Toughness Revisited (A Calm Attempt to Alleviate NYCweboy’s Frustration)

March 15th, 2008 Posted in Of Interest

I suppose I should have made it clear that I was impressed by the sober and conciliatory tone of NYCweboy’s comment on this post, despite the fact that I disagree. (And as for my own vanity — being disagreed with is far more flattering than being ignored!) A bare assertion that other people are wrong is less impressive. And I’m unsure how my response was a rejection of civility and dialog — which doesn’t imply getting beyond disagreement. That disagreement includes real disappointment by people like me in the way Clinton has run her campaign and its implications for her character. It’s clear that view of Clinton’s character may simply be unfounded, and as I mentioned, “caused by mere partisanship, the fact that I’ve taken a side and will tend to minimize the sins of my candidate and exaggerate those of the other.” On the other hand, they may well be founded. The point here is that a commitment to civility is not a commitment to giving up strong negative views about Clinton’s character.

In my case for example, certainly those negative views are motivated certain powerful emotions about all the characters who have influenced my own character — a “transference”, to use a psychoanalytic term. A political reaction to Clinton is more than a reaction to her public persona — it’s a reaction to Clinton as a symbol, and it’s a low level emotional foundation upon which reasons are built. But that doesn’t mean that the foundation isn’t good and the reasons are bad. Clinton-haters might be right that Clinton is dishonest, for instance, and they might well be wrong. I just haven’t seen any reasons that have changed the direction of my passions, and I’d like to give one example, to get back to “toughen up,” where the analytical shovel reaches bedrock and goes no further:

High toned notions of “respectable” campaigning aside, political arguments are not ice cream socials: things are bound to get rough, a little ugly, more than a little mean. My own suggestion: toughen up. If you’re prepared to get into it with people you disagree with, great; but if you plan to complain that such-and-so is unfair or mean or beyond the pale, don’t expect much sympathy. Neither side is innocent here, and things will get worse before they get better ….

This seems like a call to inure ourselves to the extremely low level of public discourse in the United States. Are we meant to accept dishonest games of gotcha — Rezko and Whitewater to take two examples — as just a necessary part of rough and tough politics? Tolerance of those games doesn’t really seem consistent with “calm” debate. NYCweboy might object that he’s thinking of lesser examples of roughness– for instance, the claim that Obama praised “Republican ideas” when he talked about Reagan. I think he’d probably agree that this claim is false, with the caveat that it’s part and parcel of rough politics, and we should tolerate it as such.

I have a few problems with tolerating that kind of public discourse. First, it’s actually a distraction from the substance of the calm (and I’m supposing more rational) debate that NYCweboy desires. And far from getting us to the “details” that are supposed to be Clinton’s strong suit, attacks like these are necessarily vague because they require trimming off all the context. Even claims that may have a reasonable grounding — like “only I’m ready on day one” — are rhetorical inanities unless we here about exactly what that readiness entails. The problem is that actually focusing on the details (what bills did you work on? what are your views on the intricacies of policy x?) is that they quickly derail a candidate from repeatedly hammering home the vague slogan that’s supposed to get them elected — “I’m the candidate of details!” Toughness, like a bludgeon, does not allow for surgical strikes.

But I think it’s a reasonable political aspiration to ask of politicians that they put away a desire for the rough and tumble methods of winning to engage in a genuine debate. That debate simply isn’t possible if candidates can’t engage in an intellectually honest characterization of their opponent’s positions. And I think that making that demand, rather than inuring ourselves to the tough political reality, is a more plausible path to “calm.” We might disagree about which candidate better meets that demand, but I don’t think we should abandon it.

I have to say that the “toughen up” idea seems to me to have its source in a quintessentially American misology. The priority here is winning rather than reasoning. I’m going to cite an argument I’ve made elsewhere on this blog that I think is especially relevant:

We know that there are broad consequences to such values [misology] when coupled with power. We see one consequence in American policy, and its, intermittent isolationism and machophilia. We see another in the tone of American public discourse, which is rhetorically inept and hard-selling. Misology and love of war have reached a peak with the Bush administration’s disdain for diplomacy and compromise, its use of torture and rendition, suspension of habeas corpus, and many other illegal and anti-constitutional measures.

Nominalism begets nihilism. It is because we are concerned with the “real world” to the exclusion of inner life that we can leave our principles and humanity behind. We ought to remember that an attack on “words” has serious implications if we take “word” in its larger sense (as in Ancient Greek logos): the persuasion of an electorate, diplomacy with an enemy, public discourse, legal proceedings, due process, constitutional provisions, and so on.

The use of words in these examples is supposed to provide some structure to an otherwise violent and chaotic world. They’re meant to be a middle ground between idea and action, defenselessness and violence, contemplative detachment and brutish immediacy. That rhetoric can be used for ill does not imply that it is always “empty.” As potentiality, as a middle ground between thought and deed, rhetoric is a receptacle for retaining and storing power instead of discharging it upon every impulse. As we have seen, the alternative to persuasion, in the world of political action, is force.

That is fine with those who embrace Machiavellian realpolitik—of late, our neoconservatives. The world is a tough, scary place, we are told, and only force will do. Words are for the weak. There is a relevant similarity between the Clinton campaign’s implication that Obama isn’t tough and cynical enough—whether for the campaign or the presidency—and the idea that Constitutional principles are too fragile for the real world, the world full of threats and enemies. Early in the campaign there were suggestions that Obama’s nuanced responses could easily be exploited in a national campaign—that the lifting of the level of intelligence in politics was positively dangerous. The same might be said of diplomacy.

I am reminded of the long literary and philosophical tradition that ruminates on the question of the experience versus innocence. At its best, it defies the conventional wisdom that cynicism and paranoia is superior to openness. Plato’s Socrates advances the idea that being the victim of injustice—and harm—is better than being the perpetrator, because of the internal deformity of character surrounding the latter role. The events of the last seven years show that we can say the same for a nation: if terrorism has a method, it is certainly not the direct destruction of lives infrastructure, but rather the induction of institutional self-destruction from within. Cynicism and toughness may not be so durable after all. Realpolitik can be self-immolating. This may sound like a dangerous form of pacifism (today “anti-war” is practically an epithet). But one need not be opposed to defense—psychological and national—to take a realistic measure of its costs, in order to use it wisely—and in the case of war, very rarely.

The Roman orator Quintillian noted that where rhetoric is in decline, a society has opened up a perilous gap between word and deed, emotion and thought, the academic and the practical. The lame and passive jargon of our academics, bureaucrats, and politicians is testimony to this division. These are the “irrelevancies” that Twain rails against—irrelevant because to stray from the point is to conceal the fact that even when they aim at the truth, words are motivated by feelings. So is the electorate. The non-pejorative sense of rhetoric is important because it is not just about inducing admiration and hope, but about preserving the dialectical component of speeches—the sense in which persuasion is a public dialog with an audience, and not just a monologue of reasons. That dialog is important not just to fostering national cooperation, but to a genuine and peaceable engagement with the “real” world. That is how people are moved, and that is how things get done.