Lindsay Beyerstein is very determined to not understand what I’m saying about our attitudes toward the Red States. She has, in fact, grievously misunderstood my point twice in one day.
She writes:
Assume that your opponent has a position, they scold. Don’t write people off as sick dupes just because they don’t agree with you. This seems like good advice to me. But allow me to suggest a corollary: some arguments are predicated on superstition, ignorance, and/or bigotry. If your interlocutor is advancing such views, you owe it to him to take him at his word. Act accordingly.
The basic idea is that liberals don’t give fundamentalist arguments the respect they deserve. According to Will and Grant most liberals don’t even realize that fundamentalists have reasons for embracing certain ideals family life, public justification, bioethics, etc.
This claim is just false. Most liberals are familiar with the arguments of the religious right.
Please look again and see if I was making a point about arguments. Look hard. I was not. If you know me, or have read this blog for a while, then you know that I’m no friend of fundamentalism, superstition, bigotry and all that bad stuff. I am an inveterate empiricist. My philosophical heroes are Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Darwin, Hayek, and Quine. You know, the founding fathers of the reality-based community.
Apparently I’m so empiricist that some folks get confused when I look out the window and report that politics is not primarily a matter of arguments, but more a matter of coalitional identity and the stories that bind these identities together. My practical point, which I also believe to be empirically sound, is that if we hope to get anywhere, we’d better face up to the facts about the way people make political choices, and that simply lashing out at others’ deeply-held identities with the disdainful counter-assertion of our identities is rather likely to be counterproductive.
We live in a pluralistic society. This is an ineradicable fact. Yet I take rather seriously the idea that everyone can benefit from a classical liberal social order, and that many more people than now do can come to see this. But causing people to see it isn’t simply a matter of giving them a good argument. It’s a matter of giving them grounds for assenting on the basis of their own commitments, in terms articulated in their own vocabulary. Now, you can try to persuade people when they like you, and they won’t like you if you hate them. Yes. You know that already. So when I say that it’s not such a grand thing to seethe with self-righteous contempt for the folks in America’s heartland, I am NOT saying that they’ve got good arguments, if only we’d listen, although some of them might. I am NOT one of them, and I am NOT indulging in Red State victimology. I AM saying that here is a huge mass of Americans, most of them good, reasonable, and open to persuasion. Most Bush voters were NOT fundamentalists, although Lindsay for God knows what reason seems to think I was talking about fundamentalists. I was talking about the people who voted for Bush. I was talking about smart, educated, industrious, open, honest non-fundamentalist Americans with whom Bush successfully connected.
My point is: we’ll do a hell of a lot better if are able to connect, insofar as it is possible, with whatever it was Bush connected with. Hint: it’s not all God talk and homophobia.
If voters grow more conservative with age, the Right will always “know its enemy” better than the Left.
Exactly Will. Being a Democrat, along w/ the rest of the left, we have had to figure out what did we do wrong. At first I was buying into the value argument. But I soon realized that this really wasn’t the whole story. It also came down to fear. Fear of being a victim of terrorism again. Looking at the exit poll numbers and polls leading up to the election showed time and again that people felt Bush would do the better job on the war on terror. Regardless of the mistakes/errors in judgement this admisitration has accomplished, people trusted Bush more.
If the left wants to succeed, it needs to not only come to terms on how to speak to the right concerning “values” (w/o condescension), but also explain how they are not the soft on terror party. It’s no different than what happend in the eighties and the war on drugs. At that time, the right accused the left of being soft on crime, and the left never truly responded in a way that reassured the public to the contrary.
This election cycle, Kerry never offered up anything in his approach, except vague notions of getting European allies involved, that was much different than Bush’s approach. So why would people make a change from Bush to Kerry. The democrats never built a coalitional identity that could draw enough people away from Bush. More people (myself included) voted for Kerry, not because of his ideas, but because we saw the damage done in one term by Bush.
IMHO, that was the left’s coalitional identity this time: Bush’s policies are the wrong ones for this country and a change must be made regardless of who our candidate is. It almost worked, but for a chance at greater success, and a long lasting success, the left needs to start reframing the issues to our advantage, that engages, and includes all the parties/voters out there. Until that happens, the left will continue to be marginalized.
Anyway, since Lakoff is becoming the de rigueur reading on the left now, I hope you write about your talk in Quebec a couple of weeks ago.
Later.
Lindsay Beyerstein’s argument is reminiscent of discussions that have come up in some of my philosophy classes surrounding the principle of charity. In most cases, we feel that it is best to reconstruct our opponents’ arguments in ways that make the most rational sense and fit with the (well-known) facts. In fact, following Davidson, it seems that we might not even be understanding our opponents’ language(s) if we don’t reconstruct their arguments in this way. However, it also seems that there are certain cases in which people really do make irrational arguments that fly in the face of certain relatively well-known facts, and indulging in too much charity will obscure this point. I think Lindsay Beyerstein is suggesting that something like this might be the case here (as my colleagues occasionally do with some very poor arguments that come up in certain readings), but I (like you) would prefer to err further on the side of charity. Clearly there are going to be some cases where charity breaks down, but I’d rather hold out as long as possible.
Maybe it’s not your arguments or identity. Maybe it was the Democrat’s ideas. Kerry didn’t seem to have any. He had recycled Carterism and Edward’s populist rhetoric – stuff a lot of people have left behind as out-moded and dysfunctional.
Maybe a certain percentage of Americans heard Kerry loud and clear and thought “No, you’re wrong.”
I’m not talking about fundamentalists, either, by the way.
If voters grow more conservative with age, the Right will always “know its enemy” better than the Left.
Exactly Will. Being a Democrat, along w/ the rest of the left, we have had to figure out what did we do wrong. At first I was buying into the value argument. But I soon realized that this really wasn’t the whole story. It also came down to fear. Fear of being a victim of terrorism again. Looking at the exit poll numbers and polls leading up to the election showed time and again that people felt Bush would do the better job on the war on terror. Regardless of the mistakes/errors in judgement this admisitration has accomplished, people trusted Bush more.
If the left wants to succeed, it needs to not only come to terms on how to speak to the right concerning “values” (w/o condescension), but also explain how they are not the soft on terror party. It’s no different than what happend in the eighties and the war on drugs. At that time, the right accused the left of being soft on crime, and the left never truly responded in a way that reassured the public to the contrary.
This election cycle, Kerry never offered up anything in his approach, except vague notions of getting European allies involved, that was much different than Bush’s approach. So why would people make a change from Bush to Kerry. The democrats never built a coalitional identity that could draw enough people away from Bush. More people (myself included) voted for Kerry, not because of his ideas, but because we saw the damage done in one term by Bush.
IMHO, that was the left’s coalitional identity this time: Bush’s policies are the wrong ones for this country and a change must be made regardless of who our candidate is. It almost worked, but for a chance at greater success, and a long lasting success, the left needs to start reframing the issues to our advantage, that engages, and includes all the parties/voters out there. Until that happens, the left will continue to be marginalized.
Anyway, since Lakoff is becoming the de rigueur reading on the left now, I hope you write about your talk in Quebec a couple of weeks ago.
Later.
Lindsay Beyerstein’s argument is reminiscent of discussions that have come up in some of my philosophy classes surrounding the principle of charity. In most cases, we feel that it is best to reconstruct our opponents’ arguments in ways that make the most rational sense and fit with the (well-known) facts. In fact, following Davidson, it seems that we might not even be understanding our opponents’ language(s) if we don’t reconstruct their arguments in this way. However, it also seems that there are certain cases in which people really do make irrational arguments that fly in the face of certain relatively well-known facts, and indulging in too much charity will obscure this point. I think Lindsay Beyerstein is suggesting that something like this might be the case here (as my colleagues occasionally do with some very poor arguments that come up in certain readings), but I (like you) would prefer to err further on the side of charity. Clearly there are going to be some cases where charity breaks down, but I’d rather hold out as long as possible.
Maybe it’s not your arguments or identity. Maybe it was the Democrat’s ideas. Kerry didn’t seem to have any. He had recycled Carterism and Edward’s populist rhetoric – stuff a lot of people have left behind as out-moded and dysfunctional.
Maybe a certain percentage of Americans heard Kerry loud and clear and thought “No, you’re wrong.”
I’m not talking about fundamentalists, either, by the way.