The False Equivalence Trap
During the Blogathon, MoltenThinker Karen earned a post each from WordGirl and myself. WordGirl is working on hers, here is mine.
The Great Depression and the Liberal Shift
The Left is cornered, angry, frustrated, and impotent these glorious days, and so we're seeing some pretty silly statements among the usual suspects. What we on the Right don't often acknowledge is that these statements correlate fairly well with some of the hysteria over the New Deal when liberalism was ascendant in the 20s and 30s. The marginalized political faction tends to lash out at any and all within reach rather than attempt to grapple with the real reasons for its marginalization.
In the depths of the Great Depression, there was great fear that capitalism had failed and that America was in danger of extinction. This was an emotional argument, not a factual one. America had endured serious economic downturns before, some quite long-lasting. The old history textbooks tended to refer to these as "The Panic of [insert year(s) here]" events, and with good reason---people panicked, there were runs on banks, industries collapsed, and times were very hard for sizeable chunks of the populace. As we made the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society, the economy boomed and tanked more frequently than we're used to today, with catastrophic consequences at times.
With the stock market crash of 1929, itself coming on the heels of an enormous economic boom following the First World War, panic once again set in. Unemployment shot to historically-high levels as the job market and capital dried up. FDR and the Democrats came to dominate American politics through the promise of a New Deal to end the Depression.
Well, needless to say conservatives didn't take the Democrats' socialist experiment very well. However, they made a fundamental miscalculation in that the New Deal had nothing whatsoever to do with achieving economic growth again and everything to do with restoring a frightened, tired, and frustrated population's hope for the future. It was an emotional plan, not an economic one, at heart. It's appeal lay not in accomplishments (there weren't any) but in restoring America's confidence in the future.
What do you think the unemployment rate was in the worst year of the Great Depression? 80 percent? 60 percent? 40 percent?
No, it was much lower. In 1933, the darkest year of the Depression, unemployment stood at 24.75 percent, about 5 times today's "natural" level.
Now, having a quarter of your workforce without a job is a horrible thing. Yet it is not quite as horrible as we might have imagined it to be. After all, when one thinks of the Depression, one doesn't think of having 75% of your workforce employed. Wasn't everyone out of a job, in soup kitchen lines, etc.?
John Steinbeck to the contrary, the answer is no.
Yet if you were a Republican politician in the 1930s arguing laissez faire economics, the business cycle, and economic history, you soon joined the ranks of the unemployed.
I don't think I need to produce much in the way of quotes from the dwindling Republican minority throughout the 30s and 40s to establish the bitterness and frustration felt by the GOP. Read H.L. Mencken if you want a taste of it.
My point is simple: the post-9/11 world is for Democrats what the Depression was for Republicans---nothing less than the utter destruction of their worldview and political aspirations by harsh, cold reality.
Sure, My Guy's Bad, But Not As Bad As Your Guy
During the past election cycle, I had several e-mail exchanges with a bright college student who had read some of my reviews of books on Amazon.com. He was preparing to vote for the first time, and was reaching out to several folks who seemed to have passionate political views to get some opinions on issues for consideration.
His questions were generally quite solid, but whenever it came down to choosing between John Kerry and George W. Bush, no matter what evidence was marshalled for Bush and against Kerry he would come down in the Kerry column, then promptly deny that he was voting for Kerry, rather stating he was voting against Bush. The rub of it all was his claim that his number one issue was abortion, with national security a strong number two. The odd thing was he claimed to be staunchly pro-life.
Needless to say, the cognitive dissonance struck me. If you have a stark choice between two alternatives---one is the expansion of abortion access and less restrictions on abortion, the other increased restrictions on abortion and a rollback of abortion "rights", and you're pro-life, one would naturally presume you'd take the latter alternative. In this case, my correspondent simply refused to support Bush, and brought up his youthful record of partying.
Well, John Kerry liked to party himself, and has a decent reputation as a womanizer and bon vivant to boot. This was deemed irrelevant.
I tried to explain that when faced with two alternatives (and only two), and one set of grading criteria, it only makes sense to go with the candidate who satisfied your most important criteria most of the time. It is not rational to vote for Candidate B to "punish" Candidate A for not being 100 percent to your liking if Candidate B in fact scores worse on your political scorecard.
Needless to say, my correspondent didn't see the logic in all this and we soon broke off our e-mail discussions. He never offered any rationale for supporting Kerry other than "He isn't Bush."
The False Equivalence Trap
If the above sounds familiar to you, great---you've been paying attention to politics.
The Democrat activists are using all sorts of variations of my correspondent's illogical argument today. This has led to some breathtaking inconsistencies, such as the Left clamoring for Karl Rove's head for allegedly "outing" a CIA employee (whose name was classified "SECRET") when they just finished defending former Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger's destruction of "TOP SECRET---CODEWORD" documents being used in the 9/11 investigation. The bottom line is, "Yeah, our guy did something bad, but it was minor-league compared to your guy's misdeed."
Which of course is silly on the face of it.
Let's start from the proposition that there is one standard for behaviors to be applied. In the above case, let's call it the law.
Sandy Berger broke federal law, as it is a crime to---let's put this nicely, shall we?---"mishandle" classified documents in the manner he did. Moreover, Berger copped to it.
Karl Rove not only appears not to have committed a crime, it seems as though it may not have been possible to commit a crime at all in this case, as Valerie Plame had not been an undercover operative for the CIA for over 5 years, which is the threshold specifically delineated in the law.
Thus, on the face of it, Sandy Berger did something much worse than Karl Rove did. Forget political affiliation---just apply the standard evenly.
Likewise, let's compare Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton.
Bill Clinton was impeached but not convicted for lying to a grand jury (as well as the American public) concerning his sexual involvement with White House intern Monica Lewinski. He was held in contempt and had was suspended from the Bar as a result.
Richard Nixon resigned before impeachment proceedings could begin regarding his role in the burglary of the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate Hotel. There is still vigorous debate as to what Nixon knew of the break-in and what part he played in obstructing the subsequent investigation, but one may infer that his resignation following a landslide election victory didn't come because he was likely to survive impeachment.
Let's apply a standard of "damage to the Presidency" here.
Bill Clinton, while a cad, a fool, and an immature little wanker, will have proven to have very little lasting impact on the country or the Presidency. His actions certainly hurt his political effectiveness, hurt his party, and soiled his legacy, but did not directly damage this country or its institutions, however tawdry they were. I believe he should have been impeached and convicted for his actions, but that he did not cause lasting damage to this country through them. His foreign policy, on the other hand.....
Richard Nixon greatly damaged America and the Presidency through his actions. It doesn't matter that LBJ played dirtier (and more illegal) political tricks or that JFK installed and used the taping system first. It doesn't matter that the Democrats were hardly angels and were likely engaged in illegal activity themselves in the Watergate, if G. Gordon Liddy is to be believed. As a direct result of Nixon's inability to do the honorable thing quickly, America's withdrawal from Vietnam became a chaotic mess, the economy tanked, most of the foreign policy progress Nixon had made was gutted, the Presidency was greatly weakened for a decade, and the Left Wing Media was ensconced in an unassailable position for a generation.
Like it or lump it, Nixon's malfeasance was worse, and he didn't soil the Oval Office carpet.
And I say that as a Republican.
Whenever you argue based on facts and standards, and your opponent argues based on team affiliation, you've won the argument.
This is why the Democrats are in so much trouble today, as are their allies (oh, who are we kidding?---their fellow Democrats) in the Left Wing Media.
They're all caught in the False Equivalence Trap.
The Consequences of False Equivalence
Credibility is everything these days. It's the coin of the realm of the blogosphere, and the credibility-challenged media and politicos are struggling mightily to adjust to this reality.
When information is transmitted so freely, so readily, and so widely, spinmeisters and liars see their stock plummet swiftly.
The American people have never liked a liar---they just lacked the means of easily telling when someone was lying prior to the Information Age.
When Mary Mapes was handed the obvious forgery purporting to portray George W. Bush as an indifferent airman, she didn't give a fig whether it was true or not. She handed it to Dan Rather, who didn't care either. What they cared about was the President was of the wrong party, the wrong ideology, the wrong team. Confident no one would be able to contradict them, and despite contrary indications, they went with the story and ignited Memogate, which led to their own removal from the CBS Evening News. They repeatedly refused to air the Swiftboat Vets claims about John Kerry's own wartime service. Why was this? Because no matter how much of a liar John Kerry is (claiming, for example, on the Senate floor that he was in Cambodia listening to President Richard Nixon deny Americans were there in Christmas, 1968 when Nixon wasn't even sworn in until the following January, an event "seared---seared!" into his memory), Dubya's worse. We just can't prove it.
Well, Dubya clearly got the better of that exchange, and Rather and Mapes ignited a firestorm which soon engulfed the whole of the LWM.
The problem with the False Equivalence Trap is that it prevents you from enforcing any standards for your own side and destroys your credibility. If you're going to circle the wagons around your folks no matter what, chances are they're going to take you down with them as their behavior, absent consequences, worsens. Dick Durbin compared U.S. soldiers at Gitmo to Nazis. Nazis! Yet no Democrat aside from Chicago Mayor Richard Dailey condemned him for those remarks. Why? Because no matter how bad Dick Durbin is, Dubya's worse. We just can't prove it.
Had Durbin simply apologized quickly for his outrageous statement, it would have all blown over. Instead, the Democrats' silence on the issue makes Americans wonder if they don't all agree with him. That's political suicide, courtesy of the False Equivalence Trap.
On the other side of the aisle, the President has maintained that if anyone in his Administration did anything illegal in the Plame Affair, he'll take care of it. I have little doubt that if Karl Rove were found to have violated the law, he'd be gone, despite his personal friendship with the President. This is not blind faith---during the Clinton impeachement mess, the Republicans got rid of House Speaker Bob Livingstone for having committed adultery on the grounds that one could hardly impeach a President for similar conduct if one's own leadership engaged in the same. They did so despite the political cost, and in so doing, avoided the trap.
Look at the damage the Democrats have done themselves by embracing former Klansman Robert Byrd and lauding him as "the Conscience of the Senate". When Trent Lott said kind words about ex-segregationist Strom Thurmond on his birthday, Lott was removed from his position as the head of Senate Republicans. The Democrats' embrace of Byrd is far more destructive (especially when he used the n-word a couple of years back in a television interview), yet they do so nonetheless. Why? They're stuck in the trap.
Green Grass and High Tides Forever
I don't disagree with Ronaldus Maximus much, but I disagree with him on his Eleventh Commandment ("Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican"). I'm proud to be a Republican because we have standards, and we hold our members to them, even if it costs us. I took some flak recently for calling for Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo's resignation after he stupidly argued for bombing Mecca if we're struck by nuclear terrorism. I did so because I apply a single standard equally to this kind of behavior---if you're a national political leader and your utterance either lends aid and comfort to the enemy or materially hurts our ability to win the war, you either apologize quickly and profusely or you go. It's that simple. Dick Durbin crossed that line. Tom Tancredo crossed that line. And as much as I respect Tancredo's position on immigration, he's got to go. He's too dangerous to have spouting off stirring up Muslims when we're relying on their help in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Iraq. He knows better, and I'm not giving him a pass on this despite his party affiliation.
How do we combat the False Equivalence Trap when a political opponent triggers it? We don't---just let 'em fall right into it. It weakens them, and hurts their ability to persuade others to support their cause.
As the Bush hatred has consumed the Left, they've taken a beating at the ballot box and in the culture. Let them keep right on taking that beating.
Napoleon once said, "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."
That sounds like great advice to me.
For a Frenchman, anyway.
The Great Depression and the Liberal Shift
The Left is cornered, angry, frustrated, and impotent these glorious days, and so we're seeing some pretty silly statements among the usual suspects. What we on the Right don't often acknowledge is that these statements correlate fairly well with some of the hysteria over the New Deal when liberalism was ascendant in the 20s and 30s. The marginalized political faction tends to lash out at any and all within reach rather than attempt to grapple with the real reasons for its marginalization.
In the depths of the Great Depression, there was great fear that capitalism had failed and that America was in danger of extinction. This was an emotional argument, not a factual one. America had endured serious economic downturns before, some quite long-lasting. The old history textbooks tended to refer to these as "The Panic of [insert year(s) here]" events, and with good reason---people panicked, there were runs on banks, industries collapsed, and times were very hard for sizeable chunks of the populace. As we made the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society, the economy boomed and tanked more frequently than we're used to today, with catastrophic consequences at times.
With the stock market crash of 1929, itself coming on the heels of an enormous economic boom following the First World War, panic once again set in. Unemployment shot to historically-high levels as the job market and capital dried up. FDR and the Democrats came to dominate American politics through the promise of a New Deal to end the Depression.
Well, needless to say conservatives didn't take the Democrats' socialist experiment very well. However, they made a fundamental miscalculation in that the New Deal had nothing whatsoever to do with achieving economic growth again and everything to do with restoring a frightened, tired, and frustrated population's hope for the future. It was an emotional plan, not an economic one, at heart. It's appeal lay not in accomplishments (there weren't any) but in restoring America's confidence in the future.
What do you think the unemployment rate was in the worst year of the Great Depression? 80 percent? 60 percent? 40 percent?
No, it was much lower. In 1933, the darkest year of the Depression, unemployment stood at 24.75 percent, about 5 times today's "natural" level.
Now, having a quarter of your workforce without a job is a horrible thing. Yet it is not quite as horrible as we might have imagined it to be. After all, when one thinks of the Depression, one doesn't think of having 75% of your workforce employed. Wasn't everyone out of a job, in soup kitchen lines, etc.?
John Steinbeck to the contrary, the answer is no.
Yet if you were a Republican politician in the 1930s arguing laissez faire economics, the business cycle, and economic history, you soon joined the ranks of the unemployed.
I don't think I need to produce much in the way of quotes from the dwindling Republican minority throughout the 30s and 40s to establish the bitterness and frustration felt by the GOP. Read H.L. Mencken if you want a taste of it.
My point is simple: the post-9/11 world is for Democrats what the Depression was for Republicans---nothing less than the utter destruction of their worldview and political aspirations by harsh, cold reality.
Sure, My Guy's Bad, But Not As Bad As Your Guy
During the past election cycle, I had several e-mail exchanges with a bright college student who had read some of my reviews of books on Amazon.com. He was preparing to vote for the first time, and was reaching out to several folks who seemed to have passionate political views to get some opinions on issues for consideration.
His questions were generally quite solid, but whenever it came down to choosing between John Kerry and George W. Bush, no matter what evidence was marshalled for Bush and against Kerry he would come down in the Kerry column, then promptly deny that he was voting for Kerry, rather stating he was voting against Bush. The rub of it all was his claim that his number one issue was abortion, with national security a strong number two. The odd thing was he claimed to be staunchly pro-life.
Needless to say, the cognitive dissonance struck me. If you have a stark choice between two alternatives---one is the expansion of abortion access and less restrictions on abortion, the other increased restrictions on abortion and a rollback of abortion "rights", and you're pro-life, one would naturally presume you'd take the latter alternative. In this case, my correspondent simply refused to support Bush, and brought up his youthful record of partying.
Well, John Kerry liked to party himself, and has a decent reputation as a womanizer and bon vivant to boot. This was deemed irrelevant.
I tried to explain that when faced with two alternatives (and only two), and one set of grading criteria, it only makes sense to go with the candidate who satisfied your most important criteria most of the time. It is not rational to vote for Candidate B to "punish" Candidate A for not being 100 percent to your liking if Candidate B in fact scores worse on your political scorecard.
Needless to say, my correspondent didn't see the logic in all this and we soon broke off our e-mail discussions. He never offered any rationale for supporting Kerry other than "He isn't Bush."
The False Equivalence Trap
If the above sounds familiar to you, great---you've been paying attention to politics.
The Democrat activists are using all sorts of variations of my correspondent's illogical argument today. This has led to some breathtaking inconsistencies, such as the Left clamoring for Karl Rove's head for allegedly "outing" a CIA employee (whose name was classified "SECRET") when they just finished defending former Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger's destruction of "TOP SECRET---CODEWORD" documents being used in the 9/11 investigation. The bottom line is, "Yeah, our guy did something bad, but it was minor-league compared to your guy's misdeed."
Which of course is silly on the face of it.
Let's start from the proposition that there is one standard for behaviors to be applied. In the above case, let's call it the law.
Sandy Berger broke federal law, as it is a crime to---let's put this nicely, shall we?---"mishandle" classified documents in the manner he did. Moreover, Berger copped to it.
Karl Rove not only appears not to have committed a crime, it seems as though it may not have been possible to commit a crime at all in this case, as Valerie Plame had not been an undercover operative for the CIA for over 5 years, which is the threshold specifically delineated in the law.
Thus, on the face of it, Sandy Berger did something much worse than Karl Rove did. Forget political affiliation---just apply the standard evenly.
Likewise, let's compare Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton.
Bill Clinton was impeached but not convicted for lying to a grand jury (as well as the American public) concerning his sexual involvement with White House intern Monica Lewinski. He was held in contempt and had was suspended from the Bar as a result.
Richard Nixon resigned before impeachment proceedings could begin regarding his role in the burglary of the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate Hotel. There is still vigorous debate as to what Nixon knew of the break-in and what part he played in obstructing the subsequent investigation, but one may infer that his resignation following a landslide election victory didn't come because he was likely to survive impeachment.
Let's apply a standard of "damage to the Presidency" here.
Bill Clinton, while a cad, a fool, and an immature little wanker, will have proven to have very little lasting impact on the country or the Presidency. His actions certainly hurt his political effectiveness, hurt his party, and soiled his legacy, but did not directly damage this country or its institutions, however tawdry they were. I believe he should have been impeached and convicted for his actions, but that he did not cause lasting damage to this country through them. His foreign policy, on the other hand.....
Richard Nixon greatly damaged America and the Presidency through his actions. It doesn't matter that LBJ played dirtier (and more illegal) political tricks or that JFK installed and used the taping system first. It doesn't matter that the Democrats were hardly angels and were likely engaged in illegal activity themselves in the Watergate, if G. Gordon Liddy is to be believed. As a direct result of Nixon's inability to do the honorable thing quickly, America's withdrawal from Vietnam became a chaotic mess, the economy tanked, most of the foreign policy progress Nixon had made was gutted, the Presidency was greatly weakened for a decade, and the Left Wing Media was ensconced in an unassailable position for a generation.
Like it or lump it, Nixon's malfeasance was worse, and he didn't soil the Oval Office carpet.
And I say that as a Republican.
Whenever you argue based on facts and standards, and your opponent argues based on team affiliation, you've won the argument.
This is why the Democrats are in so much trouble today, as are their allies (oh, who are we kidding?---their fellow Democrats) in the Left Wing Media.
They're all caught in the False Equivalence Trap.
The Consequences of False Equivalence
Credibility is everything these days. It's the coin of the realm of the blogosphere, and the credibility-challenged media and politicos are struggling mightily to adjust to this reality.
When information is transmitted so freely, so readily, and so widely, spinmeisters and liars see their stock plummet swiftly.
The American people have never liked a liar---they just lacked the means of easily telling when someone was lying prior to the Information Age.
When Mary Mapes was handed the obvious forgery purporting to portray George W. Bush as an indifferent airman, she didn't give a fig whether it was true or not. She handed it to Dan Rather, who didn't care either. What they cared about was the President was of the wrong party, the wrong ideology, the wrong team. Confident no one would be able to contradict them, and despite contrary indications, they went with the story and ignited Memogate, which led to their own removal from the CBS Evening News. They repeatedly refused to air the Swiftboat Vets claims about John Kerry's own wartime service. Why was this? Because no matter how much of a liar John Kerry is (claiming, for example, on the Senate floor that he was in Cambodia listening to President Richard Nixon deny Americans were there in Christmas, 1968 when Nixon wasn't even sworn in until the following January, an event "seared---seared!" into his memory), Dubya's worse. We just can't prove it.
Well, Dubya clearly got the better of that exchange, and Rather and Mapes ignited a firestorm which soon engulfed the whole of the LWM.
The problem with the False Equivalence Trap is that it prevents you from enforcing any standards for your own side and destroys your credibility. If you're going to circle the wagons around your folks no matter what, chances are they're going to take you down with them as their behavior, absent consequences, worsens. Dick Durbin compared U.S. soldiers at Gitmo to Nazis. Nazis! Yet no Democrat aside from Chicago Mayor Richard Dailey condemned him for those remarks. Why? Because no matter how bad Dick Durbin is, Dubya's worse. We just can't prove it.
Had Durbin simply apologized quickly for his outrageous statement, it would have all blown over. Instead, the Democrats' silence on the issue makes Americans wonder if they don't all agree with him. That's political suicide, courtesy of the False Equivalence Trap.
On the other side of the aisle, the President has maintained that if anyone in his Administration did anything illegal in the Plame Affair, he'll take care of it. I have little doubt that if Karl Rove were found to have violated the law, he'd be gone, despite his personal friendship with the President. This is not blind faith---during the Clinton impeachement mess, the Republicans got rid of House Speaker Bob Livingstone for having committed adultery on the grounds that one could hardly impeach a President for similar conduct if one's own leadership engaged in the same. They did so despite the political cost, and in so doing, avoided the trap.
Look at the damage the Democrats have done themselves by embracing former Klansman Robert Byrd and lauding him as "the Conscience of the Senate". When Trent Lott said kind words about ex-segregationist Strom Thurmond on his birthday, Lott was removed from his position as the head of Senate Republicans. The Democrats' embrace of Byrd is far more destructive (especially when he used the n-word a couple of years back in a television interview), yet they do so nonetheless. Why? They're stuck in the trap.
Green Grass and High Tides Forever
I don't disagree with Ronaldus Maximus much, but I disagree with him on his Eleventh Commandment ("Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican"). I'm proud to be a Republican because we have standards, and we hold our members to them, even if it costs us. I took some flak recently for calling for Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo's resignation after he stupidly argued for bombing Mecca if we're struck by nuclear terrorism. I did so because I apply a single standard equally to this kind of behavior---if you're a national political leader and your utterance either lends aid and comfort to the enemy or materially hurts our ability to win the war, you either apologize quickly and profusely or you go. It's that simple. Dick Durbin crossed that line. Tom Tancredo crossed that line. And as much as I respect Tancredo's position on immigration, he's got to go. He's too dangerous to have spouting off stirring up Muslims when we're relying on their help in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Iraq. He knows better, and I'm not giving him a pass on this despite his party affiliation.
How do we combat the False Equivalence Trap when a political opponent triggers it? We don't---just let 'em fall right into it. It weakens them, and hurts their ability to persuade others to support their cause.
As the Bush hatred has consumed the Left, they've taken a beating at the ballot box and in the culture. Let them keep right on taking that beating.
Napoleon once said, "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."
That sounds like great advice to me.
For a Frenchman, anyway.
posted by Teflon at 11:52 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
:0) Thank you, Teflon!! I can always count on you and WG to give it to me straight. Why the hell aren't you a history teacher in some well-deserving school?
I'm humbled to be named a MoltenThinker :). It's been a hard week up here and you just made it so much nicer; I can't wait for WG's post. What a lot of work goes into these posts!!
God bless you both and all you hold close.
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