As I See the History of Political Debate

Ann Coulter quotes some media head as claiming that the:

"explosion in our media, our deafening national noise level and our changing mores have made this a much different era in America than the one our parents grew up in."

Maybe, but I doubt it. I remember when my parents were in their thirties and Kennedy and Nixon were going at it. True the debate was more or less civil, but the media was not. Think of the Mushroom Cloud commercials of LBJ. If you tried to run something that offensive today it would be pulled immediately.

Actually dirty politics, especially in campaigns, has been around as long as our nation. Remember the duel between Aaron Burr and, I believe, Alexander Hamilton. It was over a political feud where one’s reputation had been severely damaged by the other. The claim had something to do with a women and sex (sounds familiar doesn’t it?).

And things only got worse. The rumor mill, the gossip column, the innuendo, the “yellow journalism” of the last two hundred and thirty years or so was just as bad and just as mean spirited as today. But then they often didn’t have laws against saying your opponent was gay unless you could prove it. Today even the most outrageous commentator can call names but they had better be generic rather than specific. You can call a guy a crook metaphorically but you can’t accuse him of stealing anything in particular unless you have proof. In the past you could get away with this and a lot more. So we have quite a tradition of dirty politics.

Does this mean we should continue in this tradition? That depends. Do you want to be a Conservative who believes that truth can be known and communicated or a Liberal who believes that since truth can’t be known or communicated, power is all that matters? I fear most conservative minded people are conservative in name only. At the core of their political focus is to defend their fellow conservatives, no matter how insensitive or even stupid they are, rather than agree with a liberal over anything. They see everything as a battle of good verses evil as if God Himself was the Chairman of the Republican Party and personally speaks to each of his talk-show, book writing, tv evangelist commentators personally. The only difference between a Conservative of this ilk and a Liberal of just about any ilk is that Conservatives treat their talking heads as gods while Liberals think there are no gods but themselves.

Of course there is no limit to the amount of trash talk coming out of both sides. We “Dis and Dat” each other to death and have all the documentation to prove it. We quote in and out of context and cry like h* if the opposition does the same. Why? Because we are too busy defending a “political correctness” or our own.

Try this experiment. Pick a subject and bone up on it. Create a credible case for something like, raising the minimum wage. Then present it to your conservative friends, you know, the ones who believe what you believe. See how they react. If you aren’t a pariah in ten second, flat, you will at least be highly suspect. Not because you have a mind, but because you used it for something besides echoing the party line.

Echoing the party line is of course, good for rallying the troops, making a name for yourself, and, if your as good as, say Ann Coulter, making a whole lot of dough. But if you spend all your time rallying the troops and none of your time recruiting from the vast majority who have not chosen a side you are sure to one day wake up to a vastly shrunken army. We need thinkers, not screamers. And I’m sure we have them, somewhere. Unfortunately, I can’t hear the thinking over the chaos of the screaming.