In it, Carl M. Cannon and David DesRosiers cite the example of a group called “Braver Angels,” which “encourages Americans of divergent political outlooks to share a meal together,” by way of making their own appeal, based on a suggestion by Andrew Walworth of RealClearPolitics, “to read at least one article published on our site ‘from a writer with whom you disagree.’”
“Each day,” they write, “we’re asking you to make it a discipline to read, listen to, or watch someone speaking from the other side of issues that most concern you. ... In the short run, we admit, some of it might make you even angrier. But we submit that if you make it a habit to listen with an open mind you might learn that you share more with your fellow Americans on the other side of the aisle than you knew.”
I can’t take much non-partisan pride in the fact that I’m already doing this—in fact, I’m reading way more than one article each day by people I disagree with—because it’s my job to keep up with what people on both sides are saying.
But, for the same reason, I think I have spotted the snag in the project these well-intentioned people are proposing for the rest of you.
If I merely disagreed with this statement I might say something along these lines: the writer, Steve Phillips, sees what I see, but he misinterprets it, or only sees it in a distorting mirror. Then I might explain where I think he goes wrong in his thinking—and, in doing so, I might myself discover that he was more right than I originally thought.
That’s the kind of reasoning that Cannon and DesRosiers obviously had in mind in making their proposal.
But in the case of Phillips’s article, we don’t even get to step one. He doesn’t see what I see; he doesn’t see anything at all except that which simply isn’t there, and he builds his whole article on this airy nothing. There’s no place where he goes wrong, because he’s wrong from the start.
You can’t “disagree” with an insane man because you don’t share an understanding of reality with him.
Of course, I don’t mean to say that Phillips is clinically insane, but he shares with the insane the quality of reality-blindness, gifted to him by a left ideology that has deliberately created its own reality, separate from and competing with the reality most of us are living in.
In the left’s reality, the two major concepts purportedly dealt with in the article, “whiteness” and “democracy,” not only don’t mean what they do to the rest of the world, they can’t mean what they do to the rest of the world without becoming completely incoherent.
There’s a whole constellation of words routinely used by the left which, like whiteness and democracy, have new meanings in the context its ideology that are different from or even opposite to their meanings in the everyday speech of ordinary people.
One of them is ideology itself—a word which, if it doesn’t mean a comprehensive intellectual system designed to give a single explanation of and a single solution to all political or economic problems, doesn’t mean anything at all. Yet the ideologue will invariably insist that those of us who oppose all ideologies can only be doing so out of an ideology of our own.
Here are a few other words to which the left has given new meanings, meanings which are designed to make disagreement impossible: racism, anti-racism, fascism, anti-fascism, lie, insurrection, justice, war, extremism, and, just within the last few years, even the words man and woman.
Now you may disagree with any and every decision of the Supreme Court as much as you like, but that doesn’t allow you to speak of its “tyranny” without a radical change from any hitherto recognizable meaning of the word.
Besides, this’s what logicians call begging the question. First, that is, you redefine what tyranny means as “that which the Supreme Court decides (wrongly) is Constitutional”—and then it’s all smooth sailing for your representation of “the Tyranny of the Supreme Court.”
The larger point is that if we can’t agree on what words mean, we can’t agree on anything.
The RealClearPolitics guys say that, if you follow their program, not only might you find more sense in the other guy’s point of view than you thought there could be, “you might also learn that your side is not infallible.”
But in our political culture, the other guys, at least when they’re ideologues, have specifically designed their perfect system to be, in its own terms, infallible. That’s not something, therefore, that they could ever come to doubt without junking their whole system.
Paradoxically, there’s no evil in politics except that which comes from regarding those who disagree with you as evil, since all the other evils that from time to time political leaders have instituted among men have proceeded from that one.
Elections, in other words, are never a battle between good and evil, except when one side is invincible in its supposedly infallible self-righteousness, as the left ideologues are today.
