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Generally speaking

Everyone has had fun watching Jon Stewart mocking Bernard Goldberg. Seems Bernie and company at Fox took umbrage at the way “liberals” generalized about tea party folks. Stewart agreed that it’s wrong to generalize, showed numerous clips of Goldberg and fox friends generalizing about liberals (which should include, I guess, the generalization that liberals engage in generalization) and the fun began. You can view the results on Stewart’s website, I’m sure. Per usual, he won on points.

Well, it’s not often that Stewart and Goldberg agree, and when they do, one ought to look carefully. I’ve always thought one should fear any bill that passes Congress unanimously or nearly so-trouble lurks. The same principle applies in the Stewart-Goldberg case.

I would like to submit that not only is it okay to generalize about tea party members and liberals, it is precisely what one should do. When people group together it is because they have something in common. The only way to deal with associational groups is to generalize about them. It’s different, of course, with groups people are born into. One must tread far more carefully. But when people voluntarily associates with each other, they should expect people to generalize about them. In this sense, “liberals” have a little more right to complain. They didn’t join anything, they just share philosophical principles. Tea party people actually choose to associate together. They have, in a very real sense, asked to be judged by the company they keep.

Fox took issue with the fact that there has been a lot of generalizing about the tea party folks. The implied argument, coming from them (see, I’m generalizing) is that, since there are exceptions within the group (e.g., they’re not all racists, etc.) then any generalization is illegitimate. That’s sort of like saying that it’s impermissible to maintain that professional basketball players tend to be tall because Calvin Murphy was five eight.

None of these groups complain about generalizations with which they agree. When the fox folks call the teabaggers patriotic Americans, none of them will say: “Hey, wait, you’re generalizing, we’re not all patriotic Americans!” I doubt that liberals would take umbrage at someone alleging that liberals support equal rights for women, even though there may still be one or two that don’t.

What members of these groups have a right to complain about are generalities that do not accurately reflect reality. Is the tea party motivated by racism? The facts on the ground seem to support the assertion that this movement would not exist in this virulent form if Obama were white. His color certainly seems to attract a lot of their attention. One can quibble. Despite their alleged higher than average level of education, is the movement intellectually and ideologically incoherent? I would argue that tearing words loose from their common meaning is a recipe for incoherence. Consider the word “socialism”, which represents a laudable concept that the teabaggers have applied to both Obama and the weak tea the Democrats produced by way of health care reform. Oh, if only it were so in either case, but there’s not a single fact that supports the assertion. Name calling is not intellectually coherent.

On the other hand, when (I think it was Goldberg) a conservative talking head accuses liberals of wanting terrorists to win (whatever that means in context) liberals do have a right to complain, because wanting terrorists to win is not fundamental or even incidental to the liberal philosophy as it has ever been expressed by a liberal, nor can they cite a single liberal who has ever taken that position. There may be someone out there who calls himself a liberal who wants terrorists to “win”, but that is an illiberal position.

It’s unfair generalizations that are wrong. So, we should be free to generalize to our heart’s content about the teabaggers, so long as our generalities fairly represent the group as a whole, despite the fact that there may be a stray individual exception (in a sea of white faces, Fox will find the lone black).


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