Ray Bradbury said, ""

Political hate-speak

The OK Democrat posted the following at the Balance of Power:

For today's post (Thursday, June 30), I want to discuss what I refer to as hate-speak in American politics. While I personally believe there is more hate-speak in the Republican half of the political spectrum, I am forced to admit that hateful language is prevalent in BOTH sides of the political aisle. My goal with this post is to prove that hate-speak exists in politics today, examine why it is a serious problem and finally, make suggestions on how to remedy this situation. Let's take a look at this now shall we?

First, let's look at the proof that hate-speak is prevalent in both major political parties. We'll attack the Democrats first. Earlier this year, while on the campaign trail for the Democratic Party Chairmanship, Howard Dean said, "I hate Republicans and everything they stand for, but I admire their discipline and their organization." This proves that the Democratic Party is infested with hate-speak. Dean's attempt at a save at the end of his statement was a failure. What about the Republican Party? Anyone who believes the GOP is innocent in this matter is sadly mistaken. Remember what Congressman Tom DeLay (TX) said of the judges in the Terri Schiavo case last spring? "The judges need to be intimidated, they need to uphold the Constitution. If they don't behave, we're going to go after them in a big way," he said. Pretty hateful? You bet. What about Karl Rove's long history of hateful comments? "As people do better, they start voting like Republicans," he said once a few years ago. Is it really appropriate for our nations highest leadership to be acting like this?

Ok, now that we have established the existence of this kind of rhetoric, is it truly harmful to our nation? I believe it is. Think back to your childhood folks. As a kid, did you get along better with your siblings when they were nice or when they called you a name? Think of high school now. Didn't fights result from name-calling? It certainly wasn't the compliments. Now consider Washington or even your local city council and state government. How many times can you remember the work of the government bogging down because one or both sides of the aisle were too busy slandering the other to get down to work? Do you have a better time at work when you are being called names? Does that make it easier to function in your job capacity? Does that give you inclination to compromise with your co-workers to solve problems? The answer is no to all of these questions. This is why something must be done about the hate-speak so inherent in our political system.

Now we can discuss our options. What can we do to put a stopper in the ever-increasing flow of hate-speak from our political leaders? I suggest that the first thing voters should do is educate themselves on the issues instead of letting their leaders tell them how to vote. Too many on both sides of the aisle vote the way their party leaders say. The second thing we can do is to mail and email leaders who choose to use such language, whether they be of our party or not. The third thing we can and should do is remember that we elect leaders and we can un-elect them and even call for their removal if they do not stop using hate-speak. What is needed here is an end to party line loyalty. It might be hard but it is the cure to this problem. That will send a message to extremists like Dean, DeLay, Durbin, Frist and Rove that we won't take this anymore. It's up to us. This tripe only happens because we haven't done anything about it.

The political process is characterised not by its ends, but its means. The ends of all politicians are identical to each other and to private individuals: prosperity and peace. Even the regimes of horror in Soviet Russia and National Socialist Germany held those as their final goals. No political movement ever promised misery and abject poverty to its followers; even the ascetic theocracies of Iran and Saudi Arabia promise their citizens eternal prosperity in exchange for their obedience to the laws.

The means of the political process is coercion, whereas the means of private social relations is voluntary agreement and cooperation. Government only possesses that which it has first extracted through taxation or inflation. It acts through decrees, which forcibly replace the will of the many private individuals with the will of a few in government. The means government has to attain its ends are founded in coercion, whether against the criminal or the innocent. Regardless of the justification, it cannot be denied that the political process is inextricably connected with the use of coercion.

The coercive element in politics, when government is limited by isonomy, popular sovereignty, and equal rights, is reduced to its application against criminals. Debate is narrowed to, not whose rights are more valued than another's rights, whose benefit is worth more than the harm to another, but whose rights have been violated. There is no consideration entered between which rights outweigh other rights, whose well-being is more valued than another. A government so limited possesses a focused application of coercion in which disagreement is characterized by the application of coercion to criminals, not innocents. Political debates focus on the subject of crime, people who have violated rights. Antipathy toward criminals is an antipathy toward those who disintegrate social cooperation and bring harm; such antipathy may result in extreme policies against criminals but will leave innocents unharmed. An innocent man has no need to fear his neighbor's politics in such a limited government.

A government which rejects isonomy, and begins creating laws specific to a certain segment of the population, simultaneously casts the apparatus of coercion into a wider arena. One portion of the population must inevitably be harmed to benefit the other portion. Equal rights and popular sovereignty yield to the widened application of coercion to innocent individuals.

It is this expansion of the means of the political process beyond criminal activities and into the realm of voluntary and peaceful social relationships that produces the emotional element in political debate. The moment the law takes on a specific target, rejecting isonomy and equal rights, some one must be harmed for every person benefitted. The benefits government provide come at the expense of harm to others. As a rule, the benefit will be focused and specific, provided to a delineated portion of the population, while this harm will be diffuse, scattered among the remainder. Those groups which benefit will possess more incentive to increase their privileges than will those groups which are harmed will possess to decrease their burdens.

With the collapse of isonomy, a nation fractures into groups competing with each other by proxy of the government. Each vies for some privilege with an inherently greater drive than they vie for the absence of burden in providing privilege to another group.

The only result possible is antipathy. A man must now fear the politics of his neighbor. Subsidized farmers seek to extract more benefits from burdened mothers, who in turn seek their own subsidies. A manufacturer seeks protection from a rival, this protection to come at the expense of the tax-payers and the rights of all the parties involved. One man's protection is another man's burden: each group will have an incentive to paint the necessity of its own well-being higher than the harm which must come to other groups to provide it. Each group will see an incentive to not only cast the other groups seeking to extract benefits as less important to public policy, but will seek to portray their well-being in antipathy to the interests of the rest of society.

In such a fractured society, the well-being of one group is detrimental to another group. In the voluntary cooperation of a society ordered on equal rights, isonomy, and popular sovereignty, the well-being of one man benefits every other man. No one is harmed through voluntary charity and voluntary exchange. In contrast, through political processes, the well-being of one man necessitates that harm come to another man. When well-being is sought through the political process, it becomes synonymous with the idea of a "zero-sum game," in which each man's health is another man's disease. Neighbors look upon each other's prosperity as a threat to their own. And what we see in our politics is what one would naturally see in response to a threat.

I note here that classical liberalism and Jeffersonian conservativism embrace isonomy and equal rights as the fundamental basis of a constitutional republic, as our nation is. It is quite easy to see which political beliefs reject isonomic law, and it is also quite easy to see the correlation between these beliefs and the ferocity of emotional responses.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at June 29, 2005 12:13 EST | Permalink | comments (7) |
politics, economics, best posts

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Comments:

#1  29 June 2005 - 13:20

 

Can't wait to hear his response.

Pastorius

Anonymous

#2  29 June 2005 - 17:22

 

An excellent posting and a good read. Thanks. I really should comment each time I visit, but I tend to read and run. You clearly put a lot of work and thought into this blog. Keep up the good work.

Anonymous

#3  30 June 2005 - 06:49

 

Excellent post Tom! Excellent.

Oddybobo

Anonymous

#4  03 July 2005 - 17:58

 

"Remember what Congressman Tom DeLay (TX) said of the judges in the Terri Schiavo case last spring? "The judges need to be intimidated, they need to uphold the Constitution. If they don't behave, we're going to go after them in a big way"

How could that be hate speech. It is the duty of the Legislature to reign in the judiciary. The job of judges is to interpret the law, not make law. Judges who legislate from the bench or defy federal laws (Roy Moore) need to be corrected.

Anonymous

#5  05 July 2005 - 13:21

 

and i am from the state of roy moore....

what a disgrace and an embarrassment he is to us.

but our rednecks here are just as bad....

Anonymous

#6  09 July 2005 - 20:59

 

Consider the following Tom:

Government interference in our social and economical lives has been increasing since the 1960s with so some easying up in the 1980s. Yet, at the sametime voter apathy guaged by lack of voter turn-out seems to be gaining power. So how can we say as you do that as the government gets more involved in our lives that this country will get more politised when most americans dont bother voting for the president. Clearly there is more going on here. My answer is that you would be right Tom if our elected officals had any actually power. The power in this country comes from entreached bueractic officals. Hence the common mans lament that it wont make any difference anyway who he votes for.

Anonymous

#7  11 July 2005 - 06:11

 

Tom, best let Zaph know that that is where this comment was supposed to go.. because it is attached to the current discussion on War

Anonymous

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