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Volume CXXXII, Number 22 |
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Ideas, not name-calling, can bring about political progress
TODD BUELL
COLUMNIST
Recently, I watched a speech by Robert Edgar, president of the National Council of Churches. His talk centered on U.S. foreign policy, and his arguments were more liberal than mine. However, in thinking about his positions, it dawned on me the importance that listening and respect have in politics. Respect can lead to understanding and perhaps, when appropriate, compromise. The ability to listen, appreciate, and learn from disparate arguments is one of the most compelling legacies of a liberal arts education. It is essential that we use it against tendencies of demonization in today's politics.
Late on Friday night, I happened to hit C-SPAN before I went to bed and picked up Edgar's speech to the Joan Kroch Institute in San Diego, California. His talk focused mostly on the Council's negative response to the war in Iraq. During the question period, someone asked him how he would shape American foreign policy if he were president. His answer was profound in both its genuineness and its liberality.
He readily admitted that America is the only superpower today. However, he took that classification in an entirely different direction than our current president. Edgar said that as a superpower we have a responsibility to fix our own problems here at home before we gallivant across the globe in the name of democracy. He cited the number of Americans without adequate health care, education, and housing as examples of what needed to be accomplished here at home before we could justify propagating democracy to other countries.
The reflexive reaction of many liberals to Edgar's rhetoric is to embrace it wholly and demonize those that disagree as "cold hearted," "elitist," or the particularly vitriolic "fascist" and "racist." These names only foment anger and shut off debate. Political name-calling reminds me of what my grandfather told me when I was younger about swearing. He said that when he served in the army in World War II, his unit's chaplain spoke to the men about using curse words.
The chaplain preached that swearing insults one's intelligence. Swearing shows that one is not intelligent enough to think of a more appropriate word. Just as it demonstrates a lack of intelligence to swear, to dismiss an argument with a mere label displays a lack of thought.
The fact is that there is an honorable argument against delaying military action until all of our domestic social problems are solved. Those that disagree with Edgar's desire for increased social spending likely believe that the tax increase required for such an upsurge in social spending will hinder economic growth. They also believe that the national government's primary role is self-defense and that states should concern themselves with the millions of Americans who lack health care. These are decent arguments that deserve a substantive rebuttal and not epithets.
Both sides of the political spectrum are guilty of this sort of demonization. The right has an unfortunate tendency to brandish many people who utter comments against the war on terrorism as being "unpatriotic." The paradigmatic moment of this phenomenon was the infamous instance in December of 2001 when Attorney General John Ashcroft informed the Senate Judiciary Committee that those who questioned his aggressive anti-terrorism law enforcement were "only helping those that would attack this nation."
Putting aside the merits of Ashcroft's ideas for a moment, I repudiate prima facie* the notion that those who question Ashcroft are "unpatriotic." Thinking about our own justification for going to war in Iraq should help explain why: One of the principal values of a republican democracy is the right to express one's opinions freely. Therefore, it is wholly hypocritical to accuse someone of being unpatriotic while we as a country are fighting to allow citizens of another country to express themselves freely.
Ashcroft's ranting disrespected legitimate concerns: Wanting to retard a Justice Department that was detaining people without charges, denying them attorneys, and wanting to increase its powers beyond any previously acceptable level is an honorable attempt to protect constitutional rights and deserves substantive explanations rather than a Manichean diatribe.
Bowdoin is a far more ideologically diverse place now than it was four years ago. The impassioned debate before the BSG last month about the merits of the anti-war resolution and the proliferation of political publications on campus over the last two years are ample pieces of evidence of this increase in political awareness and activism. Diversity of ideas allows one to see the merits of an argument and penetrate beneath the surface of the banal sound bites that one hears too frequently.
Interest in or engagement of political ideas may be harder to find in the "real world." However, I hope that all of us who love politics: liberals, conservatives, and those who defy definition, can retain our zeal for ideas and encourage our colleagues to see those with differing opinions as people and not pejorative names. Judging by today's tendencies toward demonization, increasing bipartisan respect among the body politic would be real political progress.
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