U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley recently told a high school audience that conservatives shouldn’t delight in “owning the libs” –– i.e. triggering a progressive into a hysterical response that you proceed to make fun of. Instead, we should be “persuading” progs with reasoned argument and “bringing people around to your point of view,” as Haley said.
In that way, we make a convert rather than energize partisans into clinging more tightly to their beliefs and voting to empower them.
I am skeptical about the power of reasoned argument among today’s ill-educated students. Most of their teachers, like most progressives, are pretty much immune to reason, evidence, and coherent argument, little of which makes it into their courses. As the old gag goes, arguing with a leftist is like playing chess with a pigeon: It knocks over the pieces, craps on the board, then struts around like it won the game.
The assumption behind Haley’s plea is the old Socratic one that virtue is knowledge, that if one knows the good, one will do the good––one of the foundational bad ideas of modernity. When people believe wrong or dangerous ideas, the paradigm goes, that’s because they’re deficient in knowledge. They just need to be better informed of the facts, and better trained to spot incoherent and fallacious arguments.
The rebuttal of this claim was made by Socrates’ contemporary Euripides, whose sex-maddened character Phaedra says in a moment of lucidity, “We know the good and recognize it, but we cannot do it.”
This faith in reason to sort out the true and the good from mere opinions drives much of our culture. Fooled by the success of science and technology in understanding and manipulating the natural world, we naively think that we can do the same for the human and social world, that we can manufacture Stalin’s “engineers of the soul” and create utopia. Yet for two hundred years the power of irrational, destructive passions and impulses has spattered the pages of history with blood.
The history of modernity is crammed with other examples of the futility of reasoned persuasion and argument in the face of the passionate beliefs spawned by modern political religions. Actually, “cults” is a better word, for most religions accept a transcendent reality, while a cult is a human creation. And what is more cult-like than the level of irrationality we have witnessed since Donald Trump won the election? It does not bespeak a coherent, well-reasoned dissent, but the hysterical anger of those whose passionate beliefs and justifying ideologies have been attacked. And since for the left “the personal is the political,” challenging their beliefs is a challenge not just to their ideals, but to their very being, a wound to their identity, to what makes them the kind of superior person they imagine themselves to be. In the absence of faith in the transcendent, these ideologies that promise the better world of social justice also provide, as baptism once did, the sign of one’s salvation.
We also have to remember that the beliefs, ideas, and fake history embraced by the progressive cult have been drilled into students from kindergarten to university, and reinforced in popular and highbrow culture alike. They now comprise the unthinking default belief system one never questions, any more than one questions the heliocentric planetary system. And if some heretic does question them, the faithful will unite in condemning and ostracizing him, the way cults like Scientology do. Like Popper’s young Nazi, they don’t want to debate and reason together and search for the truth. They want to shut you up.
All things change with time and circumstance. We cannot become complacent, for, like rust, the lust for power never sleeps. Any number of events could end our rich, comfortable existence, and bring our characters to the level of our circumstances. Under the iron necessity of want and fear, people could find the will to serious violence that they currently lack.
The history of the 20th century teaches––you can’t educate or reason someone out of his passionate delusions. We dispense with the wisdom of experience and common sense that guided our ancestors, whose foolishness exacted a fearsome price at our own peril. No activists on the left today pay a price for their patent nonsense and counterfactual bluster and glaring hypocrisy.
Telling conservatives that they should go forth and “persuade” leftist to change their minds is a fool’s errand. Arguments didn’t keep Socrates from being executed by an Athenian jury, and conservatives are unlikely to change many minds among evangelical progressives. In the rough and tumble of the democratic public square, scorn, satire, and humiliation are often more effective than well-reasoned arguments.
That’s what made Aristophanes a much better politician than Socrates. He understood that democratic politics, in the end, is not about reason, but motivating voters to pick the better policy. And the best way to accomplish that is to reduce political rivals to objects of the ridicule their ideas deserve.
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