Lost in a Sea of Hate
A worthwhile read on the theme of the right-wing's debating skills over the last week or so. It's worth reading the entire column, but I'll excerpt a bit from the end.
Still, I can’t imagine that this was what William F. Buckley had in mind for his magazine when he founded it in 1955. One wonders how these yawping barbarians took over the magazine: at gunpoint? At knifepoint? There was a civility in the old National Review that allowed Sturgeon and Buckley to be friends, to be friendly antagonists, and for Sturgeon to find a welcome readership for his criticism, even though it was known that Sturgeon wasn’t “ideologically pure” by National Review standards.
But Buckley’s magazine had some qualities that today’s incubus version does not: civility, playfulness, a sense of humor, lively debate and intellectual confidence. When you are CONFIDENT about what you believe, you need not make yourself taller exclusively by the tactic of cutting off everyone’s heads around you. You can hold your own in a debate without recourse to the gutter; you can actually debate. [emp added]
Look: the reason that we’ve come to this pretty pass is that DEBATE CEASED IN 1986, when Rush went on the air. Incapable and incompetent to hold his ground in a fair debate, his radio show and then his emulators and then the entire Republican Party removed themselves from the arena of debate, and only held mock and sham debates, as phony, choreographed and rigged as TeeVee Wrestling.
And, in this psychotic delusion of “debate” they always win, they create straw men and knock them down, thinking themselves “El Cid.” They tilt at cardboard windmills and fancy themselves Lancelot. They put on newspaper hat(e)s and brandish wooden swords, all the while thinking themselves modern Parsifals, triumphantly holding up the hard-won “Holy Grail” — which, on closer examination, turns out to be a Slurpee™ cup scavenged from a dumpster.
The point about confidence resonates with me. Their core principles have been sold out to make electoral gains, so its no surprise that they can't debate their positions from a position of confidence. Discredit your opponent so you don't have to debate them.
Lashing out at your opponent is the first recourse of the coward, and the far-right lashes out whenever they are, or just feel, challenged.
