The American Right and Anti-Intellectualism

[Mr Khan]

badgenome said:

Mr Khan said:
Have to take this piecemeal due to the fact that multi-quoting is a skill that eludes me.

-Badgenome: I'll admit hyperbole on my part for declaring it a variety of anarchy, but in arguing with you i often find that you inject points into the argument that didn't really belong there in the first place, placing presumptions on my mode of thinking and then attacking those presumptions rather than my actual points.

Examples, please? It's not something I'm trying to do. Sometimes I see things as being connected when other people don't.

Remember also that talk is cheap, while action is the name of the game, and while there are hysterical elements on the left that decry spending cuts in an irrational manner, one must take at least part of that hysteria as signaling in lieu of belief. I would argue that the left doesn't believe in spending as a fundamental good, whereas the right believes in the lack of spending as a fundamental good, where the difference lies.

I suppose, to the extent that the economically liberal right believes that the absence of spending should be the natural order of things because the government shouldn't do what it doesn't absolutely have to, and more fundamentally, because that rightfully money belongs to the citizens from whom it was taken (or in whose name it was borrowed from other countries).

And therein lies the root of the matter. The shrunken American left relies on black-and-white matters to stay relevant (literally "black and white" in the case of race, where otherwise conservative poor blacks vote democrat because the other side has racist tendencies), but the Right runs a constant play for the least-common-denominator, reducing debate to a number of platitudes in a way that is more distinctly pervasive and actively discouraging those who seek shades of grey moreso than the Left, and when one side runs entirely on platitudes, can there truly be national debate

It sounds to me like you're basically admitting that the left engages in demagoguery and platitude spewing (Obama's entire campaign) but only because the right has forced them into it. In reality, the left has been far more influential than the right over the past century and has won so many more and bigger victories that it's actually an embarrassment. Those victories have stuck, too. As you alluded to, even the Tea Party largely doesn't want its entitlements touched at this point. Plus with the media, entertainment, and academia being dominated by the left, I'm really not sure what more you could want.

Not sure about examples in particular, you just seem to try to broaden the terms of the argument in general to allow yourself to bring in other examples to prove a point valid in the broader argument, but not in the narrower one.

What i want is dialogue. I look at the ignorant things Americans say about politics and realize that this stupidity trickles up, that the establishment on the right is producing low-watt bulbs because that's more or less what the base is demanding. "Hope" and "Change" were certainly platitudes, but they are, at least, flexible platitudes, whereas the right's assertion that knowledge != truth is essentially a dialogue-killer. When the answer to all questions is "the bible" or "government is bad," and the answer to all foreign policy questions is "bring our troops home but carpet-bomb them" (which is what the grass-roots right-wing consensus on Afghanistan seems to be at the moment), then we can't really have a discussion on anything, and this will prompt the other side to entrench if they know one side isn't going to do any work. Polarization then reinforces itself in a downward spiral.

It could just be me having one of my naive youthful freakouts about the fact that there are stupid people in the world and trying to blame it on something more substantive than human nature.