Interesting: If You Want to Fight Demagoguery, You Have to First Restrain Your Own Doctrinaire Impulses

Very interesting article from Fred Bauer, excerpted at Hot Air.

Bauer goes back to James Fennimore Cooper to set up a struggle between two wicked sorts: demagogues, and the doctrinaire type.

I was just talking about this in the podcast. I mentioned that in the nineties, when Perot challenged Clinton on NAFTA, Clinton, at least, arranged for a debate on NAFTA. (Al Gore vs. Ross Perot.)

Give Clinton credit -- he was willing to debate the issue. He attempted to persuade people he was right. He briefed his Wooden Puppet Moron on some talking points and put him on Larry King Live to do this.

Public persuasion -- what an idea.

Where has that idea gone?

Anyone trying much of this on the right, lately?

Chiefly the form of "persuasion" one sees on these issues lately is ever more ghastly and baroque insults directed at the white working class.

The idea seems to be that if this cohort is insulted in even more vicious terms than the liberal ruling class did, they'll finally see the sense of supporting the right-side ruling class.

Apparently there is some idea aborning that the 10% of the country that constitutes the right-leaning urban upper-middle-class college-educated cohort (the Urban Haute Bourgeoisie, in Wilt Stillman's phrasing) is just going to form its own party and win a lot of elections with its huge one-tenth of the electorate.

One problem I have with the Establishment is that they simply YELL THEIR DOGMAS AND DOCTRINES LOUDER, AND WITH MORE SNEERING, rather than take the time to explain why the dogmas they favor should be favored.

This is usually a sign of one of two related symptoms:

1, they're lazy,

and

2, they don't actually know why they believe what they believe; they just know all the Right-Thinking People are supposed to believe it.

I think part of the sneering contempt, that emotional response, stems from the frustration that they actually can't explain why they believe whatever Cult Dogma they believe.

This is exactly the sort of posturing -- "argumentation" by mere assertion combined with sneering contempt for anyone who wasn't swayed by the third repetition of the same naked assertion -- that turned post-WWII liberalism into a desiccated husk.

I happen to think our open borders position with regard to both labor and trade ought to be subject to questioning -- and when questions are posed, they should be answered with actual answers, not huffy posturing and foot-stamping.

I've never been sold on this ultrafriedmanism. I've also not been strongly against it.

But I do know that a lot of the people who huff off when their ultrafriedmanite dogma is even challenged do not themselves know what the hell they're talking about, or they would simply answer questions. People love giving answers for questions they know -- everyone does. Everyone loves vaunting one's knowledge.

Ergo, when people just stamp their feet and shout louder, I strongly suspect they don't know what the hell it is they're talking about, and ergo cannot provide an answer any better than the foot-stamp.

The fact that this is now the preferred attitude of the alleged intellectual class -- which ought to be interested in the details and justifications of the ideas they claim to so firmly believe -- speaks to a basic rot in the intellectual class of the conservative movement.

Again, the selfsame one which afflicted the liberal movement in the 70s and 80s. An establishment which isn't questioned enough soon gets a bit lazy about answering questions, and ultimately finds it can't answer them, and that therefore the only way to respond to them is to create an uproar in hopes the questioner just goes away.

There may be good reasons to believe in strong-form open-borders-for-everybody-and-everything. If there are good reasons, I sure hope the people who are in possession of them get around to sharing them -- letting these reasons cross their own personal borders to the outside world -- at some point.

The foot-stamping tantrums are getting old, guys. And they ill-suit the people who are simultaneously posturing as the informed adults in the room.

Open Thread. Happy Friday.

By the Way: Even if Trump is beaten this election, that doesn't mean these questions go away. Trump has now demonstrated for anyone willing to see that it's very easy to win a Republican primary -- you have to just not be as grotesque a specimen as Trump and be somewhat informed on the issues, but otherwise you can run pretty much on the same issue/ideology profile as Trump and laugh your way to an early knockout win in a primary and have the whole thing wrapped up by Super Tuesday.

Trump may be beaten -- and probably will be. But he'll have been beaten for reasons having little to do with the issue profile he's running on. He'll have been beaten due to the mere circumstance of his utterly unsuitable character and unschooled mind.

But the next person to run won't be kind enough to cede these points to the Establishment.

So if the Establishment wants to ever win an election every again, it really ought to get crackin' on thinking why they believe all the religious dogmas they're so possessed by, and work out a way to explain these ideas to people who do not already share their convictions.

Otherwise, they're just an even less palatable version of Obama -- a narcissistic bunch who just thinks the country isn't virtuous enough or smart enough to receive their own received wisdom.

Managed Democracy: Similarly to Trump failing not because of his issue profile but because of his grotesque personality defects, Mario Rubio's (or Paul Ryan's) open borders agenda should not be implemented simply because they are educated men with handsome smiles.

This annoys me about the a certain style of thinking: We will avoid actually inviting the public into an open discussion (and permitted consideration) of our issue profile. Instead, we will manage them into agreeing to our agenda without every actually seeking their agreement, by simply deeming that only this guy or that guy is electable and physically attractive enough to be elected.

There seems to be a lot of avoidance of the discussion of actual ideas by the party which once upon the time styled itself -- no, really, it did -- as the "Party of Ideas."

Now ideas are passe and kind of dangerous. Now the idea is to hide ideas from the public, and just talk about pablum and loving American and loving grandpa, and having a handsome-but-not-threateningly-so guy deliver this pablum, and thereby manage the voters into giving up a vote without ever actually giving any consent.

You can't avoid the ideas you plan to implement and run on a variety of trivial distractions and then claim some kind of mandate to implement them later.

This isn't the consent of the governed. And this isn't treating the voters as peers worthy of respect.

This is the management of thugs, morons, scoundrels and various sorts of social inferiors who you plainly do not trust to do the right thing (or to believe the right things) by manipulating them by all means except honest persuasion and argument.

Conservatism used to have this sort of everyday egalitarian populism to it -- we trust the people to do the right thing when provided all the information. It's the dreaded liberals who wish to hide their agenda and thereby avoid any actual engagement with the electorate.

Where did that conservatism go?

Or was that always, like so much else, just a stupid faithless lie?

Was the argument always just about which fat, soft comfortable elites would be in control?

Proposed Debate: Let's actually have a debate on open borders, huh?

My nominees for the border security/restrictionist side are David Frum (yes, he's on this side), Mickey Kaus, Mark Krikorian, and Tucker Carlson.

The other side can nominate whatever Open Borders hucksters they like -- probably mostly from the WSJ editorial board and Jorge Ramos. Whoever.

And let's actually see what the public really thinks.

posted by Ace at 06:21 PM

| Access Comments