This. A thousand times THIS
ARGUING TUCSON
Posted by George Packer
Over a hundred comments and counting! Many are well-argued, including a lot of the dissents, and make me want to argue back. Some are nasty enough to give my original post a sort of roundabout boost. But who knew that so many conservatives read The New Yorker? I hope they stay subscribers.
I’ll group my answers and after-thoughts under several topics that come up frequently in the thread.
Marx wasn’t Hitler! I paired them, in the shorthand of blogging, as influences on Loughner (he cited “The Communist Manifesto” and “Mein Kampf”) whose destructive legacies do not include the shootings in Tucson. Obviously, a philosopher of political economy and a genocidal totalitarian dictator are not remotely commensurate-I should have made that clear. But when tens of millions of people are killed under the banner of an ism that bears your name within a century of your life, you don’t get the philosopher’s free pass. Were those murders the result of a tragic distortion of Marx? Yes-and yet, at the same time, one can’t read Marx’s writings without being aware of his brutal inflexibility, his hatred of what he considered humanistic moral cant. Marx heralded the remorseless wheel of history, whatever victims it might claim.
You started it! It’s undeniable that some Americans on the left never accepted the Bush Presidency as legitimate after the Florida recount. It’s also undeniable that the left’s rhetoric over the Iraq War was often hostile, simplistic, and unfair. For commenters who don’t know my work and assume I’m a partisan hack, take a look at Chapter 11 of “The Assassins’ Gate,” my book about Iraq, for detailed criticism of just that tendency, which flourished on both sides of the war. I try to call them as I see them, and I get in trouble with both sides along the way.
But it won’t do to dig up stray comments by Obama, Allen Grayson, or any other Democrat who used metaphors of combat over the past few years, and then try to claim some balance of responsibility in the implied violence of current American politics. (Most of the Obama quotes that appear in the comments were lame attempts to reassure his base that he can get mad and fight back, i.e., signs that he’s practically incapable of personal aggression in politics.) In fact, there is no balance-none whatsoever. Only one side has made the rhetoric of armed revolt against an oppressive tyranny the guiding spirit of its grassroots movement and its midterm campaign. Only one side routinely invokes the Second Amendment as a form of swagger and intimidation, not-so-coyly conflating rights with threats. Only one side’s activists bring guns to democratic political gatherings. Only one side has a popular national TV host who uses his platform to indoctrinate viewers in the conviction that the President is an alien, totalitarian menace to the country. Only one side fills the AM waves with rage and incendiary falsehoods. Only one side has an iconic leader, with a devoted grassroots following, who can’t stop using violent imagery and dividing her countrymen into us and them, real and fake. Any sentient American knows which side that is; to argue otherwise is disingenuous.
And yet plenty of people who ought to know better are making just that argument, with a heat that suggests they protest too much. For example, Ross Douthat, who brought his promising Times column this morning to its low point. Douthat wrote, in the spirit of phony equivalence, “If overheated rhetoric and martial imagery really led inexorably to murder, then both parties would belong in the dock,” but also this: “the attempted murder of a Democratic congresswoman is a potential gift to liberalism.” In other words, everyone goes over the line now and then, no one actually wants anyone dead, but one side kind of wouldn’t mind. Douthat’s column adds moral ugliness to the intellectual dishonesty that’s characterized the right’s furious response.
No one’s free speech ever got anyone killed, and you’re trying to take away mine! This was Jack Shafer’s claim in Slate. It’s dishonest as well-hardly anyone is calling for suppression of speech, certainly not me. What’s at issue is self-restraint on the part of leaders and media figures who command a following over which they exert considerable influence, and whom they daily incite into a state of political fury. My post stated at the top that no one but the shooter is responsible for the massacre. But other people, far from the Tucson Safeway, are responsible for pushing language, thought, and feeling to an extreme where political violence begins to seem legitimate. Is it a coincidence that threats to the President and Congress have skyrocketed over the past two years? The Secret Service doesn’t like to talk about these things, but I’ll bet that in years to come we’ll hear about a truly frightening level of threats during the Obama Presidency. Is it completely surprising that the shootings took place in a state and district that have become bywords for extremism and hot rhetoric? Or that the target was an elected official whose opponent last year used the M-16 as a campaign symbol?
Loughner might, by chance, have been completely unaware of the climate in his hometown. Or he might have been steeped in it. The point is that the climate is dangerous, in Arizona and elsewhere, and the shootings ought to have prompted its purveyors to step back and do some hard thinking. As David Frum wrote yesterday: “This talk did not cause this crime. But this crime should summon us to some reflection on this talk. Better: This crime should summon us to a quiet collective resolution to cease this kind of talk and to cease to indulge those who engage in it.” That was the point of my post, and it’s remarkable that Frum seems to be the only conservative who’s had the courage to say anything like it (other than one Republican senator, who, not so courageously, requested anonymity). At a minimum, human decency should have led Sarah Palin to express regret for the dog whistle she directed against Gabrielle Giffords, among others. Instead, in Palinland and across the right, the attitude has been: Never apologize. But this has been the right’s attitude throughout the Obama era, with considerable political success, and I don’t expect this tragedy to bring a change.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2011/01/tucson-revisited.html#ixzz1Alw68S6j
Posted by George Packer
Over a hundred comments and counting! Many are well-argued, including a lot of the dissents, and make me want to argue back. Some are nasty enough to give my original post a sort of roundabout boost. But who knew that so many conservatives read The New Yorker? I hope they stay subscribers.
I’ll group my answers and after-thoughts under several topics that come up frequently in the thread.
Marx wasn’t Hitler! I paired them, in the shorthand of blogging, as influences on Loughner (he cited “The Communist Manifesto” and “Mein Kampf”) whose destructive legacies do not include the shootings in Tucson. Obviously, a philosopher of political economy and a genocidal totalitarian dictator are not remotely commensurate-I should have made that clear. But when tens of millions of people are killed under the banner of an ism that bears your name within a century of your life, you don’t get the philosopher’s free pass. Were those murders the result of a tragic distortion of Marx? Yes-and yet, at the same time, one can’t read Marx’s writings without being aware of his brutal inflexibility, his hatred of what he considered humanistic moral cant. Marx heralded the remorseless wheel of history, whatever victims it might claim.
You started it! It’s undeniable that some Americans on the left never accepted the Bush Presidency as legitimate after the Florida recount. It’s also undeniable that the left’s rhetoric over the Iraq War was often hostile, simplistic, and unfair. For commenters who don’t know my work and assume I’m a partisan hack, take a look at Chapter 11 of “The Assassins’ Gate,” my book about Iraq, for detailed criticism of just that tendency, which flourished on both sides of the war. I try to call them as I see them, and I get in trouble with both sides along the way.
But it won’t do to dig up stray comments by Obama, Allen Grayson, or any other Democrat who used metaphors of combat over the past few years, and then try to claim some balance of responsibility in the implied violence of current American politics. (Most of the Obama quotes that appear in the comments were lame attempts to reassure his base that he can get mad and fight back, i.e., signs that he’s practically incapable of personal aggression in politics.) In fact, there is no balance-none whatsoever. Only one side has made the rhetoric of armed revolt against an oppressive tyranny the guiding spirit of its grassroots movement and its midterm campaign. Only one side routinely invokes the Second Amendment as a form of swagger and intimidation, not-so-coyly conflating rights with threats. Only one side’s activists bring guns to democratic political gatherings. Only one side has a popular national TV host who uses his platform to indoctrinate viewers in the conviction that the President is an alien, totalitarian menace to the country. Only one side fills the AM waves with rage and incendiary falsehoods. Only one side has an iconic leader, with a devoted grassroots following, who can’t stop using violent imagery and dividing her countrymen into us and them, real and fake. Any sentient American knows which side that is; to argue otherwise is disingenuous.
And yet plenty of people who ought to know better are making just that argument, with a heat that suggests they protest too much. For example, Ross Douthat, who brought his promising Times column this morning to its low point. Douthat wrote, in the spirit of phony equivalence, “If overheated rhetoric and martial imagery really led inexorably to murder, then both parties would belong in the dock,” but also this: “the attempted murder of a Democratic congresswoman is a potential gift to liberalism.” In other words, everyone goes over the line now and then, no one actually wants anyone dead, but one side kind of wouldn’t mind. Douthat’s column adds moral ugliness to the intellectual dishonesty that’s characterized the right’s furious response.
No one’s free speech ever got anyone killed, and you’re trying to take away mine! This was Jack Shafer’s claim in Slate. It’s dishonest as well-hardly anyone is calling for suppression of speech, certainly not me. What’s at issue is self-restraint on the part of leaders and media figures who command a following over which they exert considerable influence, and whom they daily incite into a state of political fury. My post stated at the top that no one but the shooter is responsible for the massacre. But other people, far from the Tucson Safeway, are responsible for pushing language, thought, and feeling to an extreme where political violence begins to seem legitimate. Is it a coincidence that threats to the President and Congress have skyrocketed over the past two years? The Secret Service doesn’t like to talk about these things, but I’ll bet that in years to come we’ll hear about a truly frightening level of threats during the Obama Presidency. Is it completely surprising that the shootings took place in a state and district that have become bywords for extremism and hot rhetoric? Or that the target was an elected official whose opponent last year used the M-16 as a campaign symbol?
Loughner might, by chance, have been completely unaware of the climate in his hometown. Or he might have been steeped in it. The point is that the climate is dangerous, in Arizona and elsewhere, and the shootings ought to have prompted its purveyors to step back and do some hard thinking. As David Frum wrote yesterday: “This talk did not cause this crime. But this crime should summon us to some reflection on this talk. Better: This crime should summon us to a quiet collective resolution to cease this kind of talk and to cease to indulge those who engage in it.” That was the point of my post, and it’s remarkable that Frum seems to be the only conservative who’s had the courage to say anything like it (other than one Republican senator, who, not so courageously, requested anonymity). At a minimum, human decency should have led Sarah Palin to express regret for the dog whistle she directed against Gabrielle Giffords, among others. Instead, in Palinland and across the right, the attitude has been: Never apologize. But this has been the right’s attitude throughout the Obama era, with considerable political success, and I don’t expect this tragedy to bring a change.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2011/01/tucson-revisited.html#ixzz1Alw68S6j