{"id":24402,"date":"2011-11-18T12:00:54","date_gmt":"2011-11-18T18:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=24402"},"modified":"2012-01-04T17:26:23","modified_gmt":"2012-01-04T23:26:23","slug":"the-rhetorical-greased-pig","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=24402","title":{"rendered":"The Rhetorical Greased Pig"},"content":{"rendered":"

I sat down for an interview with Erik Black, the former Strib <\/em>political reporter and one of the thundering herd of “deans of Minnesota political reporting”, the other day.<\/p>\n

It went a little like this.:<\/p>\n

BLACK: \u00a0So you took a trip the other day.<\/p>\n

BERG: I did.<\/p>\n

BLACK: \u00a0You’ve said your goal when driving long distances is to get there as fast as you legally can.<\/p>\n

BERG: \u00a0Yep. \u00a0I like to get the trip over with.<\/p>\n

BLACK: \u00a0But you stopped in Black River Falls.<\/p>\n

BERG: \u00a0Right. \u00a0I had to go to the bathroom.<\/p>\n

BLACK: \u00a0What do you mean?<\/p>\n

BERG: \u00a0Er, I had to urinate. And buy a Red Bull.<\/p>\n

BLACK: So haven’t you gone back on your princples then?<\/p>\n

BERG: \u00a0Are you serious?<\/p>\n

BLACK: You don’t have an answer, do \u00a0you?<\/p>\n

BERG: \u00a0Of course I do. \u00a0My goal was to get to Chicago. As a practical matter, I needed to take a whiz.<\/p>\n

BLACK: \u00a0So your principles are muddled, then? \u00a0Perhaps you shoudn’t talk about “driving fast”.<\/p>\n

BERG: \u00a0(Facepalm).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

OK, I made that one up.<\/p>\n

But when you read Black’s\u00a0fisking (I mean, really? \u00a0What else would you call it?) of a Jason Lewis column\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0in the Strib <\/em>this past weekend, you might wonder:<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s do Mr. Jason Lewis the kindness of taking seriously his latest Strib op-ed philippic against the evils of liberalism.<\/p>\n

The headline \u201cDo you want equality or freedom?\u201d certainly suggests that we can\u2019t want a bit of both, and it also suggests that freedom and equality cannot coexist.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, when liberals read “equality” they think “women and minorities voting” – something conservatives support. \u00a0When Jason Lewis – whose broadcasts and op-eds sound and read more like grad-school poli-sci seminars every year – talks about “equality” in this context, he’s referring to equality of outcomes; leveling out the economic peaks to fill in the valleys; making sure nobody becomes wealthy until everyone’s in the middle class.<\/p>\n

I’m going to add some emphasis to the next bit; we’ll come back to it:<\/p>\n

Of course, Lewis didn\u2019t write the headline, but it captures the keys to his argument, and to a bit of semantic bullying<\/strong> in which righties engage often.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It goes something like this:<\/p>\n

Everything the right likes can be phrased as a form of \u201cfreedom,\u201d as in freedom of the rich from paying higher taxes, freedom of corporations from government regulation, freedom to pollute, freedom of those with almost unlimited resources to use those resources to influence elections, freedom of the wealthiest 1 percent to accumulate any damn portion of the society\u2019s wealth and income without shame, freedom to overthrow foreign governments (but only in order to bring freedom to the oppressed of those nations) and a few other important freedoms that you can think of on your own.<\/p>\n

Once the right has established its ownership of the \u201cfreedom brand,\u201d it follows that everything that distinguishes the left from the right is a form of oppression.<\/p>\n

Government is oppression, taxes are tyranny, and progressive taxation or anything else that requires rich people to pay more than poor people is a particularly pernicious Bolshevik form of totalitarianism that requires a complete leveling between rich and poor.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why you have to choose between freedom and equality.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wow.<\/p>\n

No “rhetorical bullying” in that passage, was there?<\/p>\n

There are really two ways of addressing Black’s…argument?<\/p>\n

First: \u00a0I work in an engineering-y field. \u00a0And when analyzing a problem, engineers will break it into two areas; what you want to happen – your goal – and how you make it happen. \u00a0Your goal – your “policy”, at a high level – is to put a bridge over a river. \u00a0That goal\/”policy” drives the actual implementation; building over the road on one bank and between the buildings on the other, using plate-girder construction instead of stressed concrete arches (because it’s a small bridge with a low budget). \u00a0The same idea works in politics; high-level “principles” guide lower-level politics and undertakings. \u00a0If your princples are “progressive”, you likely believe some permutation of “society should use government to rectify the worst of life’s wrongs” and “those that have should be expected to help out those who have not”. \u00a0These principles likely inform \u00a0your “policy” decisions – things like “the rich should only make 80 times as much as the rest of us, rather than 90 times, so let’s add on a Wealth Tax”. \u00a0It’s a simple fact of life that there will <\/em>be inconsistencies between your “princples” and the policies you use to implement them. \u00a0 Lewis is speaking in terms of principles<\/em>\u00a0– “Freedom” and “Equality” in abstract, academic senses that never really occur as absolutes in nature. \u00a0That’s what he does.<\/p>\n

Second: Well, duh. \u00a0That’s what political rhetoric is; trying to frame your side as a better idea than the other side.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t have the option of maybe just bumping the top marginal rate up a point or two to help reduce the deficit (something about which the right generally claims to care) and still leave the average CEO 90 times better off than his average employee (or maybe only 80).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mr. Black: \u00a0Behold the power of rhetoric. \u00a0Of course you have the option<\/em>. \u00a0Lewis is arguing against <\/em>the option.<\/p>\n

It’s not much different than when progressives, for example, say “if you want to cut taxes [or just not increase them as much as the left wants – Ed<\/em>.], you must hate government!”. \u00a0Conservatives respond “Er, government is fine – but couldn’t we settle for just the right amount of it<\/em>, rather than letting it expand forever, unchecked?”<\/p>\n

Because in principle<\/em>, conservatives want to control the size of government; in practice<\/em>, that means picking and choosing.<\/p>\n

Just like Black wants Lewis to allow for.<\/p>\n

Now, that’s Jason Lewis for you; the guy with the Masters (PhD? \u00a0LLD? \u00a0I forget) in Poli Sci does like him some high-level political theory. \u00a0He does it for three hours every night, and in most of his written output as well. \u00a0 His second hitch in Twin Cities radio has been like an extended grad school poli sci seminar.<\/p>\n

And I have to believe Black knows that.<\/p>\n

So why would he write an entire column chastising Lewis’ “logic” when, in fact, all the cognitive dissonance is a matter of the scope <\/em>of the argument (Lewis’ high-level rhetoric vs. Black’s policy-oriented low-level analysis)?<\/p>\n

Reading the comment section – which largely reads like a thread at Democrat Underground or the Daily Kos – should answer that for you.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I sat down for an interview with Erik Black, the former Strib political reporter and one of the thundering herd of “deans of Minnesota political reporting”, the other day. It went a little like this.: BLACK: \u00a0So you took a trip the other day. BERG: I did. BLACK: \u00a0You’ve said your goal when driving long […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lefty-alt-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24402"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24402\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24443,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24402\/revisions\/24443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}