The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (2 page)

Now imagine the defendant responds, “Sir, I may disagree with your line of questioning, but I will defend to the death your right to ask me these things.”

The prosecutor, if he’s not a complete idiot, will say, “Stop trying to change the subject and answer my questions.”

One last point about “I may disagree with you but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it”: The implication is not only that the person saying this is brave but also that we live in a society where such bravery might be required. It suggests that speech is so imperiled that bloodshed may be called for. Many people think that’s how the phrase was born, that they’re echoing the heroism of some forgotten general or martyr willing to sacrifice himself for the liberty of others. But they’re wrong.

The phrase is usually attributed to Voltaire, though he didn’t say it. It was a historian’s paraphrasing of Voltaire’s attitude, written more than a century after Voltaire’s death. And even his attitude wasn’t all that sincere. According to S. G. Tallentyre’s
The Friends of Voltaire
, the quote traces itself back to a hullaballoo over a book by the French utilitarian
philosopher Claude Adrien Helvétius. The book,
De l’Espirit
, argued that people behave the way they do out of a desire to avoid pain or feel pleasure. Or something. Regardless, everyone hated the book, including Voltaire (who took offense at what he considered to be the author’s insufficient praise of him).
De l’Espirit
was essentially ignored until the dauphin, the king’s son, read it. He
really
hated it. Parliament ended up banning it. The tome was even publicly burned. Like a 1920s book that could catapult its sales by being Banned in Boston!,
De l’Espirit
became a sensation, translated into every language imaginable, precisely because it had been censored. And, just as suddenly, Helvétius became a celebrity, his salon instantly fashionable.

“What the book could never have done for itself, or for its author, persecution did for them both,” writes Tallentyre.

The men who had hated it, and had not particularly loved Helvétius, flocked round him now. Voltaire forgave him all injuries, intentional or unintentional. “What a fuss about an omelette!” [Voltaire] had exclaimed when he heard of the burning. How abominably unjust to persecute a man for such an airy trifle as that! “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” was his attitude now.
¹

So it is an expression born in glibness—defined by vanity, not courage—and it remains so to this day.

This is only one example of the problem. I started to notice that the same thing happens in writing, on TV, in books; people invoke these clichés as placeholders for arguments not won, ideas not fully understood. At the same time, the same sorts of people cavalierly denounce far more thought-out positions because they’re too “ideological.” Indeed, in America, we train people to be skeptical of ideology. College students in particular are quick to object with a certain gotcha tone: “That sounds like an ideological statement.”

Such skepticism doesn’t bother me. Indeed, I encourage it. The problem is that while our radar is great at spotting in-bound ideological statements, clichés sail right through. People will say “It is better that ten men go free than one innocent man go to jail” and
then stop talkin
g, as if
they’ve made an argument simply by saying that. They will take the slippery slope at face value. They’ll say “Diversity is strength,” as if it means something, and “Violence never solved anything,” as if that were not only plausible but so true that no further explication is required.

“We are only as free as the least free among us” they’ll proclaim, misquoting Martin Luther King, Jr., or Elie Wiesel, or was it Captain Jean-Luc Picard? But of course, this isn’t even remotely true. It is a very nice thing to say. It’s a noble thing to try to live by. But it’s in no meaningful sense true. Rather, it is the sort of thing people assert in the hopes that it will win them uncontested ground in an argument.

Sometimes the problem is simply lazy thinking. But in other cases the lazy thinking merely creates the vulnerability for radical thinking. Some incredibly ideological ideas simply ride into your head like the dream spelunkers in the movie
Inception
—setting up, working their way through your programming—all because they’re wrapped in the protective coating of clichés.

One Man’s Terrorist Is Another Man’s Freedom Fighter

Consider “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” This is surely true if the other man is a terrorist sympathizer—or an idiot. Otherwise the expression is simply pithy hogwash.

It’s difficult to think of a cliché that more baldly disqualifies ostensibly intelligent people from the pretense of moral or intellectual seriousness. It is simply absurd to contend that because people may argue over who is or is not a terrorist that it is therefore impossible to make meaningful distinctions between terrorists and freedom fighters. The reasoning behind the expression, which entered the discourse in the late 1970s and was inadvertently popularized by Ronald Reagan in 1986 (he rejected it completely, of course) is the sort of thing that would make any good Jesuit weep. It steamrolls through a fallacious comparison, confusing ends and means on its way, in order to celebrate both relativism and nihilism and elevate moral cowardice as an intellectual principle.

First of all, one could certainly argue that terrorists and freedom fighters need not be opposites. Freedom fighters can also be terrorists and vice versa (the abolitionist John Brown comes to mind as someone who may have been both). Certainly, fighting for freedom does not absolve
you from the crime of terrorism, anymore than blowing up a pizza parlor automatically means you’re fighting
for
freedom. To suggest otherwise is to say that a freedom fighter is morally immune to condemnation for his actions. Surely there are freedom fighters who reject terrorism and hence deserve our praise. Shall we say George Washington, Martin Luther King, and Mohandas Gandhi are indistinguishable from Osama bin Laden or Timothy McVeigh? Most reasonable and decent people would recoil at the suggestion that Martin Luther King was a terrorist (some liberals might interject at this point and say, “Aha, but some Southern racists said exactly that about King!,” to which a sane person would respond, “Yes, and they were wrong to do so”).

If one man pushes an old lady in front of an oncoming bus and another man pushes an old lady out of the way of an oncoming bus, to borrow Bill Buckley’s famous puncturing of moral equivalence arguments, it will not suffice to say that they are both the sorts of men who push old ladies around. But this is precisely the sort of thing some people are up to when they say “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Their notion of freedom fighter hinges on a slew of deeply ideological and dangerous positions that have been hidden away. What freedom is al Qaeda fighting for exactly? Hamas? The freedom to lock women away in burlap sacks, crush homosexuals, and throw acid in the faces of children?

Calling these murderers freedom fighters reminds me of G. K. Chesterton’s line about how “the word ‘good’ has many meanings: For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.’”
²

The other people who use the phrase are simply frightened, either intellectually or physically. The news editor for the BBC says, “It is the style of the BBC World Service to call no one a terrorist, aware as we are that one man’s terrorist is another one’s freedom fighter.” The global news editor for Reuters: “We all know that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist.”

Some news organizations justify such policies on the grounds that they need to keep their reporters safe in parts of the world where, er, terrorists/freedom fighters hold sway. And so they refuse to call the men who slit the throats of children, blow up their local kebab stands, and the
like “terrorists.” That might sound, if not exactly brave (no “defending to the death” reporters’ rights to tell the truth here, you will notice), then at least reasonable. But when terrorists attacked the London subway, suddenly these same organizations saw nothing wrong with calling terrorists what they are.

Again, if you want to call members of Hamas freedom fighters, be my guest. We’ll have an argument about it. What really offends is a morally obtuse, radically ideological phrase being bandied around as a way not to start an argument but to close one off. “Oh, let’s not argue about Israel. Besides, we all know one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” It’s a way of getting in your cheap shot just before the bell.

The Center

Other clichés aren’t so much pithy phrases used in everyday debate. They’re shorthand concepts, clichéd ways of thinking massaged into the way we see the world. Ideological marketers, such as Republican focus group maven Frank Luntz or Berkeley linguist George Lakoff, are paid huge sums of money to invent new buzzwords and phrases that are a fraction as successful as some of these ancient clichés. People at least understand that Luntz’s phrase “death tax” has some political and ideological salesmanship to it. I’m writing about many of the clichés and concepts that are more central to how we think about politics, in part because we take them as apolitical and mainstream.

How central are they to our thinking? Well, how about the word “center”? First of all, you do realize that whenever we talk about “the center” in politics it’s entirely metaphorical, right? There is no way to actually take the geographic concept of centrality and apply it literally to, say, abortion, or gay rights, or gun control. There’s a certain Goldilocks bias to discussions of politics: If Papa Bear’s porridge is too hot and Mama Bear’s is too cold, then Baby Bear’s is always just right. It must work the same way in politics, right? Centrists, moderates, middle-of-the-roaders, independents: They all suffer from variants of this confusion. The “extreme” Republicans argue ten. The “extreme” Democrats argue for zero. Therefore the smart, sensible, reasonable position must be five.

Well, the Wahhabis want to kill all the gays and Jews. The Sufis don’t want to kill any gays or Jews. So the moderate, sensible position
must be to kill just the gays, but not the Jews. Or maybe the other way around? Or half of all the gays and Jews? Or maybe all the gay Jews? Or maybe we can have a very complicated compromise along the lines of last year’s debt-ceiling negotiations, where a small percentage of Jews are killed now and we kill a larger number of gays in the out years?

The point is that sometimes the extreme is 100 percent correct while the centrist position is 100 percent wrong. But there’s something about being not as wrong as one of the other extremes that some people just find so enticing and seductive. I just don’t get it.

If I say we need one hundred feet of bridge to cross a one-hundred-foot chasm that makes me an extremist. Somebody else says we don’t need to build a bridge at all because we don’t need to cross the chasm in the first place. That makes him an extremist. The third guy is the centrist because he insists that we compromise by building a fifty-foot bridge that ends in the middle of thin air? As an extremist I’ll tell you that the other extremist has a much better grasp on reality than the centrist does. The extremists have a serious disagreement about what to do. The independent who splits the difference has no idea what to do and doesn’t want to bother with figuring it out.

And yet we hear constantly how independents who borrow a little from this side and borrow a little from that side are somehow more politically sophisticated and mature than the straight-line thinkers of the left and the right. But here’s the thing: The straight-line thinkers tend to think in a straight line not because they are hidebound and close-minded and clinging to an ideological agenda. They tend to think in a reasonably straight line because they’ve worked out a reasonably consistent way of seeing the world. The independents and moderates who just grab stuff from this shelf, then from that shelf, like a panicked survivor of the dawn of the dead grabbing what he or she can from the supermarket before the zombies spot her, do not value consistency at all.

The self-appointed guardians of this notion that the center is also the high ground can mostly be found in the press corps, because it validates their own self-conception. They honestly believe they are neither left nor right, and so they value the politicians and voters who share this political ambivalence.

More critical, this nonsense survives because our politics are
arranged so as to ensure it. When a country is evenly divided ideologically, it’s unavoidable that those who split the differences will get outsized power, because they are the ones who will ultimately decide elections. That’s why every general election that begins with “securing the base” ends with the presidential candidates begging for support from centrists, independents, moderates, and the folks who really put the
asses
in masses: the Undecideds. Every four years after each presidential debate we are forced to listen to interviews with undecided voters who not only can’t see major differences between the political candidates (which, by that point in the campaign, means they’ve not been paying attention), but who also think the reason we have presidential debates is to give tutorials on policy minutiae: “I didn’t hear enough about what they would do about education.” “I wanted more specifics about what [So-and-so] would do for someone like me.” Meanwhile, back in their election headquarters the anchors nod along as if this reaction is damning of the candidates’ performances.

After an eighteen-month campaign, all of the informed, conscious, and ideologically consistent voters have already made up their minds. All that’s left are the undecided centrists, who actually think they have the more sophisticated and serious position; their indecision comes, actually, by virtue of the fact they’ve either not paid much attention until way too late in the game, or more simply, they’re a**holes who think they must be at the center of the universe.