By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
The term “a straw man” is a useful figure of speech. It points to a tactic used by commentators to create an unfair or overly simplistic caricature of an opponent or opposition point of view. It is done to carry the day in a debate by casting the opposition’s ideas in the worst light — to make them as easy to cut apart as a child’s straw doll.
Everyone — on the left and on the right — agrees it is a cheap shot to use the tactic. But only in theory. Journalists and politicians — and the folks around the water cooler — do it all the time when it is useful for them. What is hard to determine is whether they do it deliberately and dishonestly, or if they fail to recognize this faulty logic when they employ it themselves. The latter is possible: Political enthusiasm can blur one’s judgment.
For example, I am not sure if Stephen Colbert was being deliberately dishonest when he scolded white conservatives for condemning the black rioters in Charlotte a few weeks ago for their violent tactics, when those white conservatives also condemned the football player Colin Kaepernick for kneeling silently in peaceful protest during the National Anthem. Colbert’s point was that this was hypocritical of whites, a reflection of a frame of mind that condemned blacks whether they protested peacefully or resorted to violence.
Please. One would be hard pressed to find a white conservative who condemned the violence in Charlotte, who would also have condemned the protesters in that city if they had knelt like Kaepernick in a peaceful prayer vigil. Their argument against Kaepernick was based on other grounds. Colbert created a straw man of white conservatives who could not make this distinction.
I’ll give you another example. I am not sure if Washington Post writer Jennifer Rubin was being deliberately devious in an attempt to play political hardball, or was caught up in the emotions of this year’s political campaign. Either way, she resorted to a classic straw-man tactic to condemn what she calls the “chorus of toxic commentators” on the modern right in an August 10 column. She includes Rush Limbaugh among those toxic commentators in her column, which she entitles “How We Got To Trumpism.”
The Post packages Rubin’s columns as “Right Turn: Jennifer Rubin’s take from a conservative perspective.” For the moment, let’s take Rubin at her word that she is a conservative. (The house conservatives and house Catholics at liberal publications is a topic that would take an entire column of its own.)
Rubin writes of the “Rush Limbaugh phenomenon and the Black Helicopter guys” who “have embraced smear, conspiracy theories, inflammatory language, and gross incivility to drum up ratings and stir up emotions. They’ve sown not skepticism but hatred and unwarranted distrust of all government.”
Now no one would deny that there is an irresponsible fringe element on the right, “black helicopter guys” who “engage in smear and conspiracy theories.” But Limbaugh is not one of them. Neither are Laura Ingraham, Andrew Napolitano, Larry Kudlow, Stephen Moore, and a long list of conservative commentators who are either backing Trump or leaning his way. It is a cheap shot to seek to discredit them by rattling off extremist statements from kooky people who back Trump, as unfair as lumping Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden with the New Black Panthers and the anarchists in the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Rubin charges conservative commentators who back Trump with “economic nincompoopery.” Come on. One can argue that Milton Friedman’s theories and supply-side economics do not work as well as the schemes to invigorate the economy through the federal spending favored by liberal Democrats. That can make for an honest difference of opinion. Get out the graphs and the pie charts. But it is intellectually dishonest to dismiss economists such as Moore and Kudlow as “nincompoops.” Name-calling does not end an honest debate; it avoids it.
Rubin charges the “toxic chorus” with portraying “large swaths of America” as “made up of victims, driven to madness by elites who refused to say ‘Merry Christmas’ and deprived them of $30-per-hour jobs that required no college education.”
What can she possibly mean by this? Everyone running for president this go-around, from Bernie Sanders to Ted Cruz to Hillary Clinton, promised to help American workers who have lost their jobs to foreign competition. It is not just a concern of Donald Trump and the “toxic chorus” in the media that backs him. It is fair to argue that Hillary Clinton’s approach of offering them government retraining as computer technicians makes more sense that Trump’s plan to “bring the jobs back to America,” but not that it is ignoble for Trump and his backers to also make their case.
She goes on to link Limbaugh and the conservative commentators who back Trump with “conspiracy generators” who push the theories that “Sen. Mitch McConnell sold them out!” and that “9/11 was an inside job! President Obama was born in Kenya!,” assuming that “their audience was stupid. They then concocted a brew of urban myth and racial resentment that made their audience even stupider.”
Look: I will accept that there are people on obscure radio and cable television programs who push the various right-wing conspiracy theories that trouble Rubin. But I will have to take her word for it. I have never heard them, and I listen to conservative talk radio and watch Fox News quite a bit. Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Bill O’Reilly, and a long list of conservative commentators I listen to simply do not give air time to conspiracy theories.
There is a difference between the radio personalities that are called the “alt-right” these days and mainstream conservative backers of the Trump campaign. It is a cheap shot, a straw man argument, to pretend otherwise.
Rubin continues: “It used to be that Republicans were the ideas party (Milton Friedman! James Q. Wilson!), while the Democrats were the coalition party (minorities, unions, etc.). Now the Republicans’ ‘big idea’ is that whites are persecuted and Christians get no respect.” This leaves them with a “moral toxic waste dump of a candidate whose America First foreign policy is out of the 1930s and whose domestic policy tries to re-create the ’50s.”
She ends by accusing conservatives in the media with being “far less informative, honest, and fair than the mainstream media (which has its own problems). They sure are less civil. After the election, it will be a good time to name names, to end the Fox News network monopoly on evening conservative news-ish programming, to debunk the false narratives and grotesque sexism and simply to tune out the gibberish. Shining a bright light on charlatans and encouraging more speech have always been the antidote to noxious, false, and destructive speech.”
It is getting harder and harder to determine what it means to be a conservative these days. But for me one thing is clear: If Jennifer Rubin gets to define the movement’s guidelines, I want no part of it. Some of my favorite memories are of the time when Frank S. Meyer and L. Brent Bozell would battle it out over the nature of conservatism in the pages of the National Review in the 1960s. Honest and intelligent differences of opinion are one thing. Snarky cheap shots meant to defame the opposition are something else.
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