Its relatively easy to mimic the rhetorical style of a progressive in full self-righteous spate. Getting young people to recognize the style as manipulative romantic folderol is another matter.
The following is the text of an essay that I presented--anonymously--to a class of college freshmen. Next week I shall relate how this rhetorical dissection of progressive polemics went over.
Progressivism on Trial
If I were called to speak on behalf of a twenty-first century progressiveif I were being paid for instance to present a summation of his case before a dull jury composed of citizens of the universeI could harangue more eloquently than my addle-brained client. I would expect to be paid very handsomely however.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury" I would say my client is really the victim in this caseas are you and as are all good people. The plaintiff grandly styles himself pro-life whereas he is truly anti-life anti-freedom anti-progress anti-choice anti-philanthropy and anti-humanity. He calls himself conservativeand so he is. He wishes to conserve the hierarchy of the past the special privileges of the past the archaic gods of the past the superstitious taboos of the past the hatreds of the past the bigotry of the past and the servitude of the past. He desires you to have more children that he may have more slaves but he has no intention of empowering your children with the skills and education necessary to work their way free of chains. He desires you to have more hunger and misery so that you may be driven to find work and to fend for yourselves but he has no intention of making your work safe or easy to procure or tolerably pleasant to do. He desires you to love Godhis Godso that you may be conditioned to expect less of this life but he has no intention of obeying the universal law of brotherhood that would require him to share the profits he makes on your backs.
The entire human race is this mans victimand yet he charges my client with sedition.
And what were my clients crimes? Let us review. He is said to have stolen from the wealthy. How many times thoughfor how many generationshave the wealthy and their forebears stolen from you and me? How many long days have you labored to come home with no more in your pockets than what barely suffices to put food in your childrens mouths? How many high-priced marvels have you bought after a long period of frugality only to discover that they dont work or arent safe because the wealthy ordered corners cut in their production? How many doors have been shut locked and bricked over against you and yours that might have provided entry into better-paying work and higher privilege? The wrong man is standing in the docks!
My client is said to have lied repeatedly about matters of critical public importance. How do we count the number of liesand over how many generationsthat have been ground out by the wealthy and their propaganda machine? How many of your fathers worked at miserable jobs throughout their lives retiring just about in time to drop dead of exhaustion and despair because they had always been told that hard work pays off? How many of our fathers fathers were raised as children in schools that told them over and over and over that this system is the best in the worldnot perfect perhaps but scarcely to be improved upon? How many of our mothers and their mothers were told to stay home and keep having childrento stay out of politics and the work place to keep their minds blank and to keep their men chained down with so many little dependents that they too would have no time to stop and think? The whole system is a house of lies… and my client is on trial for trying to fight a firestorm with a matchstick? The wrong man is in the docks I say again!
My client is said to have murdered unborn children and to have subverted public morality. Yet how do we count the number of children born into this system who would have been better off deadwho were born dead in effect since they were born without a future? The wealthy have seen to that! Should we say a child has life then just because he breathes? Is it life to be dreaded avoided and hated by your very parents because they can no longer feed you? Is it life to be sent for years to a prison called school where youre constantly given work that you cant understand and then punished because you cant finish it? Is it life to be spat upon and called stupid until you cant take it any morebut when you rebel and stick up for yourself youre introduced to the first in a long long series of real prisons? And how many such children diehow many are killedbefore they reach the age and estate of a man who might have sired and reared his own children a stage that was thought a normal stop along lifes journey in every human culture before ours? How do we count the number of those unborn children those millions and millions of unborn victims whom the wealthy cannot even imagine? Yet my client stands accused of killing the unborn. He shall have to make so much room in the docks for those in this one building who deserve to be standing there more than he that well find him back on the streets in one minute.
And what is it after all that my client really wants? What is the source of those actions which have stirred conservative ire against him? Why just that he wants to see things progress. He sees so much misery around him that he can no longer stand by idly and watchfor make no mistake ladies and gentlemen: if you free my client today he will be up to his old tricks tomorrow or this afternoon. He will be trying again to see that the hungry have food to eat that the ailing have medicine that the homeless have shelter that the young have a future that the oppressed have liberty and that the imprisoned have hope. His worst deeds are only those that aim at creationat bringing to light what has hitherto in this corrupt and gloomy swamp of a society been stifled and submerged. It is a lie perhaps to say that a seed should not be planted under a houses eaves because room is lacking: next year and the year after there will be room enough. But the year will come when the aspiring branches will rake the house and the two will war from then on. It is a lie in the dead of winter to say that a well should be dug because the stream hasnt enough water. The fall rains have fed the stream and now and throughout the spring it will run powerfully between its margins. Yet the summer will come the stream will dry up in July and for three months there will be no water.
Lies are all in how you see them from time. The presents truth-tellers are often the biggest liars in the future. My client is an artist a visionarya prophet. He sees things that do not yet exist. He sees a happiness that is not yet possible. People who live only in the presentand even worse people who can live only in the pastwill never share his views. You cannot climb that mountain they say because it has never been climbed. People will never share their wealth and care for their fellow beings it is said because they never have. Humansthese conservatives sayare incurably selfish. But my client has the cure. The medicine may be bitter to some because the disease is virulent: but the cure is to cut away all that is diseased. The way to climb the mountain is to put beneath us all that is above us. My client has the will to do this: his persecutors have none. They would have us roll back down to the mountains foot curl up and die of slow rot.
The wrong man is in the docks; but his accusers even if they escape trial are already sentenced. They will die of their own decay if they do not embrace his cure. Even for them he is the only hope."
Upon consideration I would not in fact deliver that speechnot for any amount of moneybecause it is too dangerous. Too much in it is trueand the falsehoods riding on the coattails of those truths might themselves usher in murder and mayhem. To speak in such terms to masses of people without rhetorical sophistication or fine discernment would be grossly irresponsible. Of course progressive politicians understand this implicitly: hence their desire to water down" the electorate with hordes of unskilled laborers who have no rhetorical sophistication at allwho in some cases cannot even speak the language of the land and perhaps cannot write the language of any land. Hence the progressive tendency as well to draw often and shamelessly from their treasure chest of demagogic imagery the weeping widow the starving child and the scapegoated migrant.
The rhetoric itself if effective is rudimentary. You take the plaintiffs charges and without addressing a single item or detail in any of them you reverse each one and send it back where it came from. Magnify the payload ten times. If they charge that you lied about your campaign donors counter-charge that they and their ancestors have always lied about their plan for the nations poor. If they charge that you have never attended the church where you claim to be an alderman counter-charge that they violate every day all the core principles of the faith they profess to follow. This might be called the see you and double your raise" technique.
Notice too that the raise must always be made in the very vaguest terms. Details about campaign donations are a matter of public record and can be verified: accusations about the attitudes and prejudices of an entire class or ethnic group perhaps spanning several generations are patently indemonstrable with any degree of precision or fairness. Likewise a behavior such as church attendance could be investigated either by interviewing other church members or examining church documents: a behavior such as degree of practical adherence to a faiths moral teachings is scarcely discernible even in an individual caseand is certainly not so for a vast group.
If I charge you with chopping down a reverend old tree then you should charge me with eradicating traditions left and right that once made life meaningful to people. If I charge you with beating your wife you should charge my entire congregation community or race with having tortured helpless innocents for centuries. See the bet and then raise with every coin you can find whose national currency is unknown and indeterminable.
As I have acknowledged however some of the counter-charges in my imaginary summation are true. Winners and losers are often predetermined in our society as in all societiesand they are so on both sides of the political aisle and in all religious faiths and denominations and among all species of pagan or atheist and within all fraternities and sodalities. People inevitably form cliques gangs coteries cabals and musketeer threesomes within musketeer companies. I have noted dozens of times for instance and always painfully that my editorials never receive a hearing when I send them to sites that enjoy a national renown even though I believe my writing to be quite the equal of many syndicated columnists. All ventures and industries have their old boy" networks and some of us will be forever on the outside looking in. No amount of hard work" will make any door open for us although a well-timed well-placed marriage or the discovery of a felicitous second-cousin connection might bring out the red carpet.
This sort of thing is highly annoying and to hear the systems defenders insist that it doesnt existto hear them warble sanctimoniously about the direct proportion connecting jobs well done with material successcan send up the blood pressure and make fists clench. The System is just another system; if it lacks the vices of some it also has the foibles common to all. Tall men with deep voices get along better than diminutive shy men: beautiful women fare better than their plain sisters. Life can be rather horrid that way.
It is also true that some of the young men perhaps many who languish in our prisons are not at all bad people and may indeed have extraordinarily good qualities. Theres no denying that a certain percentage of them were set up" by social malaises whose cancer tends to be passed along almost genetically. The ambition to redeem these men for a life of honor and decency is admirable; and if the path to redemption were capable of being made somewhat programmatic then we might even dare speak of progress" in our public policy. Not everything old is good. Sometimes the potato crop has to fail before one can understand that eating only potatoes was never very healthy to begin with.
This brings us though to the matter of poetry (for lack of a better word): for you may have noticed that my summation" closes with a couple of little allegories. Tropological language can very powerfully condense complex ideas into simple dynamic images. The compression can be excessive however; and on a progressives tongue it usually is. Life is neither a mountain-climb nor a disease to be cured. The truths I have just conceded above are indeed half-truths as used in the summation in that they more properly indict the human condition than any particular political or economic system. To insinuate that a capitalist republic produces abnormally high levels of crony-ism and criminalization of racial-ethnic minorities is grossly abusive. In the same way to suggest that removing such ills from our midst equates to curing our body of a disease is as a logical claim idiotic. A more accurate allegory would be to say that we could rid our body politic of all inequity by shutting down its voluntary systems entirely and putting it on life support under the supervision of an external healer. Those images would both do much less violence to the truth and attract far fewer adherents in a nave electorate.
The allegory of the visionary creator who brings forth something from nothing (if I may digress slightly) is especially inept when applied to entire human communities and often even when applied to certain kinds of individual endeavor. Who exactly ushers a wonder into existence where there was no such wonder before? An artist. But human beings are not an artistic medium and to imply that their lives may be treated as canvas and paint or wet clay is disturbingly hubristic. Of the several words that we might use to describe the person who would thus play God with his fellow creatures none is untainted by some implication of moral depravity or insanity.
In matters of strictly narrowly physical achievement we are often able far to exceed our self-expectations. A pitiable light-weight can become a marvel of muscle with disciplined body-building. An athlete can train himself to perform complex maneuvers with either the left or the right hand after hundreds or thousands repetitions. Olympic gymnasts are not born but molded out of years of agonizing practice. Mastering a musical instrument as well while considered an artistic achievement partakes liberally of the athletes conditioning program. In such cases stunning progress is indeed possible. There seems to be little room for carrying over this optimism however into more cerebral matters. One can become reasonably quick at mathematics or fluid in Pashtu with years of intense studyyet some people are simply born with a gift in these cognitive areas and no amount of labor can make up the ground separating the gifted from the more pedestrian. A master pianist may never be a very good composer. We human beings are not infinitely malleable in every direction.
Perhaps this is nowhere more true than in our moral character. To the extent that societies have ever existed whose members sacrifice their time and effort for the benefit of their fellow beings without any hope of remuneration it is because the remuneration is invisible. The pay-off may be either positive (e.g. high praise for services rendered) or negative (e.g. neglect in return for a lackluster performance). Though we may consider such duty-driven people to be paragons of virtue and a sure sign that progress in character is collectively possible we are deceiving ourselves: our little utopian knights of public service are mere automatons deprived of personal will power rather than liberated into moral choice. Properly seen this sort of situation (which has never even existed in convincing detail outside the fictions of Plato and Thomas More) is indeed more regression than progress. Only a mind that envies the anthill its unanimity and efficiency could embrace such a vision for human society.
I do not sayHeaven forbidthat saintly people have never existed nor even that the rest of us should not try to emulate their example in our piddling way. I say only that we must not suppose any tinkering with the political or economic systems around us capable of producing a society of saints. Spectacular moral triumphs are all individual and always individual. This is the most critical blunder made by progressive thinking. If good" is to be defined for human beings in moral terms then it must refer to the choices they make. A behavior cannot be designated as good if it has not been freely selected by the moral agentfor instance if it is forced upon the citizen by systematic brainwashing or by laws that punish contrary behaviors. The progressive proposes requiring generosity and self-sacrifice of all citizens by confiscating excess" earnings dissolving family ties severely limiting private property suppressing individualism in favor of group-think programming young children to ignore the background interference" of parental and cultural influence etc. etc. By definition this agenda cannot produce good people since it concentrates on removing choice from the lives of the rank and file. To the extent that the Brave New Hive does not permit either good or bad choices but only grinds out worker-bees it is in fact an evil place. It robs human beings of a free will whose exercise is their inalienable right and which above all else distinguishes them from mere animals.
It is sometimes difficult I realize to imagine a more hive-like existence than that into which free-market capitalism has lured or coerced millions of people. Up at the scream of an alarm fight through the crawl of rush-hour traffic sit at a desk or stand behind a counter for eight hours a day navigate another rush hour crawl into bed exhausted and quite without any sense of having benefited oneself or humanity… wake up to another alarm….
This misery is rightly ascribed to our way of life it does not belong to the inevitable human condition and we should certainly struggle to be rid of its dreariest elements some day. Yet greater centralization is not the way out. Being assigned daily a certain time to leave the house for example and a certain route to reach work so as to dispel traffic jams will only multiply the degree of regimentation in the individuals life. Being paid to stay home might seem more attractive… but where then will ones pay come from if one has withdrawn from the productive work force; and for how long in any case can any human being remain content while doing nothing?
The best antidote to the daily grind would be more freedom. When a brutal employer shortchanges his poor wage-slaves their only alternative is not (or should not be) unionization: a far better one is competition. Let the abused laborer market his skills under his own shingle. Let him quit his job and open up a small shop in his garage or den. His income would greatly diminish no doubtat least at firstbut he would also save money in gasoline car maintenance and insurance child care for little tikes who cannot be left home alone and doctors bills that would otherwise have loomed if his high-stress lifestyle had continued. The security of his neighborhood would improve the locals up and down the block would know each other better and forge stronger ties and life in general would have more sunny days.
Naturally our oppressed worker cannot do any such thing. Building permits zoning laws local taxes OSHA regulations wheel-chair access fire codes… the morass of nuisance" rules is impenetrable to any ordinary person. What I would emphasize in this context is that all such rules originated in the desire to protect the little guy. Nobody has ever stood before a local state or federal legislating body (as I pictured myself doing when this essay began) and proclaimed We need more rules to make it thoroughly impossible for small entrepreneurs to compete with huge corporations." The arguments advanced always claim to defend the poor the underprivileged the powerless the disenfranchised the overlooked… yet they simply wrap more chains around the common mans neck.
My jury consisting of average citizens of the universe would never understand the arguments I have made in rebuttal of my own summation. There is too much dependency of thing upon thing" as the Bard says: the chain of cause and effect has too many links. The victor in the debate will simply trot out weeping widows starving children and scapegoated migrants. All pageantry no discussion. And my jury will vote to hang itself without ever recognizing that it far more than either the defendant or the plaintiff is on trial.
But the good news is that there are too many citizens of the universe to hang. Eventually we will run out of rope out of hangmen out of gravediggers. Our elite rulers will have walled themselves away in such a high palace or such a deep bunker that they will have no interest in the waifs moving about the rubble of Cincinnati or Tallahassee or Spokane or Reno; and their elite police force though authorized and equipped to shoot any waif on sight will be more interested in staying warm and sharing confiscated narcotics. That will leave the rest of us to begin againand we will do so precisely as I have just described.
The first step then is to survive the Great Slaughter of Freedoms with the help of much patience and… well vision. For when unhinged progressives lead us into a steep regression all of us who would cling to our freedom must formulate a plan for real progress.