Yesterday I wrote a diary briefly explaining some characteristics of conservative thought that deeply frighten me.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/20/202723/129
The basic point was that often, in conservative discourses, there seems to be a fundamental intolerance of dissent which translates into arbitrary exercises of power designed to stifle discussion and debate, which indicates to me that conservatives have little or no respect for me should I differ from them and would act accordingly at a governmental level should they have the power to do so.
More below the fold:
To illustrate this, I chose an exchange on Redstate as a symptomatic example, where someone named Storm Survivor was very reasonably responding to the claim that democrats are weak on defense by pointing to flaws in Bush's policies and various democratic proposals, only to find himself subsequently banned.
http://kmaher.redstate.org/story/2005/9/20/05244/7355
Storm Survivor was polite and provided sound reasons, yet rather than address these uncomfortable points they simply banned him. Today I received a response seeking to pacify my fears from Leon H of Redstate.
Bear with me, I haven't figured out how to do block quotes, so pay attention to the quotation marks to read Leon's response.
Leon H kindly writes:
"I admit it. I have a fetish for this kind of diary. So, let me offer you a few helpful comments that will hopefully ease your fear of us RedStaters.
"First, you conflate us banning someone with trying to silence them. That's not so. You can say anything you want. We won't stop you. We don't have to provide you a megaphone in the form of bandwidth to do it in, though, and usually we won't.
"Now, as to why we so frequently ban Kossacks, it generally works something like this. For whatever reason, whether it be due to personal connections between guys at the higher levels (as in the case of dKos), or various other considerations (we really have assembled a fine collection of conservative writers for the front page), we are frequently linked by a lot of liberal blogs who are a lot bigger than we are.
"Now, what generally happens, is that each one of those links sends over a deluge of people who all generally want to make the same point, and feel entitled to be treated like they are the first person making that point. And, in the end, because we are a relative speck in comparison to dKos, we often find ourselves literally overrun with liberal commentors, to the point where the conservatives don't feel at home.
"We could allow this to go on, and have our comments section become like LGF or some similar site, but we've made a conscious decision to not be that kind of place. And so, respectful liberals with interesting things to say can stay indefinitely (Addison, ChiMod, amos, acbonin and the rest). The rest, who are simply seeking to rabble-rouse and parrot talking points, are banned. And thusly we remain a site for Republican activism, instead of a place to mudwrestle with ideological opponents."
Now the point point that I would like readers of this response to pay special attention to is where Leon remarks that he doesn't want Redstate to be overrun and that they just want to create a place where conservatives can feel at home. These are remarkable statements, and speak to a certain structure of thought and perception. Put otherwise, these statements are xenophobic. The idea of being overrun is often heard in homogeneous communities who are being faced with ethnic newcomers for the very first time. These foreigners or strangers are experienced as "making us feel uneasy in our home."
It is precisely this distinction between from-here/not-from-here that concerns me about conservatives, as I see myself and many other fellow Americans being experienced by them as maurading hords due to their differing beliefs. Living in a society such as ours, it is impossible to avoid encountering difference. This entails that we must have a government that promotes difference and which is able to foster civil debate amog a variety of different policy perspectives and distill some compromise between these different perspectives. What is of importance here is not respecting everyone's view and treating it as gospel truth, but of at least creating a space where these different perspectives can dialogue and reach some sort of consensus. Yet apparently Leon, and those who think like him, believe that people trying to make a good faith effort to reach some mutual understanding ought to be rewarded with being excluded altogether. That is, the conservative problem to the solution of difference is to get rid of difference altogether. Far from pacifying my fear, Leon has frightened me even more with his xenophobic and territorial talk of being overrun and not feeling at home. No doubt this is how many conservatives feel about various groups in the United States: They're overrunning us! We're the one's who rightfully belong here!
What is even more remarkable in Leon's post is that he doesn't even bother to read the exchange involving Storm Survivor that I referred to in the original diary. Leon doesn't examine the exchange to see whether or not it fits the description of what he was talking about as liberal talking points. But simply assumes that this was the case. There's no question in his mind that any points disagreeing with the views of his ilk are merely "talking points" and therefore subject to summary dismissal. That is, there's no question of truth or of modifying one's position when confronted with evidence to the contrary.
I know that Kossacks and liberals aren't perfect. I know that there are those who abuse the rating system here. I know that sometimes people here get banned for reasons that look more like exercises of power than just and considered applications of the rules. However, it seems to me that the left is perpetually striving to critique itself and to change its positions, so as to be both just and true, and that it possesses a marked willingness to listen to dissenting voices and carefully try to refute these voices or to modify its positions in response to them. It does not seem that we find this on the right. Are people who behave in this way truly fit to rule and lead? Was it not the Administrations refusal to listen to dissenting voices what led to a war based on faulty intelligence and such poor planning after the war? Has Leon not missed the entire point, thinking this is an issue of how to run a blog, and not noticing that this is a question of how one ethical and justly responds to dissent in governing a nation?
This is precisely the point: The attitude of conservatives is structured around a certain attitude towards groups-- An attitude which strives to produce maximum identity, while minimizing productive debate aimed at getting at the truth. This cannot but be dangerous to the health of democracy as the events of the last five years have aptly demonstrated.