I was reminded yesterday why it is that I never fell in for the popular Ron Paul, younger generation hype by watching his CPAC address. Overall it was a good speech, full of thought provoking suggestions and interesting analysis. I suppose the other reason that I didn’t fall in for Paul is that I often times don’t agree with his take on things. It seems to me that Paul provides an interesting flavour on foreign affairs, both military and economic, but that at core he is one of those folks who wants to run away into the past and I just don’t find that option to be very compelling.
There are, of course, other elements of Ron Paul’s analysis that don’t mesh well with me, but by and large I can respect where he’s coming from. Which is why it always makes me roll my eyes when Paul gets to this part of his speech,
“We now have moved a major step in the direction of socialism,” Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) said Friday, adding: “We are close to a fascist system where the government has control of our lives and our economy.”
Boom, just like that you’ve lost me. And frankly, you’ve probably lost a goodly portion of any audience who aren’t automatically primed to hoot, cheer, and applaud at any and every portion of your speech. Call this the reverse Godwin’s Law of political speech writing, but the more consistently a politician refers to either side of the political spectrum advancing their agenda as the steady march of American society towards a fascist state, the closer that politician’s likelihood of building a broad base of support that could conceivably govern as diverse polity as America approaches zero.
In other words, saying that this development or that development in American politics means that America is on the brink of becoming a fascist society is an excellent way of ensuring you don’t ever get taken as seriously as you need to in order to have a major impact on said society.
Granted, Ron Paul has his supporters, so I’m not trying to argue that he’s a nothing when it comes to American politics. For goodness sake, he’s a US Congressman and was one of the most talked about Republican candidates for president in 2008. But the Ron Paul movement never seemed to materialize in anything truly significant and some of the people who should have at least been inclined to support, if not vote for, a libertarian leaning Republican like Paul whose analysis I trust, people like Will Wilkinson and Daniel Larison couldn’t bring themselves to do it. Why is that?
Well, there were lots of reasons, but one of them, which I think speaks to the problems inherent with serving up “fascism” throw-ins when addressing an audience is that doing so ultimately undermines the larger point that you’re making by giving in to incendiary, if not perhaps sometimes well-intentioned, rhetorical devices. I mean listen, Ron Paul’s comments and warnings about the slow creep of government intrusion are in fact important points to raise. The tendency for Canadians to, by many accounts, tacitly accept that part of government’s role is to define the terms of what is and is not acceptable through regulation and stunt the moral development of individuals as a result is something I’ve written about vociferously in other venues.
But to then point your quivering finger and label that fascism is just a step too far for me and for most people.
A lot of the reasoning for that is, I think, that we have a sense of what a truly fascist society looks like from past examples, we have a good sense about the kind of cruelty and suffering that go on in those societies, we have an understanding of the moral toll that the existence of such societies have on us as a whole. So when you have anyone from either the left or the right, and both sides do cry wolf in this way, sounding off about the impending fascistic overthrow of a country like America, well it’s more than just hard to take that person seriously, it’s somewhat offensive that said person would choose to utilize a word that carries so many historical connotations in such a cavalier manner.
What’s more, from a strategic angle, you actually tend to hurt the ideas you’re promoting more than help them. When the majority of people hear someone making arguments that throw back to the fascist argument in what the average individual would take to be an inappropriate context, the logical conclusion is to assume that that person is not altogether with it in their analysis, that the person occupies a space on the fringe of political and social discourse and is not to be taken seriously.
That same person might tell you that it doesn’t really matter what certain people think of her or him because what they’re saying needs to be said.
Fair enough, but the problem there is that their message is simultaneously getting degraded along with them by the very fact they are the one delivering it. Over enough time, people like Ron Paul actually do harm to the very message they seek to spread by letting their grandiose rhetoric actually undermine them with audiences that aren’t already dyed in the wool. And sometimes, on rare occasions like with some of Ron Paul’s content, those message are actually pretty important and doing anything to degrade them by way of association with unnecessarily flagrant rhetorical abuses is something that needs to get called out.
(Reposted in part from The League of Ordinary Gentlemen)