Left vs. Right in public discourse -- Part 1

The Daou Report is a nicely designed blog that links to left, right, and mainstream blogs and news reports. It has just hooked up with Salon, so you will now have to subscribe or watch a commercial to access it, but it is a good place to see the range of topics and perspectives on a day-to-day basis.

One of the differences I notice between the left and right today is the way they approach politics and issues. It may surprise none of my readers that I find the left -- in general -- to be more responsible, thoughtful, and reasonable, while the right indulges in ideology, name-calling, victimhood, violence and even eliminationist rhetoric -- to the detriment of our republic. But let me give some specific recent examples.

First of all, I am not saying that the left is less partisan. And I am not saying that there are not name-callers, simpletons, charlatans, even idiots on the left. Two of my favorites, Digby and Wolcott, specialize in snarky vituperation. But for every obscure academic like Ward churchill on the left, there are numerous mainstream celebrity "journalists" and pundits like O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Coulter and Savage -- people who do not advance arguments based upon reasoned examination of facts but shout, insult, and threaten those they disagree with.

Check out, for example, the Center for American Progress if you want to get a sense of what liberals do when they oppose Bush administration policies. You can get a daily email from them that assembles facts, analyzes facts, draws conclusions, and proposes policies. You wont find anyone calling the opposition poopyheads or traitors.

One thing the rightwing blowhards share in common as well -- something I hope to get back to in more detail later -- is a sense of victimization. Going back to Nixon's "silent majority" and Falwell's "moral majority," the right has often claimed itself to be victimized by the pointy-headed liberal establishment. I think alot of the appeal of the right, especially for young people, is this sense of being an underdog, or taking an unpopular position, of "sticking it to the man" -- of being a rebel against the mainstream -- while simultaneously claiming to represent the oppressed mainstream. While decrying, especially, African-Americans' sense of victimization, the right has appropriated that -- white males as the besieged minority under attack from radical feminists, affirmative actioners, gay libbers, etc.

How does the right wing advance its agenda? Well, if you are president, you travel on the taxpayer's dollar to prescreened audiences to dishonestly sell the dismantling of the most sucessful government social program ever. You hold press conferences and when the questions get too tough you call on a plant -- no, I don't mean vegetation -- a guy who is not an accredited journalist (which all other White House reporters must be), who uses an alias, and who, as of today, seems to have quit after leftwing bloggers undercovered his true identity and partisan (Republican) credentials (see also here and here). If you are a bigtime newspaper pundit, you misuse other people's scholarship to support a partisan agenda. If you are the RNC, you threaten to sue those who dare to oppose the President's Social Security agenda. (I guess some lawsuits are more frivolous than others.)

And, I haven't even waded through the sewers of rightwing radio, tv and blogs. I don't have the stomach for it, nor the time. Nor, for that matter, the inclination. I know some lefties like to troll through the right's media and search for the most egregious violations of decency and reason. And I suppose someone has to do it. Media Matters has been doing a fantastic job of monitoring and factchecking the right. But I find the whole enterprise often makes the battles only personal; and I believe the right thrives on reducing everything to the personal -- hating Michael Moore for being a boorish oaf rather than having to wrestle with the uncomfortable truths that his film does present (whatever its faults).

Don't forget Clinton, Clinton, and Clinton. Each one the subject of the most sordid hatred that sucks up all the oxygen for miles around. After indulging in what in 1984 is called the "two-minutes-hate" there is no time or energy left to actually rationally assess policies, even if one were so inclined. So I don't think that the left is motivated by "Bush-hatred" to the degree that right wingers were and still are riled up by the Clintons. Sure, there is some of that. But I truly believe that most of us on the left deplore what has happened to our country and world in the past four years, and fear what will happen during the second term. That, at least, is what I am fighting about.

More later...