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Column: Shut-Up, He Explained ... W's Idea of a National Conversation

by P.M. Carpenter

Mr. Carpenter is working on a book about American demagoguery. He is a columnist for HNN.

Having been pounded for weeks on all fronts, W's recent coming out on the Iraq Question has demonstrated once again that when it comes to honest analysis and honest debate, the administration takes a powder. Both are irritants to the royal ear; nasty vestiges of a quasi-democratic society which interfere with the transition-now properly underway-to a plutocratic and authoritarian one.

Throughout August we, the people, called for a national debate over invading, warring, and occupying. Last Wednesday the president seemed to finally agree: "We look forward to an open dialogue with Congress and the American people," he told reporters after briefing congressional leaders. The next day, however, he let it be known that "one thing is for certain. I'm not going to change my view." So much for debate. In the administration's thinking, "open dialogue" is a rhetorical plaything at best, a nuisance to be tolerated at worst. The rest of the universe may think debate and dialogue mean deliberation; Bush II sees them as so much rubbish to be exploited at its convenience.

Yet the administration's tactics are far from a new force in American politics. They are, rather, a maturation of the Right's political methodology conceived under Barry Goldwater's leadership in the 1960s and developed during the New Right's infancy in the 1970s. In short order the new Right engulfed simply "the Right," which in shorter order engulfed the whole of conservatism itself. The latter has steadily marched farther to the right ever since.

Notwithstanding the ultraconservative shift that the New Right forced upon the GOP Establishment, the movement also represented a fair degree of conservative continuity. Its 1970s formal debut was simultaneously sudden and long in coming. It never abandoned the Old Right's legacy of anticommunism, economic libertarianism, and Christian traditionalism; its fundamental grounding did not differ from its immediate forebears. The difference that came about in modern conservatism--what marked its dramatic shift, indeed, what made it the "New" Right--was its public rhetoric. While basic goals remained intact, the message and its delivery changed. The Right picked up on rhetorical demagogic devices of the past, refined them for the times, and hence attracted an electoral base far more expansive than ever possible with its earlier and rather boring talk of capitalism's sanctity and communism's evils. To gain an electoral foothold the New Right largely supplanted substantive arguments with deceptive political rhetoric.

The tactical use of simplistic messages in place of balanced and thoughtful public analyses became the Right's political salvation, just as its use had been uppermost in the exploits of demagogic luminaries such as Huey Long and George Wallace. Emotional appeals with built-in scapegoats--godless humanists, big-spending liberals, criminal-loving judges, baby-killing feminists, welfare-cheating blacks, child-molesting gays, and on and on ... and on--became the New Right's modus operandi. Whorishly rooted in red herrings, the Right reflowered in a self-made political greenhouse of reactionary rhetoric and fallacious reasoning. It would convert independent voters, socially conservative Democrats, and historically disengaged evangelicals under the Republican tent. This unfolding reality was that which distinguished latter twentieth-century American conservatism from what preceded.

The overarching characteristic of the New Right's rhetoric that marked it as demagoguery rather than honest political debate was not any pointed refutation of opposing arguments, but the blanket denial of their possible validity, even in part. Rhetorically speaking, in any authentic political dialogue there must be, at least to some degree, an element of give and take. Just as scientific laws deny the absolute certainty of any given physical event occurring, the laws of argumentation mandate that any wholly dogmatic contention cannot be deemed absolutely valid, for it lacks the lifeblood of critical examination. In his book One-Sided Arguments, philosopher Douglas Walton offers a powerful rationale for honest exchange.

Argumentation in a persuasion dialogue, in particular, is resolved on a balance of considerations.... As the sequence of argumentation proceeds, there is supposed to be a genuine exchange of views. The other side's arguments are taken seriously, and are taken account of, in improving one's own arguments.... As an argument goes along, and shows increased [Socratic] insight, it reacts to and benefits from the arguments on both sides.

In addition to other rhetorical tactics, the New Right's uncritical selling to the public of altogether unilaterally derived political positions was what moved it from the arena of reasoned advocacy to the amphitheatre of arbitrary demagoguery. It capitalized on a common denominator of all demagogues: simplistic logic. Barry Goldwater perhaps best promoted simplicity as a dandy political tool while speaking at a 1964 campaign rally in Memphis. He said "a lot of my enemies call me simple. The big trouble with the so-called liberal today is that he doesn't understand simplicity." Problems are easily solved "if we have the courage to face them. Those who don't have that courage want complicated answers when they know in their hearts I'm right." His oft-repeated view led New York Times columnist Tom Wicker to compare him to a "child ... speaking on the problems of the times, with a child's directness and lack of complexity."

Answers came easily to Barry Goldwater and, later, the New Right. They usually do when one doesn't bother with differing opinions. As Barry was a child speaking on problems of the times, so W is a likeminded child of the ultraconservative New Right and its profoundly simplistic view of the world.

When the president says he's now eager to debate the Iraq Question but won't change his mind--"for certain"--the real issue then becomes, What's the point? Modern conservatism has twisted the meaning of "debate" into opportunism. That's what has taken the Right this far, and that's all we'll witness this go-around, too. Thus we might as well skip phony debates and go right to the body bags.

Mr. Carpenter's column is published weekly by History News Network and buzzflash.com.