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I've found over the years that one of the principal challenges of opinion writing -- in addition to consistently having original things to say -- is being conscious enough of your own biases that you can make a strong case for your side that might possibly be persuasive to those who don't already agree with you. You can get a certain amount of mileage out of creative name-calling and assuming the worst motives in your opponents, but that route is ultimately limiting. As I've tried to be more thoughtful about my own writing, the more bored I've gotten with a certain kind of partisanship, the kind that dominates talk radio, for instance.Which brings me to this rather amazing piece in the Weekly Standard by David Gelertner, one that has already been noted by a few people (Chait, Drum), arguing...well, really just arguing that liberals are awful. It's an appalling piece in many ways, but I want to take note of this parenthetical:
(Not long ago a thoughtful Obamacrat was attacking Cheney, and I asked him whether Cheney and Obama weren't, in personal terms, much alike. He thought it over and said yes; they were both highly intelligent, low-key, thoughtful, well-read, unemotional but strongly committed to their own worldviews. Then why did the left find Cheney personally so objectionable? And wasn't it striking that the right never talks about Obama the way the left did about Cheney? To his credit, he had no answer.)Gelertner isn't, so far as I can tell, simply an idiot -- he's got a Ph.D. in computer science, so he must know something, at least about computers. But what kind of psychological process takes someone to a place where he thinks that conservatives haven't talked about Obama in ways suggesting they personally dislike him? We're talking about Barack Obama here, right? The Muslim Kenyan America-hating anti-colonialist terrorist-loving guy, the one who "has a deep-seated hatred for white people," the one who is depicted by conservatives as Hitler and an African witch doctor? That guy?OK, so that's crazy. But that, and other things in Gelertner's piece, raise the question of how we understand and interpret the things our side does, and compare them to what the other side does. For instance, do you think the left or the right has a greater quantity of nuts on its side? I'm sure if you polled partisans, overwhelming majorities would respond that it is the other side which is in the grip of madness. My position on this has always been that there may be equal numbers of extremists, but the difference is that the right's extremists are far more influential. For instance, groups like Code Pink may be silly, but no one could argue that they have the same influence that someone like Rush Limbaugh has.Perhaps it doesn't look that way from the right. Or maybe it does -- maybe there are lots of conservatives who cringe at the latest bit of stone-cold racism from leading media figures, and are horrified when they see Ann Coulter, who regularly advocates the murder of people with whom she disagrees, rise up the bestseller list with her latest anti-liberal screed. (The new one, in case you're curious, is called Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America. It currently stands at #9 on Amazon.) I certainly hope so.I'm not saying it's possible to be totally free of bias, to evaluate your own side's behavior with the same critical eye you do that of the other side. But at least you can try. You don't need to believe that in his heart of hearts Paul Ryan wants to kill old people to conclude, and argue persuasively, that his plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program is a really bad idea. Of course we all attribute motives -- it's part of how we fit events into coherent, understandable narratives. But it helps to ask yourself now and again, "Is my interpretation of the other side's motives maybe a bit over the top?" As in, "Might Barack Obama have advocated the Affordable Care Act because he genuinely thought it would improve the health care system, and not because he wanted to turn America into a nightmare of statist oppression?" Once you've decided that people who disagree with you about politics are nothing more than monsters and every thing they do is for the most heinous of reasons, you've diminished your capacity to think clearly -- including the capacity to distinguish between the objectionable and the atrocious. And you haven't really helped your side much either.
