Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith

Opinion

Why liberals can’t get away with calling all conservatives ‘crazy’

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One of these words is not like the others (or maybe they’re all pretty much the same — you make the call): Loon, nutjob, crank, wingnut, whackjob, cuckoo, crackpot, dingbat, wacko, conservative.

Can’t spot the outlier? You might be a liberal. Because even among the Very Serious and Highly Respected voices on the left, “conservative” and “crazy” are synonyms.

A recent example: A highly acclaimed book that examines the conservative movement in the 1970s, Rick Perlstein’s “The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.” The book is the kind of thing that liberals praise as an evenhanded portrait of the Right. You know, kinda like how “Super Size Me” was totally fair about McDonald’s.

One liberal dissenter, Sam Tanenhaus, writing in The Atlantic, describes the book as implying “contempt not just for Nixon but for the public that eventually elected him president twice, the second time in one of the biggest landslides in history. For Perlstein, the mere fact of a President Nixon is explicable only as pathology. . . . Perlstein describes the centrist Nixon as the sole author of ‘the fracturing of America,’ who feasted on middle-American fears . . . even as he turned the federal government into a private militia.”

The book, continues Tanenhaus, is “a manic chronicle of what Philip Roth, in a different context, once called ‘Pure American Dada,’ and what Perlstein himself has labeled the ‘wingnuttism’ of the ‘whackadoodle far-right.’ Perlstein’s gift for energetic caricature and his taste for bizarre incidents have overpowered his impulse to sift through the ideas and beliefs that animate his subjects, and to grapple seriously with a politics rooted in authentic if not always coherent dissent.”

If you have any doubts about Perlstein’s mindset, his 2012 Rolling Stone column, written as Republicans were in the process of nominating known crazypants Mitt Romney to be their party’s standard-bearer, is a little more frank. “Conservatism has gotten crazier than ever,” he wrote. “Are right-wingers scarier now than in the past? They certainly seem stranger and fiercer. I’d argue, however, that they’ve been this crazy for a long time . . . Loony conservatives are now the Republican mainstream, the dominant force in the GOP.”

Yet Perlstein is a liberal’s idea of “balanced” and someone who “doesn’t condescend” (Frank Rich, in his New York Times Book Review rave).

What about the liberal writers who make no pretense whatsoever of understanding their ideological opposites? Here’s a partial list of the hundreds of conservatives who have been labeled “wingnut” by Salon.com alone: Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts, Justice Antonin Scalia, columnist Jonah Goldberg, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (and his predecessor Eric Cantor), the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Sen. Marco Rubio and Gov. Chris Christie.

If these people and institutions are cuckoo, then conservatism itself is crazy. And that is exactly what liberals think. (Sometimes this tendency takes eccentric form, as when liberals argue that it’s “crazy” not to panic about climate change.)

Liberals hope to tag completely mainstream conservative thought as outside the boundaries of polite discourse, but the electorate keeps refusing to comply by, for instance, electing a Congress designed to serve as a stalwart check on progressivism for 16 of last 20 years. This is baffling to liberals. How can that many Americans be batspit insane?

Remember that liberals are the ones who are always claiming to have superior powers of empathy and tolerance — and a more sophisticated sense of science, which has shown us that conservatives are actually the ones who are better at seeing things from the other guy’s point of view. An experiment by psychologist Jonathan Haidt (sometimes called “an ideological Turing test”) asked liberals and conservatives to put themselves in the other guy’s socks for the duration of a test and ask them: How would your ideological opponent answer?

Conservatives were far better at liberals at this game, though that should have been easy to guess. When a conservative goes to the movies, picks up nearly any newspaper or watches TV news on any channel but one, he gets the liberal point of view. Liberals, especially in a place like New York, can easily seal themselves off from principled conservative thinking and many choose to do so. A result is that they haven’t a clue how conservatives think.

Liberals also kid themselves that they’re better at arguing than conservatives, but calling your opponent crazy is an appeal to emotion, not reason. It’s also a lazy schoolyard taunt, and it fails an elementary rule of debate, the prohibition of ad hominem remarks.

As Margaret Thatcher once put it, “I always cheer up immensely if [criticism] is particularly wounding because I think well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.”