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Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Repetition, Repetition, And Repetition
Among the great virtues of the married state is the frequent reminder it provides that however much you may talk, no one is required to listen.
No, your Curmudgeon will not provide details. Suffice it to say that the C.S.O. demonstrated this critical truth to him afresh this very morning. It's painfully applicable to the state of our national political discourse.
Quite a number of libertarians, pro-freedom conservatives, and men of good will find that, after a few years of active engagement in politics and outreach, they simply can't muster the energy to continue. The meager results from their efforts fall too far short of justifying the time, effort, and money they expend to get them. In particular, they can't endure any more repetitive statist cant or vilification from their opponents. So they discontinue their efforts, conclude their political involvements, and take to crossing the street whenever they spy an old ally coming toward them.
Your Curmudgeon has been there. He knows the syndrome from the inside.
Our adversaries on the Left -- broadly speaking, authoritarian left-liberals, socialists, and fellow-traveling special interests -- are fully aware of the power of the repetition effect. They wield it relentlessly. We don't wield it against them, a moral credit to us, but we've been unable to find a countermeasure that would nullify the thinning effect it has on our ranks.
Your Curmudgeon has been thinking about this matter for nearly twenty years. Every year, the perniciousness of the repetition effect seems worse. Time was, it merely caused some percentage of us to lapse into silence. More recently, the Left has succeeded in stripping a number of pro-freedom figures of their access to media outlets. The recent case of Rachel Marsden,, who was dismissed from her position at the Toronto Sun for this column, should cause any defender of freedom of expression to sit up and take notice. Lisa DePasquale notes a raft of other cases in her column of today.
Intellectually, the Left is on the ropes and knows it. Over the century past, it's had hundreds of chances to try its nostrums from a position of power. Every such implementation has failed disastrously. In contrast, the repeal of their policies and programs, where permitted, has reversed the damage and fostered health and growth. The Soviet Union and Red China averted total collapse only by embracing capitalism. In the West, the most dramatic example is Chile, where the dissolution of socialism and the institution of a market economy even freer than that of the United States led to 9% annual economic growth and fears throughout the rest of Latin America that the Chileans would soon leave them permanently behind. With demonstrations such as these available, the Left is aware that it cannot win at the debating table.
Politics is about debate, and debate's prospects for determining which of two ideas is the better. The alternatives to debate are censorship and slaughter.
Fortunately, the Left doesn't possess the coercive power to silence pro-freedom voices directly. Yes, it's striving for such power; the attempts to revive the "Fairness Doctrine" as an explicit aspect of federal law were aimed at precisely that. But so far such attempts have all failed. What hasn't failed is the repetition effect.
The Old Media -- newspapers and broadcast television -- pour an unending stream of leftist cant and vitriol into our ears. One can hardly turn on the Idiot Box without being slapped in the face by a fresh dollop of it. As for the newspapers, with hundreds of dailies in the country, that there should be only three with a generally libertarian-conservative editorial position -- the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, and the relatively young New York Sun -- should put the matter to rest without further argument.
With a few exceptions, the persons who run the Left's Old Media annexes are not unintelligent. They can see the same evidence as we. Their ability to evaluate it is no less than ours. Yet they persist in their repetition strategy, even to the extent of obscuring relevant facts, or refusing to report them, when those facts militate against their positions. The token conservatives they allow a few column-inches, or a few minutes of air time, each week are drowned out by the repetition effect; they usually retire from the field of their own volition after a few years of frustration.
The conservative and libertarian voices least impeded from reaching us at this time are in talk radio, and on the World Wide Web. The Left has attempted several times to form a bastion in radio, and has always failed. On the Web, a reader selects his own favorite opinion-mongering sites; he need not trouble himself with others. These highly competitive fields have been the Right's success stories from their inception. The repetition effect can make no headway there, because we can choose to exclude it. If you needed an explanation for Democrats' ardency about "regulating" talk radio and the Web, you have it now.
However, your Curmudgeon's primary concern is at the grassroots. Prominent conservative and libertarian opinion mongers mostly speak to those who already agree with them. We need ours; they help us to sustain our confidence that we're not insane, not being unrealistic, and aren't enemies of all that is good and just. But they make relatively few converts to pro-freedom ideals. The working fluid in the engine of freedom is the mass of private individuals who, by example and by ordinary conversations with others of dissimilar opinions, persuade those others to see things through the lens of liberty.
Private persons are as daunted and disheartened by the repetition effect as anyone. It's a mark of sanity, really. The import of a communication is in the response of the listener; if the listener's response never changes no matter what one says, then to continue on would testify to the belief that doing the same thing over and over will somehow evoke a different result at some unspecified future time. All the same, to conclude that one cannot contribute to the renaissance of freedom, Constitutionally limited government, and individual responsibility is a personal defeat and a very sad thing.
There are some palliatives. One can choose not to talk to persons who make use of the repetition effect. One can remind oneself that when third parties are listening to an exchange, what they come away with is at least as important as whether one can persuade one's nominal adversary. And finally, one can and must remain mindful that if the other party's thrusts and responses never vary, then one's own convictions cannot possibly be at issue -- especially if the never-ending theme is that one must be either stupid or evil for preferring freedom to the swaddling embrace of the Omnipotent State.
All that to the side, the power of the repetition effect, and the Left's relentless use of it, remain among the most important tactical problems of the pro-freedom Right. A truly effective countermeasure would virtually win the field, all by itself. Your Curmudgeon hopes that a lot of very smart persons are thinking hard about it.
Comments
Ahh, yes, the old repetition ploy: the oral equivalent of Chinese water torture. Crude but devilishly effective it is. If you think about it, it’s everyone’s rhetorical weapon of choice up until age twelve or so, at which time everyone who’s not a congenital liberal or sadist will abandon it as a tactic. Will so, will so, will so, will so …
Sadly, there are a lot of congenital liberals and sadists out there, Fran. Whenever you discuss socio-political topics with a liberal, rest assured he will not allow the exchange to stay on the high road. I think it was Peter Brimelow who defined a “racist” as any person who’s winning an argument with a liberal. Soon enough, the liberal can be counted upon to resort to repetition and invective. Can to, can to, can to, can to …
Since most liberals are beyond persuasion, whenever you’re forced into a confrontation, the wise course is to present your case coolly and rationally for the benefit of any third party witnesses to the conversation who might be influenced by your civilized behavior. If there are no witnesses to the exchange – repeat, no witnesses – a quick jab to the twit’s solar plexus does the trick. Does so, does so, does so, does so …
Posted by on 12/11/2007 at 10:43 PMThis is an interesting pattern that also showed itself even in congressional deliberations. I note that when conservative proposals like Social Security reform were killed, they tended to stay dead. I have no doubt that congressional conservatives will bring up the issue again some time in the future, but it will likely be years from now.
On the other hand, when a liberal proposal dies, you’re likely to see it again the very same year, and sometimes multiple times in the same year. Can’t get SCHIP passed? Sneak it into every appropriations bill until people forget to notice. Lack of popular support kills your immigration bill? Win a few more seats in that year’s elections and promptly bring it back up again. White House keeps frustrating your efforts to end a war? Hold some hundred votes and hearings on it. It’s not hard to see why conservatives would feel beleaugered in these circumstances.
Posted by on 12/12/2007 at 12:03 PM
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