I don't think that conservative talking heads are alone in using these types of deception, but I do know that I go apoplectic when I hear them and generally forget and forsake my own intelligence. This makes me an ineffective respondent - of that there is no doubt.
Anyway, good piece from Brandon on Kos.
Foundations of Conservatism: Straw Man, Red Herring, and the Common Enemy
by BKuhl
Thu Jul 26, 2007 at 04:32:26 AM PDT
This is going to be a series. Many foundations of conservatism exist to deconstruct, so I’ll only tackle a few at a time. Today’s dose includes the Straw Man, the Red Herring, and the Common Enemy. It all appears in an article entitled “Why the Left Lies about Sex” by Kevin McCullough and posted at Townhall.com.
It starts thusly: “Liberals want your child to have sex.” This statement, to many people, is merely a lie. But it is actually much more involved than that. It is the center of a world-devouring black hole of bullshit.
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The statement, first and foremost, is a Straw Man argument. Republicans use these simulacra of reason all the time. A Straw Man is a sham argument set up to be defeated. To construct a Straw Man, just lie about your opponent’s argument to de-legitimate it.
It works in any argument. For instance, imagine we are debating whether to go ice skating. I am pro-ice skating. You respond, “You just want me to fall on the ice and break my ass!” This is bullshit, and it makes me seem like a total bastard. I could respond, “Yeah? Well, you just want to sit on your fat, indolent ass and work on your insulin resistance! You just want to beat the Guiness World Record for the laziest asshole alive!” Both would be straw men.
Back to “Liberals want your child to have sex.” God knows none of us gives a shit about the warped little Pharisee Pod People right wingers are cultivating in their gated gardens of hypocrisy (Note: I am a reformed pod). Nonetheless, dishonesty comes naturally to Kevin McCullough. Claiming that we liberals want their children to have sex is easier than debating us on the merits of our position.
Our real position: Instead of teaching children “abstinence only,” we should teach them “abstinence first.” Abstinence is the only way to avoid with confidence things like too-early pregnancy, infection, and the emotional parasites that accompany immature sex. But one should still know how to protect oneself for the almost certainly inevitable day when sex is appropriate, whether within marriage or otherwise.
See? That seems reasonable, right?
Of course, and it would have taken a hell of an effort by Mr. McCullough to challenge such a perspective. Lying was easier. The Straw Man is inevitable in right-wing discourse.
Now, on to the Red Herring: “For the first time since before President Clinton said what ‘is, is’ a majority of American teens...” You may be wondering, “What the hell does Clinton have to do with this?” This is the expected reaction of a rational mind. Cognitive processes halt for a second in stunned stupor. I call this the “WTF?!?-reaction.”
You have to complement the man, though, for the lyrical and philosophical contortion act required to pull off such a feat of imagination as to cram Bill Clinton’s promiscuity into such a thin attempt at argument. I applaud you, Kevin.
The accomplishment is one of distraction, the right-winger’s all-purpose instrument of influence. The Red Herring is an effort to mislead someone with an irrelevant assertion. It is named after the practice of using the scent of a fish to train hounds.
The Red Herring always seems relevant. For instance, in McCullough’s essay, talking about Clinton’s sexual impropriety sounds relevant to a discussion about government policy and sex.
But the argument is really about the credibility collapse of abstinence-only education as a policy. McCullough claims that the study unveiling this collapse is flawed because the kids in the study grew up during the “permissive” Clinton administration. I shit you not.
(Note: He also claims that the kids in the study didn’t really undergo abstinence-only education because the Bush era funding didn’t materialize until years after the study began. But abstinence-only education pre-existed federal funding for it, and unfortunately for McCullough, a quick read of WaPo’s article on the study reveals that, in fact, “slightly more than half of [the children in the study] also received abstinence-only education.” So, basically, McCullough made shit up, again.)
See? Does Clinton’s infidelity have anything to do with the worthiness of abstinence-only education? No. God, no. This is the kind of argument that makes sane men want to stab themselves in the eyes.
McCullough mentions that fewer children are choosing to have sex according to another study and actually tries to credit Bush with this success. The study never even tested the effects of abstinence-only education; it merely said that kids are having less sex. Kids can be having less sex while abstinence-only programs are failing, but one would think from reading ole' Kevin's article that the two are at mutually exclusive, opposite ends of the universe.
The study also showed that kids are using condoms more often, but McCullough bizarrely expresses dissatisfaction that news outlets mentioned this fact. Did Bush’s policies lead teens to use condoms? Would he deem such an increase in safe sex a success?
The two studies have nothing to do with one another, but McCullough distracted the reader with the Clinton Red Herring while he shifted to discussing this new study. See? Distract people long enough, and you can take them down any garden path you like.
A Red Herring is like pointing to the sky and screaming, “Look! An angel!” while stealing someone’s wallet. Mention something only tangentially related to the topic at hand when trying to change the subject in a losing argument or trying to cover a week spot, and few will notice.
It usually goes like this:
Liberal: “I think that we should build more wind farms to combat global warming.”
Right-winger: “Don’t you know that Ted Kennedy tried to stop an offshore wind farm from being built so he could protect his view of the ocean from his zillion-dollar palace?”
Liberal: “What the fuck? He did? What does that have to do with... ?”
Right-winger: “All liberals are the same. Hypocrites! Stupid liberals.”
This brings me to the final Foundation of Conservatism for now: The Common Enemy.
The Common Enemy Hypothesis is social psychology’s explanation for how a nationalist rip tide can sweep away the consciences of millions of people. All fascist movements contained at their cores a deep hatred of someone. This Common Enemy against which people rally to defeat may be the jews (Nazis), the blacks (the confederates), or, finally, the liberal (Republicans).
“The liberal” is not actually anything like real liberals that think and breath. It is a caricature. Lies such as “Liberals want your child to have sex” accumulate in the mind of the angry Republican to form a heaping pile of bullshit akin to a Straw Man but much easier to hate. The more bullshit one adds to the pile, the more it stinks.
The easier it is to hate the caricature the more united around that hatred they will be. This unity is a sick kind of power.
Republicans find ever-larger ways to make “the liberal” Common Enemy more nefarious. One such way is to pose Straw Men as discussed above. For instance, they claim that liberals hate America (instead of admitting that a capacity for truthful reflection upon one’s wrongs is an essential component of a conscience).
Another way is to find actual examples of the boogeyman one wants to create and use them as examples of the Common Enemy. For instance: Ward Churchill. He makes a stupid comment about 9/11 victims, and right-wingers frenzy around him like piranha. This is also called the Fallacy of Composition, which is to assume that what is true of a member of the group is true of the group as a whole (This is largely how things like racist and sexist ideas start).
The goal, though, is to make him a representative of liberals. When they burn useful idiots like Ward Churchill, they are burning all of us in effigy, even if we never agreed with a word the man spoke. The same thing happens to good liberals like Howard Dean, George Soros, the Clintons, Rosie O’Donnel, or Michael Moore. The right wing is looking for someone to hate by proxy. These people are temporary villains and will be replaced by the rest of us if such a opportunity ever comes within their reach.
What connects all of these ideological instruments is their usefulness at distracting people and circumventing their ability to think for themselves. Each is a distraction, and it is as good an explanation for why politics has been so bizarre during the last several years as anything.
Knowing these concepts will help any liberal counter right-wing propaganda. These concepts are our tools, and we can use them to retake the debate in America. The more people who know what we know about deceptive Republican tactics, the fewer people who fall for them.
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