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Wednesday, August 22, 2007
An Old Slander
...is back on the wires this morning:
WASHINGTON — Liberals read more books than conservatives. The head of the book publishing industry's trade group says she knows why — and there's little flattering about conservative readers in her explanation."The Karl Roves of the world have built a generation that just wants a couple slogans: 'No, don't raise my taxes, no new taxes,'" Pat Schroeder, president of the American Association of Publishers, said in a recent interview. "It's pretty hard to write a book saying, 'No new taxes, no new taxes, no new taxes' on every page."
Schroeder, who as a Colorado Democrat was once one of Congress' most liberal House members, was responding to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll that found people who consider themselves liberals are more prodigious book readers than conservatives.
She said liberals tend to be policy wonks who "can't say anything in less than paragraphs. We really want the whole picture, want to peel the onion."
Ah, the old "conservatives are simplistic ignoramuses" smear! But refresh your Curmudgeon's memory, please: isn't Miss Schroeder the woman who wanted to end American involvement in NATO because she wanted the money for domestic welfare programs? The woman who put her name forward as a Democratic presidential candidate, and then withdrew it because it would "shrivel" her to campaign for the office?
Publishing industry history indicates two things rather clearly:
- Non-fiction with a liberal slant tends to get laudatory reviews from the Old Media, then goes through one printing before being remaindered.
- Non-fiction with a conservative slant tends to be ignored by the Old Media, then goes through multiple printings and gets mentioned a year after publication as a "surprise best-seller."
So if one may judge from the above, it's not liberals who are buying and reading books, unless Miss Schroeder means to count Harlequin romances and the like. But that's not really what your Curmudgeon is here to talk about.
Liberals routinely employ certain words and phrases as dismissals, to avert a serious discussion of an issue or a proposal put forward to address it. Here's a representative sample:
- simplistic
- inevitable
- here to stay
- heartless
- utopian
- unworkable
- uncompassionate
- social justice
- for the children
The merest breath of any of these terms is enough to make your Curmudgeon drop his ear trumpet and grope for his musket. They're an infallible indication that the speaker doesn't want to continue the discussion. Observable trends? Historical evidence? Mechanisms in place? The record of comparable thrusts in other places? All irrelevant. The liberal has spoken, and don't you dare dispute his characterization of your notions...or of you.
That's what it's really all about, you see. The liberal has a low opinion of you, Mr. Conservative. He works backward from that, not forward from the evidence of the senses and the ordinary reasoning power God gave us. Since you don't measure up, your notions of right, wrong, and political efficacy can't possibly be any better. Why should he waste the precious matter of his brain on actual thought when he can simply dismiss your notions with a flip evaluation, you knuckle-dragging Neanderthal, you?
(An old joke: A man interested in increasing his intelligence walked into a "brain shop" and perused the price list. It ran a bit like this:
- Laborer's brain: $10 / ounce.
- Engineer's brain: $50 / ounce.
- Professor's brain: $100 / ounce.
- Liberal's brain: $10,000 / ounce.
Flummoxed, the man asked the proprietor why the last price was so much higher than the others. The proprietor cocked an eyebrow and replied, "Do you have any idea how many liberals it takes to get an ounce of brain?" [Of course, you can tell this on anyone you like.])
The most self-flattering and cutting insult one can deliver to an adversary is to denigrate his intelligence. Yes, it's even worse than damning him morally; moral evaluations are always marred by a holier-than-thou backwash, and besides, liberals claim not to believe in moral standards anyway. But to lampoon a man as a dullard or an ignoramus is both socially acceptable and potentially entertaining, among liberals, at least. If it were otherwise, liberal commentary wouldn't embed all those Republicans-are-stupid motifs, would it?
It can get worse, of course. When a conservative is too obviously brighter, of better character, and better informed than his opponents, they'll retreat to other sorts of insults: his appearance, his grooming, his ancestry, even his race. Consider the shafts aimed at President Bush's face and walk. Regard well the statements of James "Choke On Your Own Vomit, America" Wolcott, who called the incomparably more intelligent, accomplished, and eloquent Ann Coulter "a travesty of humanity, as unacceptable a hank of flesh draped on a hanger ever to be foisted upon an ignorant populace hungry for more ignorance," and a "skank" who can "shift ass on a dime." And does anyone else here remember the late Carl "Ban Handguns" Rowan, the black liberal columnist who couldn't resist calling one of the foremost public intellectuals in America "Uncle Tom" Sowell?
All of this is de rigueur in liberal rhetoric. It's one of the features of their "thought" most responsible for the acrimony between Left and Right that we suffer today. The question before us is what to do about it.
Your Curmudgeon's favored tactic, when unable to escape discussion with a liberal who believes that his disdain for conservative thought trumps all evidence and logic, is to leap to the meta-argument. The "argument," in this formulation, is whatever specific issue or development is nominally under discussion. The meta-argument is the constellation of implicit rules of discourse: implicit, because few persons ever preface their opinions by stating those rules explicitly. Still, like a referee who only intrudes on the action when a foul is committed, they're there to be invoked when appropriate.
Here's a typical case:
Liberal Interlocutor (LI): Your proposal is simplistic.
Your Curmudgeon (YC): Your statement is arrogant and irrelevant.LI: What? How dare you!
YC: Quite simply. What you said is an evaluation unsupported by the evidence. In fact, the evidence runs directly counter to your evaluation. To dismiss all that evidence with a one-word evaluation is arrogant in the extreme. It proves that you're not really interested in the issue, else you'd have something to say about the facts of the matter and the history of other attempts to deal with it. It also expresses a lack of respect for my intelligence and knowledge. Do you have anything substantive to say?LI: Well...
YC: Take your time. I'll wait.
Your Curmudgeon has had several exchanges of this sort. Happily, none have yet eventuated in pistols at dawn. The point is that liberals are just as unhappy about being confronted with their rhetorical evasions as they are about conservatives' possession of divergent opinions. They maintain, in general, that it's okay to deceive and mislead "in a good cause," -- you know, "the narrative was right even if the facts were wrong" -- but they don't really believe it. Nor are they incapable of being embarrassed at being called on their dishonorable tactics in front of an audience.
Of course, you have to be willing to make enemies to use this approach. (And you should always carry your walking stick. Your Curmudgeon's is a six foot length of cherry that goes just about everywhere with him. Why, yes, he has trained in quarterstaff combat; why do you ask?) More to the point, a liberal who'd apply such contemptuous evaluative dismissals to a conservative's proposals is unlikely to be reached by argument; he's already announced by his rhetoric that he's uninterested in it. What remains is embarrassment. And of course, there's always your audience to consider.
Above all, and regardless of the approach you adopt, it's imperative that you not let a liberal's evaluative dismissal be "the last word." Liberal opinioneers have to have the last word; they believe that's equivalent to proving their case. Your objective is to ensure that the liberal's last word is something your onlookers will remember to his discredit. That's not too hard. Once stripped of their standard dismissals, liberals automatically retreat to insult and slander, the use of which, being crude and irrelevant, is a flag of surrender. That will provide you with the perfect moment to smile pleasantly and withdraw, leaving your adversary to wonder if he might have spat in his own soup.
They're not very bright, you see.
Comments
I dare anyone to come on this website, read my bloviations, and then say conservatives speak in sentences while liberals speak in paragraphs!
On a more serious note, this type of thinking is far too common among liberals. Your post nails it right on the head - if the books conservatives tend to read aren’t “real books,” then of course liberals read more books than conservatives! It quickly becomes a tautology. Furthermore, the poll question itself is of course misleading. The AP article reports that the poll asked respondents to say whether they had a read a book in the last year. This type of question just begs for response bias - the more one’s view of oneself is based upon how others view one on the issue in question, the more one is likely to answer in the affirmative. If the prevailing belief among liberals is that liberalism equals higher intelligence, more liberals will say they read lots of books, even if they don’t. The polls about sex that the media trumpets from time to time show the same thing, with men much more likely to exaggerate their numbers of partners and other signs of prowess than women. Men probably really do tend to have more sexual partners than women, but is the number really double or greater, as many polls seem to indicate? If it were, where would the men be finding all these different willing partners?
Does this natural bias reduce the poll results like these to insignificance? I don’t know - but the methodology is very suspect.
In any case, no surprise to see polls conducted solely so the people giving the poll can feel better about themselves. It seems to have become a staple of American life.
Posted by on 08/23/2007 at 01:43 PM
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