"To see, you must have vision." -- Gregory Benford, Timescape
In the era of the Continuous Campaign, wherein the politicking never stops, the astute observer must learn to probe behind the specifics of "issues" and "personalities" for the underlying strategic conceptions being employed. For there is no kind of politics that's not informed with some broad vision; there is no political tactic that lacks roots in a vision of the political battlespace and the dynamics that dominate it.
In any sort of contest, tactics that cohere to a strategic vision will prevail over those that do not...if the vision itself be an accurate one.
Have a gander at a few recent headlines:
- We can only save ourselves from kidnappers at the NRA
- Obama to College Students: ‘Reject These Voices’ That Warn of Big Government & Tyranny
- Dan Savage Wishes Cancer on Sarah Palin
- Gov. Bill Richardson on Ted Cruz: "He should Not be defined as a Hispanic; He demeans the office."
Read the stories at the links, if you have the stomach for it. Note the common theme. Then ask yourself, "Why does the Left strive to delegitimize those who speak for the Right, if the Left has a set of rational arguments for its positions?"
The immediate conclusion must be that the Left's strategists consider this tactic practically superior to all others. That conclusion, all by itself, is an important one that deserves independent reflection. But behind it lies another of even greater import, which comes most plainly into view when one realizes that the next electoral battle is still seventeen months away:
An old trial-lawyer's maxim has much point: "When the law is against you, pound the facts. When the facts are against you, pound the law. When both are against you, pound the table."
The Left cannot compete with the Right on logical grounds, nor can it muster evidence in support of its theses. Therefore it must "pound the table:" it must deflect the public's attention from both evidence and logic to make room for whatever other assets it can bring to bear. But to do so without addressing the Right's arguments and evidence requires that those "pounding the facts and the law" be delegitimized in the eyes of those who might otherwise attend to them.
A delegitimization attack, aimed at dissuading open-minded Americans from listening to the target, will proceed on either or both of two grounds: personality and / or character.
Anyone who didn't sleep through the 2008 presidential campaign remembers the torrent of assaults the Left poured onto Sarah Palin, at that time the wildly popular governor of Alaska. To listen to their allegations, she was the embodiment of everything unworthy: stupid, provincial, superstitious, inexperienced, hypocritical, corrupt, an unfaithful spouse, and a fraudster who claimed to have borne a child that was actually that of her daughter Bristol. It probably had the desired effect, at least sufficiently so to dampen the enthusiasm that the GOP's nomination of Governor Palin as its vice-presidential candidate had elicited.
Today's rising conservative stars are currently headlined by Ted Cruz, junior United States Senator from Texas. Senator Cruz is coming in for treatment similar to that Governor Palin received, as we can see from the remarks of the odious Bill Richardson, failed former governor of one of the easiest-to-govern states of the Union. The one and only reason for this is that Cruz has been spectacularly effective at what the Left fears most: demonstrating that its standard-bearers cannot argue on logical or evidentiary grounds. Add Cruz's Hispanic heritage and his personal charisma, and you have today's version of Governor Palin -- who, as we can see from the above, remains a formidable force in conservative politics, whom the Left, for all its efforts, has not succeeded in bringing down.
Palin and Cruz are individual standouts on the Right. There are institutional ones as well. Most recently the National Rifle Association has distinguished itself, by rallying its members to the fight against anti-Constitutional gun control bills submitted to the Senate. And just as Palin and Cruz are being assailed with an eye to delegitimizing them, so also is the NRA, as the vicious editorial by Dave Perry linked above makes clear.
Should the Left's assaults succeed in their aim, further arguments advanced by the spokesmen and allied institutions of the Right named above will be rejected without consideration by the uncommitted public. "She's a witless chillbilly lunatic." "He has a hidden agenda." "They're in the pay of the big gun makers." It's the Left's version of "Consider the source"...though here, "the source" is intelligent, accomplished, of sterling character, and dedicated to an important, Constitutionally recognized right.
He who has wearied of political involvement is often the victim of enervation by delegitimization-attack propaganda. He might know the propaganda for exactly what it is: a tissue of lies and slanders. He simply can't bear to hear it any longer. No matter how ardently he'd like to know who's right, what's best, what's worked and what hasn't, the rhetorical temperature of political discourse has risen too high for him. He's withdrawn to preserve his sanity.
The Right cannot and must not employ the Left's tactic...but it can leap to the meta-argument and put the Left's covert reasons for its campaigns of delegitimization on full, garish display.
It's all about the political battlespace: specifically, who is recognized as a legitimate contestant there, and what tactics are deemed permissible. The Left is straining to corrupt the "laws of war" as they pertain to that battlespace...or failing that, to deflect the public's attention from it and move it to a cruder, scandal-sheet-like domain in which no lapse of conduct or taste is ruled out of bounds.
Take heed, and alert those around you.
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