Why The Right Is Losing The Debate

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post in which I touched on the fact that the conservative movement in America is starting to lose its ability to articulate a coherent position. Over the last few days, I've been having a rather interesting debate with Dr. Barry Mauer, a professor at the University of Central Florida, on the whether or not it is proper to have an American flag permanently displayed in every classroom on campus.

During the course of our debate (which is still ongoing as I write this), he pointed me towards an essay he wrote titled Speaking Freely in a Time of War.

The essay is written from a liberal point of view and looks primarily at free speech in a wartime environment and how it is challenged by fundamentally weak arguments by the right. I disagree with several of the details, such as the media is protecting Bush or that the Marshall Plan was likely a plan to spread US corporate power in the aftermath of WWII. But to focus on a few disagreeable details is to miss the bigger, and more accurate, picture. The defenders of the conservative movement in America are losing their ability to form a defensible and coherent argument.

In the years since the end of WWII, America has been working its way through a long term political cycle. From the end of the War right through the Johnson Administration, the Democrats, and their ideas, were the dominating influence on America. Even Eisenhower, nominally a Republican, went in for expansion of government (see the Interstate Highway System). The real peak of this Democratic wave hit during the Kennedy Administration.

Some people will debate the overall effectiveness or value of JFK's term in office, but for my purposes in this argument, Kennedy was the high water mark for the liberal/Democratic idea. More than any other Democrat before or after, he was able to articulate his ideas; he was able to articulate his thoughts; and he was able to inspire great dreams in Americans.

Kennedy was a communicator. The only reason that he was able to defeat Nixon was because he was able to articulate and defend a position when Nixon could not. Nixon may have been a better policy man than JFK; he may have been a better choice in 1960 (we'll never know), but in the end he lost the election because he could not effectively articulate the conservative position. (As for all the accusations of vote rigging and other irregularities, if Nixon had been an effective communicator, the election wouldn't have been close enough for any of that to matter.)

One of the side effects of the years of Democratic sway in the US was that the conservative movement began to find its voice. The right learned how to build and defend a position. And as they were doing so, the left began to think of themselves as infallible. Throughout the mid to late '60s, the balance of articulation shifted to the right.

The greatness articulated by Kennedy and his space program gave way to the despair of Johnson that brought on the Great Society. Johnson was never able to solidly articulate his reasoning behind the Great Society. His inarticulation, combined with the coherent messages being brought forth by Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon on the national level, and by men like Ronald Reagan in some of the influential states, eventually signaled a fundamental shift in society from left to right.

Throughout the '70s, even taking into account Watergate and the Ford Administration, the right kept presenting the American people with a valid and believable message, while the left kept right on making irrational and indefensible arguments.

The administration of Ronald Reagan beginning in 1980, like the administration of Kennedy starting in 1960, signaled the real high point in the conservative movement since the end of WWII. Reagan, like Kennedy before him, was a great communicator. He knew how to talk to the American people. He knew how to reach them. And most importantly, he knew how to present the conservative position to them in a way that they understood.

The landslide reelection of Reagan in 1984 seemed to wake the liberal movement up to the fact that they were considered out of touch and clueless by the American populace. They understood at that point, that they had lost their ability to debate and that they were instead relying on many of the enthymemes that Dr. Mauer discusses in his essay.

It was in the mid to late '80s that many of our current crop of political commentators got their start. And they had argumentative biases set that still persist to this day.

On the conservative side, there was established a belief that the best way to argue with a liberal was to challenge them in the manner in which they challenged you. In other words, the current conservative commentators learned that they could effectively influence large numbers of people with weak, but good sounding, arguments. Fact and reason started to lose their prominence as the basis for argument and were instead replaced to a large degree by intellectually simple arguments that appealed to a large non-critically thinking segment of the population. Bill O'Reilly is one of the best examples of this trend. He can debate someone like Al Sharpton, who also uses these intellectually weak arguments, without any problem, but when it comes to debating a Harvard educated record executive his only response is the repetition of "But it's mind poison" (first noted here).

In contrast, Allan Colmes would have gotten his ideological grounding at about the same time, in the mid to late '80s. It is also obvious that he studied the faults of the hippie liberal generation and learned that in order to truly promote the liberal position, he had to do more than sloganeering. He learned to formulate positions and to make them defensible.

Watch Fox's Hannity and Colmes one night and you'll see an example of the diverging approaches used by each side right now. Sean Hannity is the more popular of the two hosts, but part of the reason why is because he uses intellectually simplistic arguments that, while indefensible, anyone can follow. Colmes on the other hand, suffers from constructing real arguments that require some intellectual effort to follow. And so his popularity suffers. It's also interesting to note, that Colmes is often written off by the left as a false liberal because his positions aren't far enough left to suit the powers that be. I think that this is more a reflection of the fact that a well thought out position, viewed from either perspective, will tend towards a moderate approach. But I'm digressing.

If we look at the Presidential elections since the end of the Reagan Administration, we see the same pattern continuing. Bush won in '88 because he was a more effective communicator than Dukakis. But in '92 the lessons the left had learned from their Reagan years in the political wilderness were brought onto the national stage full force by Bill Clinton.

Clinton was another communicator. There were large segments of the population that disagreed with nearly every policy decision he undertook, but in the end he was able to communicate his ideas and to inspire people that wanted to believe him. Clinton recognized that in Presidential elections, the voting public wants to hear thought out and theoretically defensible positions (this is why the Presidential debates do so well and are so heavily discussed whereas most people don't even realize that there are mayoral debates also). Clinton gave them that. Bush, Sr., thinking he could ride into another four years with intellectually easy arguments, did not. What were the big issues for each party in '92? For the Democrats it was health care. For the Republicans it was he's a dope-smoking, draft-dodging, womanizer.

In '96, Clinton once again out-communicated his opponent, Bob Dole.

The Republicans learned their lesson during the Clinton years and the election of GW Bush was as much a factor of communication as was true in the election of Kennedy over Nixon. Gore never articulated what he stood for, other than a continuation of Clinton. Bush put forth a reasoned and articulated argument for why we needed something different.

Since taking office, the Democrats have been getting frustrated by the fact that Bush can communicate with the common American. Like with Reagan, they can't understand why the American people will listen to someone is so obviously intellectually inferior.

But I can't bring myself to call Bush a communicator yet. He, like his father before him, falls prey to many of the weak techniques described by Dr. Mauer. If the Democrats can present and articulate a reasonable platform in '04, then it is very possible that Bush may lose.

Part of the reason why Howard Dean seems to have such staying power in the Democratic race is because he seems to be the sole candidate for the Democrats capable of building a true position. Many of his positions are disagreeable to me, but then again, so was the idea of nationalized health care. Dean may very well be able to win the election running on a platform of tax increases if he can present the American people with a reasonable argument for why they are necessary.

Of the other Democratic candidates, the only one who seems to have any skill of articulation is Al Sharpton, but as I said earlier he is too prone to taking the intellectually easy argument to be a true factor.

Bush has to develop a platform that consists of more than "I won the war in Iraq" and "More tax cuts." These arguments are incredibly weak, but they're all he's proposed so far. He's got to get on the ball. Otherwise, he may very well lose the election to an articulate Democrat.

The right does have time to right its ship before it ends up in a political Bermuda Triangle again like it was in during the '60s. The right hasn't completely lost its ability to formulate defensible positions and the left hasn't again perfected their ability to do so.

But if things keep shifting the way they have been over the last few years, the right will once again lose the debate.