Onesideism and Bad Faith Arguments from the Right in US Politics
I hope that this Friday is good for everyone. Or should I say Good? Anyway, pleasantries aside, this will be a relatively short column to end the week, focusing on what has come to be called bothsidesism, sometimes also known as false equivalence, a topic on which I have written frequently on this blog (most recently here).
More accurately, because the term bothsidesism was coined specifically to highlight a fundamentally dishonest political move -- "I'm bad for wanting to end democracy? Well, you once tried to get a parking ticket fixed by a friend at City Hall. Samesies!" -- I want to explore what we might call onesideism. The number of possible examples is enormous, but I will focus on only two here, one quite simple and the other slightly more complicated.
Have Democrats as a group, or even a large subset thereof, ever glommed onto anything similar to the "Obama is a Muslim" move by Republicans? It is true that John McCain, in the late stages of his losing presidential campaign against Barack Obama in 2008, did the right thing by pushing back against a supporter at a town hall who called Obama "an Arab" (which, to be clear, is the same as calling someone a Muslim only to people who have no idea how to keep their bigotries sorted into nationalist and religious lanes), McCain's answer was less than ideal: "No ma'am, he's a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that's what this campaign is all about."
As an ABC affiliate put it (perhaps too) gently ten years later: "Though some have criticized McCain's response as furthering anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiments, the exchange came to be viewed as a defining moment in the senator's decadeslong political career." Consider me among the critics who think that "No, I know he's not an Arab because Arabs aren't decent family men or citizens" is less than ideal. Even so, it was a defense of sorts, and because McCain's running mate had been pushing the line about Obama "pallin' around with terrorists," it was notable.
But the point is that there is no equivalent on the Democratic side when it comes to creating a lie and absolutely refusing to let it go. The closest I could come to an example is the ongoing joke about J.D. Vance having sex with -- with, not on -- furniture. But that is something that no one (including the person who started it all as a joke) believes, and it is not intended as a statement of fact. Conspiracy theories about Obama, however, never seem to go away and are fervently believed by large numbers of people on the American right.
The larger onesideist point occurred to me the other day. I happened to be having lunch with a friend in Hyde Park (the one in Chicago), which of course made me think of all of the Chicago School-infused political, legal, and economic arguments that have done so much damage to policy in the US and the world at large for something going on a full century now. This happened to be the day after I wrote these words in my column on Tuesday of this week: "When I say, for example, that although I reject trickle-down economics, I would believe in it if the evidence ever were to show that it works the way conservatives say it works, I mean it. It is difficult to imagine being any other way."
The context of that statement was important, because I chose that as an example of something that I firmly believe -- trickle-down economic policies are terrible -- but that I could be convinced not to believe if the evidence supported changing my mind. Thinking about those people who believe (or claim to believe) in trickle-down economics notwithstanding the complete lack of supporting evidence, I had a snarky thought (and certainly not for the first time): "Well, isn't it convenient that a person who doesn't give a damn about non-rich people can hide behind trickle-down economics as a way to claim not to be elitist, cruel, or racist!"
The point is that someone can hold truly horrific views about the people who are less advantaged in society, blaming them for being lazy or morally defective and undeserving of anything better than their current lots in life, all the while hiding behind the claim that in fact giving tax cuts to rich people will eventually help everyone. "I don't hate poor people. I just know a better way to help them."
And when those stroke-the-rich policies fail to deliver for the umpteenth time, what then? "Oh, I thought it would work this time. I truly care. Bummer." I suppose one could imagine a person being sincere but ignorant (although that would have to be some seriously motivated ignorance), but certainly trickle-down mythology provides a convenient cover for people who view the harms to the non-rich of regressive redistributionist policies as a feature rather than a bug.
So that is one side. What would the equivalent accusation be against people like me? That is, how would a critic from the right frame a snarky response? "You say I'm secretly happy that my favored policies help the rich and hurt the rest, but you're secretly happy that your redistributive policies actually do something that you don't want to admit out loud." What would that something be?
The closest that I have ever heard to a counter-insult in that context is that people like me are "just jealous," which is to say that we care only about taking down successful people even if it did not help the non-rich. Put another way, "You hate rich people so much that you'd support Robin Hood even if he only stole from the rich and never gave it to the poor."
What is the source of our/my supposed hatred? Envy! Envy that other people are more successful, talented, or whatever. The problems with that claim are obvious, but the most basic error is that the supposed haters include large numbers (I daresay even a majority) who could have made large amounts of money but were simply not motivated by that goal. Nearly every liberal law professor I know could have gone the BigLaw route and made serious coin. Economists who are liberal could have gone to business school and cleaned up, and certainly large numbers of economists have monetized their Ph.D.'s in a big way. These are not people who envy other people's superior talents, to say the least.
More importantly, the accusation is off the mark because there are in fact reasons to favor the "half Robin Hood strategy" that I described above. Especially in the last decade, it has become clear that the social, political, and economic damage caused by rich people derives not only from hoarding and withholding "their" money but of rigging the system to make it impossible for them ever to be dislodged. If someone were to accuse a person like me of "being a tax-and-spend liberal because you want to hurt the rich, full stop," my response would be, "Well no, but that is hardly the zinger that you seem to think it is."
Am I saying that non-conservatives are morally perfect and as pure as the driven snow? Of course not. I am saying, however, that there appears to be no equivalent on the left of dodgy trickle-down nonsense, in which at best we know that the rich will get theirs up front while we cross our fingers and hope (or claim to hope) that everyone else will soon feel the warming trickle on their heads that has been promised so many times.
What makes the Trump era different, I suppose, is that we now see many people on the right who have become comfortable -- make that gleeful -- in no longer bothering even to hide their contempt for the "losers." Does that count as progress?
- Neil H. Buchanan