I didn't put the word horrible in your mouth. Nor did I make you suggest that American conservatives are deluded by dark, sinister forces which have cleverly led them to believe the evil things they believe.

You were being patronizing, which is an easily recognizable form of contempt. I'm taking the same attitude toward you, in the perhaps vain hope that it might help you see how rude you're being. I'm also quite happy to classify you culturally as a function of your belief system, which is once again good for the gander.

As it happens, I don't have a problem with either "torture" or gay marriage. However, because I have been exposed to plenty of perfectly intelligent arguments for waterboarding and against gay marriage, I can tell you haven't been. No, I would not recommend Fox News as an introduction to conservative thought - try Burke. Or better yet Maistre. And have some more arugula, preferably with the chevre.

(Also, if you think there's a meaningful difference between American communism and "socialism" or "radicalism" or "progressivism" or "liberalism," I suggest the following exercise - pick an arbitrary NYT obituary of anyone over 80, ie anyone who was an adult in the '40s, and try to classify your subject as "communist," "socialist," "progressive" or "liberal." Unless you say that only a card-carrying CPUSA member can be a "communist," which is an abuse of the English language, you'll find no basis for any such distinction.)

I chose those two issues for a reason. Certainly there may be intelligent arguments for waterboarding or gay marriage, but they are few and far between those driven by emotions stirred up by the right wing media. And I don't think it's unfair to call these particular issues, as supported by mainstream conservative thought, horrible, since in the realm of torture you are going back against decades of international law and human decency, and in the case of criminalizing gay marriage you are basically carbon copying the discriminatory laws seen before the civil rights movement. Are you suggesting that just because people thought it was OK to ban interracial marriage just a mere few decades ago, it's unfair to claim that those views are horrible now?

And yes, I've read Burke and other conservative thinkers of the past. If you think these viewpoints have anything to do with mainstream "conservatism" in America, I don't know what to tell you.

Decades! ZOMG, decades. That's like, totally ancient.

Can I stereotype you again? You've read a ten-page excerpt of Burke in your sophomore poli-sci reader. Like claiming to know all about Mexico because you once spent a week in Acapulco. The rest of the country being, of course, "horrible." Why risk Montezuma's revenge? Go read the Regicide Peace, cover to cover, then come back and talk about Burke:

http://archive.org/details/thoughtsonprospe00burkiala

What was offensive about your post was not that you claimed certain views were "horrible," but that you assumed this position on the way to an entirely separate argument. Moreover, your approach to those who held these views was not to argue with them, but to patronize them.

You even appeared touched by great and tender concern for the poor Fox News viewer - a concern which can't possibly be genuine, because we can only be genuinely concerned with those we actually know and interact with. If you knew and interacted with ordinary American conservatives while talking this way about them, you'd receive a swift punch in the nose or at least its digital equivalent.

In short, you've seen the usual story about the "brogrammer" who talks about women as if there were no women in the room. s/women/conservatives. While I am not even slightly deluded as to the health of American "conservatism" (the scare quotes, for once, are entirely appropriate), I consider the importance of good manners all the greater when the victim doesn't have the iron fist of the EEOC in her back pocket.

I appreciate the point that you are trying to make, but your issue seems to be largely about my tone and the 'patronizing' nature of my argument, and not about the argument itself. I still think you are swinging largely at ghosts here, as it's not particularly patronizing that I take what conservatives say at face value: waterboarding is necessary to protect our country, and same-sex marriage/civil unions jeopardize the foundations of family and community. This is their position, publicly and privately. The stance I presume to be "horrible" is that 'waterboarding is not torture' (it is) and that explicitly denying gay couples equal treatment under the law is constitutional (it isn't.) Take these for what they are worth, I stand by them, and maybe I'm wrong for presuming them in my argument. If there are more nuanced points here and I am on one side of a highly subjective issue, would enjoy hearing them. (note I am aware of more subtle variations of these arguments, eg, that other forms of coercion are legal and ethical, or that gay couples should be granted civil unions, but I do not feel these are mainstream conservative viewpoints, as we've learned by seeing NC pass a law banning both civil unions and marriage and mainstream conservatives defending, and enacting policies to enable waterboarding.)

Also, the tactic of patronizing me in a manner to make me realize I am being patronizing, while clever, doesn't really open me up to being receptive to hearing what you have to say.

You don't often see conservatives in America arguing the subtle role of government and where the line can be drawn on these issues, and where it ought to be drawn. This is the conversation that we should be having on these topics, and we are not. However, they are quick to point out where government intervention goes too far in some areas, such as in tax law. This asymmetry is striking and leads me to believe there is something deeper going on.

My original post was postulating a clear, at least to me, example of two issues that have been strategically complected with other portable ideas to most of America. This process results the arguments we hear rest not upon the ethical/moral/legal nature of the acts themselves, but upon the potential consequences of not doing them. This is a red flag: it points to arguments that are coming from somewhere, but not from the overt facts and historical context of those specific issues, but deeper, more subtle shared values that override those matters. There is a reason, after all, that it is the right wing in this country identifies themselves as "values voters" and has "values voter summits." Its because they share these common ideals and their views on specific issues often framed in a way to fall out of these ideals.

My point is that the right wing media perverts and simplifies issues in order to shoehorn them into fitting into this ideological framework to make them portable to many people. The nice thing about controlling the message is that you can often find arguments to tie either side of an issue to general, broad ideals. The result, of course, is massive surface-level hypocrasy ("Get your government hands off my medicare") but internal, hidden, consistency due to the fact that their views tie back to a few basic ideals.

It is this phenomenon I was getting at with my post, and I was hoping you would attack these points more directly, instead of coming to the defense of classical conservatism (which I am not attacking, and is largely dead) and telling me I am being patronizing by saying people are being manipulated despite the well understood, documented, and measured phenomenon of Fox News in the U.S. misleading viewers and manipulating them by tying complicated issues to very simplistic ideals in a way that suits their agenda and takes reasoned debate off the playing field.

I won't reply to your next response in order to give you the last word. I appreciate you making the time to respond to my posts and I hope on good faith you will restrain yourself from further ad hom attacks and your, as you admit yourself, patronizing tone.

Alas, the reason I've avoided addressing your argument (as you put it) is that it would require me to be ruder than I'd like. You're being polite (to me), so let's see if we can work around that.

Your whole vision of the way "the right-wing media" "controls the message" could uncharitably be described as a "conspiracy theory," a term I'd like to avoid (not least because real conspiracies do exist in real history). It's perhaps more neutral to say that it has nothing to do with reality.

The reason that American conservatives believe the things they believe is that those things seem obvious to them, and no one has yet succeeded in convincing them otherwise. In the long term (by your "decades" definition) we see a gradual retreat, as you can see from evidence like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_14_(1963...

(Yes, in 1963 it seemed obvious to an overwhelming majority of Californians that segregated housing was a good idea. Fortunately, the new enlightened Californians have proved them wrong with the enlightened rainbow society we've created. If only 1963 could see how great California is today! Ha, ha, ha.)

Fox News is an entirely demotic, grass-roots organization. Its goal is to make money, and it makes money by showing its viewers a reality they find credible. You could say it reinforces their existing beliefs, but even this would be ascribing some conspiratorial intent beyond making money. Murdoch sure does make a lot of that.

It's only the American left that has genuine leadership institutions which work to frame the debate. There is no right-wing Harvard. There is no right-wing New York Times. There are various small scattered circles of intellectuals, generally poorly funded. The only professional conservatives are neoconservatives, ie, post-Trotskyists. Nothing at all survives of either McCarthyism or isolationism, the two even remotely effective oppositions to the New Deal heritage - both comical by pre-20th century standards, American or European. In short, American conservatism is a pathetic joke, and any liberal who worries about it is a paranoid.

Why do so many liberals have this vision of Dr. Evil cleverly twisting the minds of innocent Ohioans? In a word, projection. It is simply impossible for the liberal to fathom how pathetic and inept his so-called opponents are. In part this is because he wants to think of himself as the oppressed underdog, rather than the ruling establishment.

Here's a wonderful example of the "framing" mentality I recently found, in the wild, by a respected and intelligent commenter on the extremely erudite Crooked Timber:

But I’d say, just because affirmative action is a lonely and isolated victory doesn’t mean we should abandon it. I also think that fighting for other lonely and isolated victories is… the best we can do. This is basically what I took away from MLK’s letter from a Birmingham prison. We are never really going to get the apathetic white moderates on board with a radical change, but we can hope to somehow create a new more radical status quo and then over time get apathetic white moderates on board with what’s now the status quo. So each policy we manage to get enacted is shaky and not well-supported for, like, 50 years. Then it will have become normal enough that we can repaint the landscape: the policy will probably still be contentious, but if we gradually repaint things right, it will be the people trying to undo the policy that will look like radicals.

http://crookedtimber.org/2012/04/14/needless-to-say-part-ii/...

I find this an extremely representative picture of the complexity and deviousness of the 20th-century American "liberal" mind. You're playing 3-D chess. Your opponents are playing tic-tac-toe, and not very good tic-tac-toe at that. Is it possible that if you can first overcome your fear, you can later learn to overcome your hatred?