Doubtlessly as the year draws on I will be drawn back, to some extent, to the spectre of national politics, if only for the horse race aspect of this November’s elections. Any kind of heavy-duty number crunching has a strong appeal to me, and I’m certainly more interested in politics than sports or fantasy sports or anything else like that. For the most part, though, I’m kind of enjoying not following the news so religiously, even if Buckeye Cablesystem really needs to get Current so I can catch a little more Keith Olbermann before he finally flames out for good. (They need to get NHL Network, too. Just saying. Why do you guys carry Windsor’s CBC stations if not for the hockey goodness?)
Part of what started burning me out on politics about a year and a half ago is the continuing devolution of political discourse in this country. It’s not like things just started getting bad when I was born, or when Reagan was elected, or when I turned 18, but the constant refrain over the years of “political discourse is the worst it’s even been in this country” wouldn’t be uttered so frequently, and by so many people, if there weren’t a pretty strong grain of truth to it all. Yes, this isn’t the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries when politicians were shooting one another to death in duels, but this is the twenty-first century where a Democratic campaign manager’s cat gets its head bashed in and “LIBERAL” scrawled across its dead body. (That article only links to a photo of the dead cat; many articles spring the photo up on you without warning, something I find sick and highly inappropriate.)
Pointing out any singular aspect of American political discourse that’s undesirable (to say the least) runs the risk of taking attention away from everything else that’s wrong with our politics, but the us-versus-them hyperbolic approach, where everyone who doesn’t completely agree 100% with your point of view (or your party’s point of view or your preacher’s point of view or what have you) is not only mistaken, but wrong and stupid and evil and so on, makes it hard to feel like there’s any use in trying to participate. There’s a sliver of a chance you might actually change anyone’s mind, and a practical guarantee of eliciting hundreds of “your dumb foad” messages. (Unless, of course, you have a blog no one reads like this one. Before I go on, I cop to all the hyperbole contained in my first few years’ worth of posts on the .org, and everything I did online before then. I didn’t know better then, and I’d like to think I know better now.)
That being said, it would be foolish to go so far as to say that stupidity doesn’t exist in American politics, within all ranges of the spectrum from left to right and every point in between, and certainly we need to call out stupidity when we see it. One of the reasons I’m such a big First Amendment proponent is because when you let people with genuinely bad ideas speak their minds, people can usually determine for themselves how bad those ideas are, so the proponents of bad ideas tend to be their own worst enemies in the end. It doesn’t always work out that way, though, so sometimes there is the need to raise your voice and say, “Hey, this is stupid, and it should stop.”
An example would help here. I believe that the government should provide its citizens with some kind of safety net for when some of its people are willing but unable to find work. If you want to call it welfare then call it welfare. I think such a safety net is not only a moral obligation of a people, particularly one as relatively well-off as we Americans are, but it’s also beneficial to society as a whole because it ameliorates the suffering both of the unemployed and the communities around them since it reduces the need to turn to illegal or immoral ways to get money.
Now, do I think that people who argue that such a system provides a disincentive for people to find work are stupid? No. I think the possibility of a disincentive is there, but that the harm done by shrinking the safety net would be worse than keeping the safety net in place and dealing with the effects of the disincentive. I strongly disagree with the idea that there should be no safety net at all, but I don’t think that argument is stupid because it’s rooted in a philosophical idea that has some logic to it. I think that logic is misguided, but it’s there.
You know what’s stupid, though? Saying that we can’t have this safety net because Linda Taylor of Chicago used eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards, and invented four fictitious dead ex-husbands to collect $150,000 of tax-free income a year from the government, so if people can cheat the system like that we can’t have a safety net. Do you know why that’s a stupid argument? Because it isn’t true. Linda Taylor was convicted of using two aliases to collect a grand total of $8,000 from the government. This was pointed out when then-candidate Reagan kept using Taylor’s story as a reason to dismantle the safety net, not in his 1980 presidential campaign, but his 1976 campaign. This anecdote was shot down around the time I was born, and I turn 36 in March. (Buy me presents.)
Despite this, I was still able to remember the numbers — eighty names, thirty addresses, and so on — off the top of my head, double-checking them (in William Kleinknecht’s The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America) just to make sure I had them straight. Do you know why I still know those numbers two whole generations after Reagan trotted them out? Because conservatives are still using them today. People talk about conservatives’ use of apocryphal anecdotes as if it’s a modern thing, but it’s been going on since before I was born, and it feels safe to assume it will keep going on long after I die. Using stories and accusations that have been proven false, especially when that proof is over thirty-five years old, is stupid.
This doesn’t mean that people don’t cheat the system, and that we shouldn’t have reasonable safeguards in place to weed out people who try to take advantage of the safety net. What it does mean is that inventing stories to try to make any argument more persuasive is something that no free-thinking citizen, regardless of political beliefs, should stand for. As a fiction writer I understand the power of stories and how persuasive they can be, but you don’t want an electorate to base their voting on the rhetorical equivalent of Twilight. Sadly, that might actually be an improvement over the stories some politicians and talking heads are feeding us these days.
On the one hand, some of us, myself included, are guilty of complacency when it comes to not calling out the stupidity more diligently. One of the main reasons Fox News has continued to succeed is that those of us who are aware of how misleading and inaccurate their claims are don’t call more attention to them. There’s a certain “boy who cried wolf” quality to going after the inaccuracies of Fox News and how their talking heads mislead people, where people around you will say, “Yeah, we know Fox News is full of crap, now will you shut up about it?” The thing is that Fox News isn’t shutting up, so unless we do speak up and point out each inaccuracy or misleading argument, they might go completely unchallenged.
On the other hand, as a culture we’ve moved the “stupidity bar” down so low that the word (as well as its synonyms, including some highly inappropriate ones like the r-word) is starting to lose its meaning. I can understand being so fiercely drawn to an issue that you start using it to refer to your opponents’ ideas, especially if the issue is one that affects you directly. There needs to be a little bit of wiggle room there because a little bit of passion in rhetoric can be a very good thing. When you start calling everyone who disagrees with you to even the slightest degree “stupid”, though, that undercuts the possibility of rational discourse, and things tend to spiral down into ad hominem and other illogical arguments after that. Unfortunately, with the way our discourse is continuing to trend, the apocryphal stories, the “not intended to be a factual statement” statements, may be all we have before too long. As a fiction writer that may open up a lot of job opportunities for me, but as an American the thought disgusts me.
