” by the Student Life Committee, allegedly for publishing racist and anti-Islamic smears. Here is what the conservative student newspaper says about it:
Showing profound disregard for free speech and freedom of the press, Tufts University has found a conservative student publication guilty of harassment and creating a hostile environment for publishing political satire. Despite explicitly promising to protect controversial and offensive expression in its policies, the Tufts Committee on Student Life decided yesterday to punish the student publication The Primary Source (TPS) for printing two articles that offended African-American and Muslim students on campus. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which has spearheaded the defense of TPS, is now launching a public campaign to oppose Tufts’ outrageous actions.
From the Tufts University web site:
The Committee on Student Life (CSL) today released a decision finding The Primary Source, Tufts’ conservative journal, guilty of harassment and creating a hostile environment.
As a result of the verdict, all pieces in the Source must now be attributed to specific authors. The CSL, which is comprised of students and faculty members, also recommended that “student governance consider the behavior of student groups in future decisions concerning funding and recognition,” according to a copy of the decision that was sent to the Daily.
Today’s result stems from an April 30 hearing during which two separate cases against the Source were heard. In one, David Dennis, an African-American senior, said that the Source’s Dec. 6 carol “O Come All Ye Black Folk” constituted harassment and the creation of a hostile environment. In the other, the Muslim Students Association brought the same two charges against The Primary Source for its April 11 piece “Islam – Arabic Translation: Submission.” Both of these Source pieces were unsigned.
Regarding the content of the offensive material, I mostly agree with what Fontana Labs says at Unfogged:
My initial inclination is to say that while publishing this sort of thing is irritating and nasty– like its predecessor, the satirical carol “Oh come all ye black folk,” this item isn’t really intended to spark an interesting conversation so much as it’s intended to marginalize people who get enough of that already– it’s not the sort of thing that should be banned by harassment policies.
Part of the difficulty here, I think, is the tendency for college students in general and “Campus Conservative” types in particular to be a little bit too attracted to the idea of stomping on sacred cows no matter what the day-to-day effects. This unfortunate attachment is just increased by going the official-sanction route. Fantastic: more conservative students who are bitter about being kept down by The Man.
My general view is that colleges and universities have an understandably janus-faced view of student agency: sometimes they’re adults, sometimes they’re not. This puts the institution in the awkward position of officially endorsing the virtues of autonomy and free expression while inconsistently applying pressure on uncomfortable exercises of this freedom.
He’s probably right about that. Even though the offensive material has all the literary and intellectual value of used kitty litter, these children conservative students just get even uglier when they feel oppressed. Better to let them get the bile out of their systems and into public view. Thirty years from now some of them will run for political office, and then their opponents will dig up this muck and leak it to news media, and then they’ll be sorry.
The conservative students argue that since their Muslim piece was factual, it can’t be censored.
A panel consisting of both faculty and students found the publication guilty in flagrant abuse of what harassment case law and regulations actually say, and demonstrating total ignorance of the principles of a free society. Even in libel law (one of the oldest exceptions to the rule of free speech is that you can be punished for defaming people) truth is rightfully an absolute defense. Here, the fact that TPS printed verifiable information—with citations—was apparently no defense, nor was the fact that the ad concerned contentious issues of dire global importance. Such an anemic conception of free speech should chill anyone who cares about basic rights and democracy itself.
See what I mean about getting uglier when they feel oppressed? But this argument has two weaknesses.
I understand this newspaper was chartered and funded by the university’s Student Life department. If that’s not true, then what the students put in their newspaper ain’t none of the Student Life department’s business. If it is true, then in effect the Student Life department is the newspaper’s publisher. And publishers, right or wrong, do get the last word on what goes into the publication. That’s not censorship or libel; that’s capitalism. Writers and editors who work for all kinds of publications in the real grown-up world often have very little freedom to write and publish whatever they want. They write and publish what the publisher says they can write or publish.
Student newspaper staffs are forever overstepping the bounds of the principal’s or dean of student’s taste and getting into trouble for it, and the students eternally holler they are being censored, but in reality the youngun’s are assuming a lot more freedom than they’ll have if they go into journalism or publishing when they grow up.
I agree with the conservative student that what they published probably was not libelous, as I understand libel law, but I don’t think that was the problem the Student Life people had with it. The Student Life group thought it created a hostile campus environment for black and Muslim students, which is a different issue from libel.
I can appreciate how nasty it is to be in a hostile environment, but whether the conservative student newspaper by itself was rendering all of campus life hostile is a judgment call. As much as I sympathize with the black student who complained about the racist piece, sometimes it can be a mistake in the long run to enforce the rules of polite society too rigidly. Sometimes you just drive the ugliness underground where it festers out of sight and becomes even more dangerous.
Even though the conservative students put a disclaimer in their publication that their views do not reflect the views of Tufts University, in reality I believe it’s still a publication of Tufts University. If someone were to sue the newspaper for damages — I don’t think that would apply in this case, but let’s pretend — any money rewarded by a court would, I assume, come out of the university’s hide. So I have some sympathy with the university in this case, and I disagree that students have an absolute right to publish anything in a student newspaper.
The moral is, if you want the unfettered freedom to write and publish any damn fool thing you want, you have to pay for it yourself.
My second quibble with the conservative student is his assumption that factuality and truth are the same thing. Alas, it ain’t necessarily so.
It’s the oldest propagandist trick in the world to present carefully selected facts to tell a lie. You could, for example, pick through a biography of Adolf Hitler and compile a list of completely factual statements that would make Hitler himself seem like a perfectly nice guy. You’d have to leave out the part about the Holocaust and World War II, of course, but it could be done.
The point is that an isolated statement may be completely true and still be used to say something that is not the truth. And someday maybe I’ll elaborate on that, but not right now.
I don’t follow French politics closely and haven’t drawn any sweeping conclusions from the recent election of Nicolas Sarkozy, who replaces outgoing Jacques Chirac as President of France. But E.J. Dionne writes that progressives can find lessons in the elections, while Newt Gringrich sees clues for conservatives. Continue reading
At Media Matters, Eric Boehlert asks, “Can conservative bloggers tell the truth?”
No.
Simple answers to simple question, eh?
They can’t even tell the truth when they’ve been pinned to the ground with their falsehoods. Boehlert caught John Hinderaker of Power Line in a lie — just plain nailed him — and Hinderaker’s response is a study in weaseling. He got caught fibbing, so to defend himself he shifts to a different set of lies. Unreal.
The lie was that the stories told about John Kerry’s Vietnam service by the Swift Boat crew had never been disputed. Cough.
The Jawa Report defended Hinderaker by publishing the fact that David Brock, the founder of Media Matters, had made campaign contributions to John Kerry. However, it’s anyone’s guess what this is supposed to “prove.” In this bloggers sick little — very little — mind, campaign contributions to a a Democrat are evidence of sedition and conspiracy, evidently.
One quick follow-up to yesterday’s “Not Funny” post — today all manner of people are scrambling to disown Don Imus and blame his reign of (rhetorical) terror on their ideological enemies. For example, rightie Brian Maloney says some people (identified as “key leftists”) are calling Imus a “conservative.” Maloney writes, “That’s despite his endorsement of John Kerry in the 2004 presidential race and past tirades against the Bush Administration from a decidedly leftist perspective.” Maloney doesn’t explain what he means by “decidedly leftist perspective.”
Maloney provides one example of Imus being called a “conservative,” from a Media Matters press release quoting David Brock, who says,
“More and more Americans are coming to understand the damage done by major news organizations providing a platform for bigoted commentary and other conservative misinformation, and they are demanding change. MSNBC’s decision is an important step in the right direction.”
Maloney provides another example that purports to be of a “key leftist” calling Imus a “conservative,” but the word conservative doesn’t appear anywhere in his example. The quote is from Air America founder Sheldon Drobny, who complained that some “idiot commentator” had called Imus a liberal, which is absurd. I’m not sure what point Maloney thought he was making by highlighting this quote. He either thinks it is self-evident that Imus is a liberal (which is absurd), or that saying that someone is “not a liberal” is the same thing as calling him a “conservative.”
Actually, it’s very common for people to be neither liberals nor conservatives in any meaningful sense of those words, and I’d say Imus is a good example. I think David Brock misspoke when he used the word “conservative” in conjunction with Imus. True conservatives are an endangered species in America these days. George W. Bush isn’t one, and I doubt Brian Maloney is, either. Most of the critters one bumps into these days who identify themselves as “conservatives” are really pseudo conservatives, per historian Richard Hofstadter. Imus doesn’t fit into any category neatly, but I’d say he’s closer to being a pseudo conservative than anything else.
Instapundit and Moe Lane of RedState chime in and express outrage that anyone would dare call Imus a “conservative.” Lane writes,
Not much else to say, except: frankly, you can keep him, guys. He ain’t one of us (although I fully expect the first round of duckspeakers claiming otherwise within the next twenty four hours); he’s your problem, so you deal with him. I don’t particularly feel like catering to your side’s delusion that all sin comes from the Right, so I shan’t; and I encourage my compadres to do the same.
The only links provided by Instapundit and Lane link either to each other or to Brian Maloney. So, basically, these fellas found one example of someone using the word “conservative” in a press release about Imus and they’re whining about all “leftists” everywhere. A number of other rightie blogs are joining this circus, and it’s possible one of them has come up with another example, but frankly I’m not terribly interested in sniffing this out any further. As I said, I wouldn’t call Imus a “conservative.”
At the same time, support for John Kerry in 2004 is hardly proof of anyone being liberal. By 2004 the two or three genuine conservatives left in America had abandoned George Bush. And since the principle and bedrock value of American liberalism is equality, a hard-core bigot like Imus cannot be a “liberal” any more than a cold-blooded critter that lays eggs can be a “mammal.”
Digby spoke to this “ideological confusion” yesterday.
I just had a conversation with a wingnut in which I was held responsible for Imus because the so-called liberal media were his strongest defenders so therefore, they are racists, which makes me a racist also. Did you get that logic? That’s where they’re going with this, folks.
I have written before about my pet peeve that people believe the mainstream media represent liberalism, particularly the alleged liberals of the punditocrisy. (Think Richard Cohen.) And because of this, they also don’t have a clue what “liberals” really believe in since politicians babble in politico speak and these sanctioned pundits and talking heads are so incoherent that they rarely make any sense.
Regardless of their designated perch on the media political spectrum, the fact is that these people are part of a decadent political establishment, which has almost nothing to do with liberalism anymore (if it ever did.) But the successful conflation of “liberal” and “media” has brought all the disgust at the pompous clubbiness of the media gasbags down on our heads and I resent the hell out of it.
Digby goes on to explain that she doesn’t particularly feel like catering to the rightie delusion that all sin comes from the Left. Amen, Digby.
Update: See also Pam of Pam’s House Blend.