My friend Conor Friedersdorf comes dangerously close to violating the Dougherty Doctrine. You see, Mr. Friedersdorf is an unfailingly polite, open-minded, sympathetic, empathetic, irenic, well-mannered guy. An utterly non-self-aggrandizing, calming, unflappable, gentle man. And over at The Atlantic he notices how unpleasant are those partisans that lack his virtues.
But if you spend time talking politics with people who identify as hard core progressives or movement conservatives, you’ll find that a significant percentage believe their ideology would prevail more often if only their partisans were more angry, their attacks more pointed, their operatives more ruthless. This is most often expressed via the use of metaphors that draw on the language of war and fighting. Usually it doesn’t make any sense. In war, the victor kills as many folks as possible on the opposing side. Political winners persuade more people to join their coalition.
Mr. Friedersdorf goes on to produce examples of negative campaigning that failed or proved ineffective, as part of his argument that irenic persuasion of the sort Friedersdorf (and I) prefer is a winner politically.
Unfortunately, he’s wrong. Politics may not be about killing your opponents (at least here it isn’t), but it certainly isn’t about gently persuading them. Politics is often about humiliating, discrediting, and shaming people and their ideas. Only rarely or at the elite margins is this done with argument. The reason words like “fascist”, “bigot”, and “racist” are an everyday feature of our discourse is because they are powerful weapons for marginalizing and shaming people.
Take welfare reform. Charles Murray wrote a persuasive and irenic book on the subject, Losing Ground. The book was released in 1984 and aimed at elites. But the political possibility of ending “welfare as we know it” came later, after a decade of populist conservatives assailing poor black mothers as welfare queens who drive Cadillacs. Conservatives made liberals ashamed to defend the welfare system. And, after the electoral rebuke of 1994, Clinton triangulated the issue. Losing Ground helped of course, but a good part of the work was ugly.
Mr. Friedersdorf says Hillary Clinton ran the more negative campaign in the 2008 Democratic primary. I’m not convinced at all that this is true. Sure, some of her advisors talked about questioning Obama’s bona fides as an American. Alas, that never really happened in the official campaign.
But look to 2004, surely a consequential election. The conservative movement’s organs and the Bush campaign didn’t make sophisticated arguments. They cut together images of John Kerry windsurfing with a clip of him saying he voted one way or another. The Connecticut Yalie attacked a Vietnam Vet as an effete snob. His hatchet-men helped the media find stories of Kerry asking for swiss cheese on his Philly Cheesesteak – a faux pax that apparently disqualifies one from high executive office.
Right now we are witnessing same-sex marriage proponents win the long-term political battle for gay equality. Are they doing this with persuasive argument? Only in the most obscure outlets. No, pro-same sex marriage advocates are winning by shaming their opponents as homophobes and bigots. They put their opponents in the position of defending Fred Phelps and his marginal God Hates Fags cult. If the arguments of Mary Eberstadt are recalled in the future they will described as “the apologetics of Matthew Shepherd’s killers.” That’s not a fair or true statement about Eberstadt’s work, but stigmatization works to keep people from deviating from the new orthodoxy.
Abortion is another example. The debate really turns on whether the larger culture feels antipathy toward religious fanatics or toward slutty young women. So far America is undecided. If that debate is ever settled it won’t be because the great majority of people have come to a considered conclusion about the moral worth of a fertilized embryo. It will be settled when one side is considered intolerably bad, and the other decent and virtuous.
The utterly innocent, well-meaning Mr. Friedersdorf should be intimately familiar with the language of stigmatization, with content-free demands for “decency”, with shaming – they are an everyday (almost every quarter-hour) event on Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, where Mr. Friedersdorf worked.
In a mass democracy politics operate by the permission of the larger culture. And I’m afraid to inform my gentle kind hearted friend that the great mass of Americans are moved by hatred, fear, status-seeking, greed, and shame. Persuading them by argument is as useless as directing a mob with a sonnet. So we should not be surprised when people with political ambitions speak to the larger population’s real political emotions.
Mr. Friedersdorf is concerned with men’s souls. That’s admirable. Me too. But politics concern the kingdom of this world.