alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

July 3, 2006

Rhetorical Fallacy Watch

by AltHippo @ 11:00 am. Filed under rhetorical fallacy

I hesitate to call this wingnut post rhetoric. If it weren’t that it adds a dubious comparison of the netroots to the John Birch society, it would be just another ode to mouth breathers everywhere. If you’re curious how the author makes the John Birch/netroots bit work, it goes like this:

Even when it wins the Presidency, it loses the Congress: and even when the President is the inept, uncommunicative George W. Bush, it still cannot make a dent in the ascendancy of its enemies. The end result of this is a group of Americans, identifying as members of the left, that is strikingly similar to the conservative movement of a generation past: inchoate, angry, and prone to “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

I’m guessing the author hasn’t taken a look at the leading blogs of the right recently. Which, as far as I can tell have two notes: misdirection and hate-mongering.

At any rate, my favorite bit of this post is where the author puts himself in the shoes of the left. I defy you to read this without laughing:

Consider the average member of this group. He (or she) remembers the era of leftist dominance of American politics — and he remembers the beginning of its end, on election day 1980. He is around 50 years old. He is professional living in a coastal enclave, mostly on the Pacific coast or the northeast. His political consciousness was formed by the McGovern and Carter campaigns — and of course the American retreat from Vietnam. He may have grown up in Iowa, or Texas, or Missouri, or Utah — but he went to college elsewhere, and fell in love with the people in California, or New York, or Boston, who were so much more progressive and intellectual than the hayseeds back home. His initial concept of conservatives, which he’s never really abandoned, was formed by Nixonian malfeasance: they’re all crooks and corrupt, in his mind. The ascent of Reagan in 1980, and later the 1994 revolution, came as a profound shock — how could America forget so soon? He is well-off: and the bulk of his working career — and hence the font of his personal prosperity — was spent in the boom markets of the 1980s and 1990s, under Republican national governance in one form or another. He doesn’t think about the implications of that much.

That’s not exactly how I remember the Reagan years. I remember a recession in 1983. Then the Iran Contra affair. If Nixon’s drama queen antics during Watergate hadn’t made the country sick of impeachment proceedings, I suspect that Reagan would have been impeached. Then came the S&L bailouts, starting with the closing of Old Court S&L.

I do remember boom markets during the 1990s, however. And a budget surplus. Under Clinton. But then, the author doesn’t think about the implications of that much.

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hip·po·pot·a·mus n. A notion, perhaps distinct from conventional wisdom, that needs to be verified by reality-based scrutiny.

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95. Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum (I think that I think, therefore I think that I am.)
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