What with Thanksgiving and all, including a visit from my kids, I won’t be writing much over the weekend, but that doesn’t mean I won’t inflict my ravings on my helpless readers at all.
Today, an object lesson in the sort of unconscious limits that we place on the acceptable realm of debate in this country.
The New Yorker, has an otherwise excellent article by George Packer about the fact that the Republican candidates, or at least the leading candidates, have been forced, willingly or unwillingly, to compete with each other in a race to the intellectual and moral bottom:
As the tide goes out on President Bush’s foreign policy, the mass of flotsam left behind includes a Republican Party that no longer knows how to be reasonable. Whenever its leading Presidential candidates appear before partisan audiences, they try to outdo one another in pledging loyalty oaths to the use of force, pandering to the war lobby as if they were Democrats addressing the teachers’ union.
Yet, in an article bemoaning the inability of Republican candidates to step outside of the Republican mindset, he has this to say about Ron Paul, a nutcase to be sure, but not necessarily on the subject of Iraq:
In this election, the isolationist candidate is the Texas congressman Ron Paul. He frequently attacks the core rationale of Bush’s foreign policy, and receives enthusiastic applause for doing so, which indicates that Republican views about the war in Iraq might be more heterodox than the leading candidates and their strategists assume. But his brand of anti-interventionism reduces the Republican debate to hawks versus cranks. “They attack us because we’ve been over there. We’ve been bombing Iraq for ten years,” Paul said at a debate in South Carolina. “I’m suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it.”
I’m not saying that Paul isn’t a crank, but there’s nothing about the quote Packer uses that remotely proves that point. The first two sentences are statements of fact; the last is an eminently reasonable statement of opinion. Perhaps it’s the last sentence that proves Paul’s crankiness on the subject of Iraq. He is, after all, stating explicitly that we should listen to our adversaries and consider taking the reasons they give for hating us at face value. While this is a perfectly rational statement, in fact a self evidently true statement, it is also a statement that runs against an implicit orthodoxy in our present discourse, which holds that we should never listen to what our “enemies” have to say, nor should we ever engage with their ideas. The fact that our refusal to listen often creates new enemies is ignored, or, to some minds, actually proves that our approach of righteous ignorance is correct.
Listening to others does not imply agreement with them, but it is the only way to really understand them. Nor does the fact that a person or organization turns to terrorism as a strategy necessarily prove that they do not have legitimate grievances. We can condemn the attacks on the World Trade Center while agreeing with bin Laden that the U.S. has no business maintaining a military presence in the Middle East. We can do that, that is, as a matter of logic and common sense, but we cannot do it in the irrational arena of American politics. Bin Laden actually understands this about our political dialog, and has used it against us. Most cultures would have seen through his attempts to re-elect Bush with his supposed endorsement of Kerry. Not the U.S., which listens with its ears shut.
Paul may be a crank, but his suggestion that we actually listen to our adversaries is not admissible evidence in support of that proposition.
As an aside, I must point out that the limits of acceptable discourse, are subject to change in this country. Every once in a while it becomes unacceptable to advocate racist ideologies, even if one dresses them up in pseudo-scientific jargon, but now is not one of these times. So while we can’t advocate listening to what our adversaries have to say, it is presently acceptable to argue that a substantial segment of our population are intellectually inferior and apparently also acceptable to argue that, while blacks may not be inferior, White Anglo Saxon Protestants are definitely superior.
