The rhetoric of the “reasonable right”

Sep 1st, 2019 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Eve Fairbanks argues at the Washington Post that there is some overlap between the rhetoric of the dark web types and that of the “respectable” antebellum defenders of slavery.

My childhood home is just a half-hour drive from the Manassas battlefield in Virginia, and I grew up intensely fascinated by the Civil War. I loved perusing soldiers’ diaries. During my senior year in college, I studied almost nothing but Abraham Lincoln’s speeches. As I wrote my thesis on a key Lincoln address, Civil War rhetoric was almost all I read: not just that of the 16th president but also that of his adversaries.

Thinking back on those debates, I finally figured it out. The reasonable right’s rhetoric is exactly the same as the antebellum rhetoric I’d read so much of. The same exact words. The same exact arguments. Rhetoric, to be precise, in support of the slave-owning South.

If that sounds absurd — Shapiro and his compatriots aren’t defending slavery, after all — it may be because many Americans are unfamiliar with the South’s actual rhetoric. When I was a kid in public school, I learned the arguments of Sen. John C. Calhoun (D-S.C.), who called slavery a “positive good,” and Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy’s vice president, who declared that the South’s ideological “cornerstone” rested “upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man.”

But such clear statements were not the norm. Proslavery rhetoricians talked little of slavery itself. Instead, they anointed themselves the defenders of “reason,” free speech and “civility.” The prevalent line of argument in the antebellum South rested on the supposition that Southerners were simultaneously the keepers of an ancient faith and renegades — made martyrs by their dedication to facts, reason and civil discourse.

They had to, didn’t they. They couldn’t just say: “We can’t get rich by growing cotton any other way because the work is too horrible and the climate is even worse.” They had to make it sound convincing, and dignified.

It might sound strange that America’s proslavery faction styled itself the guardian of freedom and minority rights. And yet it did. In a deep study of antebellum Southern rhetoric, Patricia Roberts-Miller, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Texas at Austin, characterizes the story that proslavery writers “wanted to tell” between the 1830s and 1860s as not one of “demanding more power, but of David resisting Goliath.”

And they did it after the war, too. Mainstream America bought the story and helped promote it – Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind for instance. “The chivalry,” as slaveowners liked to call themselves. At the same time they talked a lot about “facts” and “science”…kind of like the people who keep saying we need to hear the kind of stale bullshit James Damore was so eager to force on his Google colleagues. “It’s not that men forget (at best) or refuse (at worst) to hire women, it’s that women would rather be teachers or nurses or mommies” – that’s such a new and original line of thought that males in the workplace must be allowed to share their manifestos on the subject in that mostly-male workplace.

The most important thing to know about them, they held, was that they were not the oppressors. They were the oppressed. They were driven to feelings of isolation and shame purely on the basis of freely held ideas, the right of every thinking man. Rep. Alexander Sims (D-S.C.) claimed that America’s real problem was the way Southerners were made to suffer under “the sneers and fanatic ebullitions of ignorant and wicked pretenders to philanthropy.” Booth’s complaint, before he shot Lincoln, wasn’t that he could no longer practice slavery, something he’d never done anyway. Instead, he lamented that he no longer felt comfortable expressing “my thoughts or sentiments” on slavery freely in good company.

The tyranny of opinion, in short. White men must be free to inform everyone of their superiority, or we will be trapped in 1984 forever.

All of this is there in the reasonable right: The claim that they are the little people struggling against prevailing winds. The argument that they’re the ones championing reason and common sense. The allegation that their interlocutors aren’t so much wrong as excessive; they’re just trying to think freely and are being tormented. The reliance on hyperbole and slippery slopes to warn about their adversaries’ intentions and power. The depiction of their opponents as an “orthodoxy,” an epithet the antebellum South loved.

…

Many reasonable-right figures find themselves defending the liberties of people to the right of them. Not because they agree with these people, they say, but on principle. Sam Harris, a popular podcast host, has released three lengthy shows about Charles Murray, a political scientist who is often booed at campus speeches and whose 2017 talk at Middlebury College ended when students injured his host. Murray argues that white people test higher than black people on “every known test of cognitive ability” and that these “differences in capacity” predict white people’s predominance. Harris repeatedly insists he has no vested interest in Murray’s ideas. His only interest in Murray, he claims, rests in his dedication to discussing science and airing controversial views.

But Harris’s claim is implausible. Hundreds of scientists produce controversial work in the fields of race, demographics and inequality. Only one, though, is the social scientist nationally notorious for suggesting that white people are innately smarter than people of color. That Harris chooses to invite this one on his show suggests that he is not merely motivated by freedom of speech. It suggests that he is interested in what Murray has to say.

…

If you hear somebody lament, as Bret Stephens does, that political “opinions that were considered reasonable and normal” not too long ago now must be “delivered in whispers,” it might be antebellum reasoning. If somebody says — as Harris has — that our politics are at risk of ignoring common sense, logic or the realities of human biology, it might be antebellum reasoning. If somebody such as Nicholas Kristof says they don’t like noxious thinkers but urges us to give them platforms for the sake of “protecting dissonant and unwelcome voices,” it might be antebellum reasoning. The truth is that we have more avenues now for free expression in America than we’ve ever had.

If somebody says liberals have become illiberal, you should consider whether it’s true. But you should also know that this assertion has a long history and that George Wallace and Barry Goldwater used it in their eras to powerful effect. People who make this claim aren’t “renegades.” They’re heirs to an extremely specific tradition in American political rhetoric, one that has become a dangerous inheritance.

Jonathan Haidt misrepresents the argument:

Here’s a bad kind of argument: If you favor X and some very bad people favored X, then you are wrong and, by association, bad. Here is @evefairbanks in WaPo likening me & others who favor “facts, reason, and civil discourse” to defenders of slavery:

But that isn’t what she says. She likens the rhetoric Haidt and others use to the rhetoric defenders of slavery used.

Jason Stanley (whom I don’t always agree with) replied:

Not how I read this piece at all. The point is rather tha[t] defenses of reasonableness, civility, and free speech often function to normalize greed and self-interest, sometimes intentionally sometimes unintentionally. It’s a vital lesson of history; relevant eg for climate change

Haidt refused to get the point.

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