Stanley Kurtz responds to David Frum and William Galston, whose new organization, No Labels, seeks to set a kind of pre-determined political speech perimeter, with Frum and liberal activist Galston helpfully setting the boundaries for acceptable public utterance.
That is, Frum and Galston want to replace the classically liberal ideas of free speech and tolerance with the idea of Frum and Galston-approved speech, which by dint of its approval by Frum and Galston (and whatever other political pragmatists they manage to wrangle for these policings) becomes tolerant.
The rest? Hate. And hate is unhelpful.
Kurtz:
No Labels aims to “expand the space” of public debate in America by reducing the fear of “social or political retribution.” But this expansion is, by the two men’s own account, really a contraction. That is, Galston and Frum intend to moderate public debate by “establishing lines that no one should cross,” as they put it. Specifically, they seek to police the use of labels like “racist” and “socialist,” which they believe are used recklessly in a way that undermines democratic discussion of “legitimate policy differences.”
What this represents, in part, is an attempt to delegitimize and silence the substantial number of Americans who believe, with good reason, that President Obama’s policies are socialist in both effect and intent. Far from reducing the fear of “social and political retribution” in public debate, Galston and Frum mean to engineer an increase in such retribution, and to direct it to their own ends. In a democracy, we ought to be at pains to avoid preemptively drawing bright lines against any substantive point of view. Arguments instead ought to be tested and winnowed in the marketplace of ideas, with citizens judging political advocates on how well they support their own assertions and how effectively (and how fairly) they address counter-arguments.
[…]
The announcement of the No Labels project by Galston and Frum makes perfect sense of all this. Given Frum’s response to the mere title and description of my book, it’s clear that the purpose of No Labels is not to engage those who call Obama socialist in a serious intellectual exchange, but rather to put their arguments beyond the pale of acceptable public debate. Far from being a recipe for moderation, Galston and Frum have hit on a surefire way to excite the very polarization they claim to oppose.
Contrary to Galston and Frum, the way to reduce polarization is not to suppress disagreement but to invite reasoned debate on the issues that actually divide us. Since a substantial portion of the public views the president as a covert radical, let the topic be debated in the widest and most respectable forums. If the president’s accusers offer mere bluster, or his defenders are living in denial, we shall see it all then. A true public debate on this issue in the pages of the mainstream press would rivet the public’s attention and immediately raise the level of discussion. By further suppressing this debate, on the other hand, Galston and Frum promote distrust and enmity between Left and Right.
None of this is particularly mysterious — or at least it ought not to be to those who have learned from the classical liberal approach to democratic debate recommended by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty. Mill discourages the creation of implicit or explicit rules banning any substantive claim in public debate, calling on us instead to judge a given argument according to the quality of its reasoning and the degree to which it fairly represents and successfully parries opposing points of view.
On its face, a principled opposition to political labeling is both incoherent and illiberal. Labels can surely be misused. Yet political discourse itself would be impossible without the basic terms through which we name and recognize our own political beliefs and those of others. Abused as they may often be, we can’t even think without labels — which is to say, without categories. Galston and Frum label their own opponents when they decry them for “brain-dead partisanship.” Apparently, Frum consigned my book to that category without even reading it. Who was the brain-dead partisan there? Galston and Frum don’t actually mean “no labels.” What they really mean is, “no labels of which we disapprove.” Their new group might more aptly be named “Shut Up.”
For years I’ve made this same argument against those on either side of the political divide who seek to dictate arbitrary constraints on speech. From free-speech zones to hate speech laws, the systemic attack on the classical liberal idea of free speech, born of those leftist ideas about language and who controls it I’ve detailed here at great length, is an attack on the very Enlightenment epistemology that provides the intellectual justification for our American experiment. By replacing individual autonomy with sanctified and protected group narratives — and this No Labels project is just another in a long line of attempts to preemptively circumvent the American ideal of individual liberty by first creating and then seeking to empower a politically interested, consensus-based interpretive ideal (thereby drawing the boundary lines for what comes to count as “authentic” political speech) — those who adopt the (necessarily) leftist idea that meaning is merely a function of power, then set themselves up as the very policemen who both hold and guard that power in the name of an inverted projection of tolerance at odds with the classical liberal idea of tolerance it pretends to champion.
Theirs is a will to power. It is a form of intellectual tyranny that seeks to delegitimize that individualism not already approved by the group holding power.
But frankly, any country that would surrender itself to David Frum, of all people, deserves to fail.
(h/t Geoff, sdferr)
Mill discourages the creation of implicit or explicit rules banning any substantive claim in public debate, calling on us instead to judge a given argument according to the quality of its reasoning and the degree to which it fairly represents and successfully parries opposing points of view.
Way too much work. Much simpler and easier to declare certain arguments off-limits and save everyone the trouble of thinking. Especially thinking about unpleasant truths.
I get the feeling, though, that Frum et. al. would quickly term “socialist” out-of-bounds, yet leave “racist”, “homophobe”, “sexist”, etc. within bounds.
More from the Kurtz piece:
It’s not that it is impossible to believe. It’s that the information itself doesn’t help Obama politically in a mainstream context, so therefore that mainstream context must be shaped so that it will not accept the information as a matter of principle.
This I believe aptly describes the stance taken by the mainstream press in its role as social filter. Which is why those who downplay the importance of media bias on the formation and institutionalization of ideas that come to inscribe our cultural epistemology are doing a tremendous disservice to liberty — even more so for their related failure to refuse to accept the premises that inform the epistemological coup being aimed at classical liberalism.
In the Kurtz linked Berkowitz piece we find [my emphases]:
It’s hard work being a gatekeeper when the walls are crumbling. All you can really do is keep shouting “don’t go there! It’s for your own good!”
at first, with bumblefuck, there was a palpable effort to be respectful and you could see a certain tact employed in discussions of him and his bumblefuckery… A palpable effort what was quite lacking with bumblefuck’s predecessor. I think the Frumster has watched in alarm as that effort has dashed apart on the rocks of fail.
The idea that bumblefuck is entitled to respect by dint of his historic ass
by dint of an attribution to him of good faith
by dint of his holding the office of our failshit little country’s presidency has … waned.
And the Frumster is alarmed.
But what the Frumster misses is that a sure and certain route to the restoration of a certain amount of respect and decorum and agree to disagree old chap in our political discourse what he craves craves craves would be for our failshit political class to get their act together and eschew failshittery.
It’s a problem, in other words, involving precisely in which order one arranges the cart in relation to the horse.
No Labels? Might as well just ban nouns altogether. Frum, to no one’s surprise, is an idiot.
Why do some people (no one here I’d guess, except as a nod to his self-identification as one) continue to label Frum as a conservative? Why does Frum label himself as a conservative? He is not. He is, perhaps, a JFK leftist, and that’s giving him some credit. He’s probably to the left of JFK, but I’m too lazy to check.
Anybody wanna bet there’s at least one California prosecutor on the “No Labels” team?
And the self-proclaimed vetters in the unofficial 4th branch of gov’t, those guardians of the public interest whose function is so crucial to the public weal that it’s inscribed in the sacred and invioble text of the First Amendment, allowed him to do so.
He’s a good man, McGehee.
Shorter Kurtz: Frum and Galston oppose labels unless they’re the ones who get to label.
It’s less a leap from there to, “Frum and Galston oppose labels because they don’t get to do the labeling,” than to where Frum claims he wants us all to think that he thinks we should.
Why does Frum label himself as a conservative?
The “conservative” critic of conservatism is the sweet-spot for self-aggrandizing pundit hackery.
Sort of like maverickery in nominally Republican public officials that way.
While I agree that it is lucrative for him to label himself such, even I wouldn’t attach that much cynicism to the man.
At least, not right now. Maybe this afternoon I will be ready.
Even if you couched an argument in inoffensive terms, they’d still shout you down:
“Congressmen A, B, and C support Policy X, which represents an encroachment of the federal government into areas which traditionally and justifiably have been left to personal or local control. This is part of a long-standing pattern of Congressmen A, B and C supporting such policies.”
Does anyone really believe that Frum & Co would applaud and support such a thing? Far more likely that they’d say you were deploying the “S-” argument unfairly against A, B and C, and add No Code Words! and No Dog Whistles! sections to their little organization.
How long are we going to have to pretend we really give a shit about the feelings of the kids who were picked last in kickball?
Prior to November, I might have agreed with you cranky. ’06 and ’08 seem to have shaken the Frumster badly, and he may have honestly believed that accommadating and ameliorating the Progressive resurgence was the best we could do going forward. And, believing that, since someone had to be the Marshal Petain of the punditocracy, why not him?
But to go on in that vein even after the results of the recent elections have served to emphatically disprove his “shoulda struck a deal, any deal on healthcare and now we’re screwed” thesis? That to me would suggest a truly contemptible fixed obsession with being stuck on stupid.
I guess I’d rather see him as a conscientious sell-out than as an unaware useful idiot.
Kiss my ass, Frum. And get your goddamn hand off my thigh.
I mean, shouldn’t they be over it by now?
Frum should be roundly mocked, then ignored.
– If Frum really does have a viable history of conservatism, since this sort of nonsense is something you’d expect to come directly from the Progressives playbook, that of attempting to shut down any opposition discourse, he must be one of that group of “Conservatives” suffering from a sort of Stockholm syndrome. Certain members of that now identifiable group seem to be rushing to stick their heads in the Leftist woodchipper.
– Yes, by all means, the best response – Mock them from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.
I propose that we eliminate the labels “hoochie,” “gobsmacking,” “breathtaking,” and “quintessential.”
For starters.
I mean, this could be fun if you think about it.
NOTHING THAT CONTAINS THE LETTER “E”!
Adjectivephobe! Letterist! Denounced!
“Shut up,” they explained.
I seem to recall a Newsweek cover and related article that appeared shortly after the last Presidential election proclaiming ‘We Are All Socialists Now.’
http://www.newsweek.com/2009/02/06/we-are-all-socialists-now.html
I don’t remember Frum raising any major concerns over such talk at the time. Perhaps he’d care to denounce such discourse as being unhelpful now? (I’d be willing to bet there are many looking back on that article now who would privately admit that it did prove decidedly unhelpful – to the Obama agenda, that is.)
It is also strange that, now that the mid-term election results have proven the ‘racism’ card to be worthless and spent, such charges are only now declared off limits, and only to the extent that they are directly balanced by and equated to charges of socialism.
I’m sure that is just a coincidence.
In 1994, Frum declared conservatism to be dead (he even wrote a book arguing such: Dead Right), warning that unless the GOP moved left they would face political oblivion. The GOP instead moved right and won control of the House for the first time in 40 years with a gain of 54 seats.
In 2010, Frum declared conservatism to be dead, warning that unless the GOP moved left they would face political oblivion. The GOP instead moved right and won control of the House with a gain of 63 seats, the biggest gain by a political party since the 1938 congressional elections.
There seems to be a pattern here…
The pattern, Mike, is that people still pretend he’s a thoughtful conservative.
I’ve seen that happen with others, as well.
Any chance we casn get Frum to publish a book declaring conservatism dead in every even-numbered year?
I think the odds of that happening anyway are about 50/50. Far as I can recall, someone has declared conservatism “dead” just about every year since I hit puberty.
Yes, but Frum seems to have the magic touch. He’s the coroner’s deputy I want at my car wreck.
Frum-> Shrum-> *rum-> um um um.
Honestly, did Frum ever leave Junior High School? It’s the same mentality all over the Left these days. No longer able to tolerate the tedium of truth, they simply devolve into protective cliques that form their own truth. Next they’ll have secret handshakes and incense, albs, and icons.
See, the fun part of a religion is getting to outline and enforce its tenets.
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