A post for the kind of people who will never read it

We’re all afraid of the political middle, or so it seems when I look at what passes for political dialogue out there in the blogosphere and on TV. We sometimes want to be able to claim centrism, but most of us don’t have much centrism in our dialogue. Here’s a hypothesis about why this might be so: maybe we’ve bought so fully into the two-party system that we truly see the political world in America as a war between two factions. If you’re not one of us, you’re against us. If you’re not clearly, unquestionably one of us, then you’re also not one of us. So, you darn well better make it clear just how radically left/right you are. Say nothing that could be construed as giving an inch to the enemy.

The nasty secret is that we’re not actually afraid of the enemy; we’re afraid of being branded traitors. The enemy can’t hurt us, in this situation; only our allies can.

This leaves us with a (relatively) new category of thoughtcrime, punishable within all political ideologies: insufficient orthodoxy. The punishment is to be treated like an outsider (indistinguishable from the enemy, because there is no middle ground). The only real defense is polarized, black-white thinking and speech. Dissenters must be characterized as being fully and completely opposite. Incompatible. Irreconcilably different. Fundamentally antagonistic. Failure to speak of others in these terms, or to speak loudly enough, might cause our co-ideologues to suspect our loyalty to the cause, and then… pfft. Out the door.

So Bush is a jack-booted fascist. Cheney is a shadowy kingpin of international petroleum fraud. Ashcroft is a glowing-eyed Svengali of legal manipulation. Rove is a fat Stalin, stuffing ballot boxes with both hands while he screams invective through others’ mouths.

Obama is a red-coated socialist. Clinton is a sexless, scheming climber who clawed her way to Washington through the swamp of her husband’s ineptitude. Ayers is still building bombs in his basement, and has one ready for every good, patriotic American institution. Gore is a false apocalyptic prophet who takes nightly baths in the mountains of money his empire of doomsaying has accrued.

These caricatures seem to ooze from my computer and TV screens. It’s as if we’re terrified of prosaic reality. As if we think we can’t win any argument in which we concede that anything other than pure evil and pure good (or pure brilliance and pure idiocy) might exist in the political world. I wonder if, deep down, Keith Olbermann realizes that Bush is not actually a fascist. Yes, his administration checks off a few of the characteristics of fascism, especially with the right spin. He pushed militarism, nationalist pride and symbolism, conformity to patriotic themes, and rallying against a common enemy that he and his folks made out to be much more monolithic than it actually was, but that’s not the same thing. It’s not fascism. It’s just some characteristics of it. I wonder if the liberal pundits could admit the possibility that the Surge had some benefit, or that Bush’s reaction to the attacks of 2001 might have been good for national security.

I wonder if Glen Beck realizes that Obama is not actually a socialist. Again, he has some socialist characteristics: he clearly wants to redistribute wealth, using his (and others’) elected power. He wants to use federal economic incentives to increase volunteerism and civic involvement, effectively redistributing labor. He is right up there at the front of the bipartisan mob of people who want to use taxpayer money that does not yet exist to bail out industries that are feeling what might be called the consequences of the unavoidable risks in capitalist economies. But that’s not socialism. It’s just some characteristics of it. I wonder if the right-wing shock-jocks could conceive of the possibility that increased diplomacy and reduced militarism might have benefits for national security, or that increasing healthcare for children might be a legitimately patriotic priority.

The scariest idea is that maybe these extremist public figures actually fully believe their own words. It’s more comforting to me to think that they must realize, at least sometimes, how silly their extremism is.

Some elements of a thing do not a thing make. Rat poison and ice cream have elements in common. We’ve arrived at a point, however, where it would seem insipid and powerless to say, “Barack Obama’s economic views share certain priorities and processes in common with socialism.” That wouldn’t sell any online ads or TV spots at all. It’s much cooler to say, “Barack the Socialist.”

Well, I don’t know what to do about it. How do you get people motivated to think more, rather than less? To speak in less exciting ways, with greater long-term benefits, rather than in more exciting ways, with more short-term payoff? I really don’t know. This post is about problems, not solutions. Apparently.