Fareed

This blog has long considered Fareed Zakaria to be one of the top minds in the political spectrum but recently he set out to convince his viewers of a concept that simply doesn’t fly. Using student reactions to VP Pence at Notre Dame, Betsy DeVos at Bethune-Cookman, Anne Coulter at Cal and Milos Yanopolis at St Paul as examples, Zakaria objected to the loss of what he calls debate by serious conservative speakers. His problem would normally be valid but since none of those sited have shown any ability to carry on an intelligent discussion based on reality or facts, this writer feels Fareed has jumped the shark. This especially pertains to Pence. Fareed’s premise would certainly be valid if he had chosen speakers that had shown some penchant for serous debate or intelligent discussion based on facts but those he is defending have based their entire rhetoric on rabble rousing and denial of all accepted levels of truth.

Fareed is looking for intellectual discourse and he’s right to do so but you can’t win an argument with a hog. You can’t even start one. And that is the problem with Fareed’s position. He wants intelligent discourse but that presupposes intelligence on both sides of the table. Unfortunately the forces on the current far right side of any such discourse have developed a long standing reputation for being anti-intellectual, thereby establishing themselves as being as ignorant as humanly possible while still being able to stand upright; a circumstance that bodes ill for any kind of intelligent discourse.

Fareed states that it’s strange that the colleges where this is happening are strongholds of liberal education and he goes on to define liberal as evolving from its Latin root; Liber to mean free, pertaining to liberty. He goes on to explain that at the heart of the liberal tradition in the western world has been freedom of speech, which means allowing and protecting speech with which you disagree. It is here that this blog heartily disagrees with Fareed. Yes we must protect the right of anyone to speak his thoughts but there is nothing in the concept of freedom of speech that establishes the need for anyone to listen to it or to endorse the right to lie.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that when we protect freedom of thought we are protecting the thought that we hate. True, but that doesn’t mean that we have to agree with it,, or waste our time debating it.

The leaders of the White Supremacist movement have every right to spew their hatred and vile thoughts but we don’t have to waste our time debating the truth of those thoughts. The falsehood of them is more often than not self-evident. Their followers are often too ignorant to understand intelligent arguments but mostly too vested in their fundamentalist positions to accept another point of view even if they did.

The students who walked out on their own graduation at Notre Dame didn’t do so to stop Pence from speaking. He went right on with his blatant lies and cynical quasi-morality. What they did was make a statement that they would not respect the lies, immoral racist concepts and twisted view of the contorted religious beliefs that the VP was spewing forth. And by the way, Notre Dame, buried in Catholicism, is anything but a liberal university.

The student protest against DeVos at Bethune-Cookman was born of the fact that this woman basically had nothing to say. She is almost completely un-credentialed. She holds her office not by dint of education or experience but because she is the wife and daughter-in-law of rich men who donated a large amount of money to the campaign of our current President. She was speaking at a school, the existence of which stands as a symbol that everything she believes in and is trying to accomplish is unequivocally wrong. Her very existence is an affront to everyone in attendance at that school and her policies are aimed at destroying the education system that school was created to reward. I can say without a doubt that if Ms DeVos had decided to come to Bethune-Cookman to debate her policy or lack hereof with the students or faculty, they would have welcomed her with open arms and taken great relish in showing her up for the dangerous fool she is. But allowing her to come on their campus to vomit out her lies and misconceptions was just more than is necessary to establish an atmosphere of free speech.

As for Coulter and Yanopolis, they are just a pair of hideous crackpots, spewing out hate and every kind of vile bigotry and racism. Keeping them from speaking is not the right approach to their hatred. Rather they should have been allowed to speak but there should have been a concerted effort to not attend the events. Empty seats are the loudest comment on the work of such despicable hate mongers.

None of the above mentioned speakers were unknown commodities. Their opinions were already well known to anyone with an interest in what is happening in this country. So it was not necessary for anyone to hear them again to know that they had nothing new to offer to any intelligent discussion.

Fareed goes on to say that no one has a monopoly on right or virtue. That may be true but in a Trumpian world where no one thinks for himself, or regards truth as a goal to be attained, many self-expressed positions immediately inform us as to who is right and who is wrong. Quickly self-evident are those who have moral standing in regard to said positions, and who do not.

Talking to each other seriously and respectfully is the only way to solve the great problems currently facing our nation but in order to have that serious conversation we must be able to discern that our opponents respect the concept of truth and that he or she is open minded enough to consider arguments based on logical thought. So far, the far right, as exemplified by Donald Trump and his followers on Fox News and talk radio have not been able to satisfy those criteria in any way, shape or form so how do we get to debate?

To this thought, Fareeed says that liberals think they are too pure to accept any other point of view. I say this is incorrect. Liberals have for years, tried to debate points of political fact and moral responsibility with the right and the right has fought back with lies, moral equivalency or ambiguity. When a full fifty percent of everything the President says on TV is factually incorrect according to a consensus of fact checkers, there is no longer any point at which one can start a reasonable debate. When members of his administration can no longer give sensible answers to logical questions because Trump has lied them into a corner, there is no longer a position from which to debate. When neither Trump nor his lackeys will answer a straight question on policy because anything they could possibly say will be a lie, there is no longer a need for debate because we are long past the point where a debate will solve anything. Debate or the use of free speech to arrive at a point of mutual agreement is dead, killed by the Right’s lack of an understanding of the meaning of truth or their ability to formulate logic.

There is no way to convince the fundamentalist mind that a position, which for centuries has been imbedded in their psyche, so that they might continue down a path long ago decided on for them by others, can in any way, shape or form be wrong. That is known as having a closed mind. So when Mike Pence stands in front of a national audience and states that there is still open debate on the existence of global warming, when he is completely aware that the scientific community stands 99% behind the concept of the existence of said global warming, there is no longer any place for debate. When Pence bases his argument on scripture, specifically a section of the bible in which God promises Noah that he will never destroy mankind again, there is no place for logical debate. Pence is using a 2700 year old text, written by four illiterate men and retranslated by no one knows how many others. This is a text chosen from eighty others by a Roman Emperor who did not believe in the religion being promoted, but who did this task to please his mother. When the Vice-President of the United States uses this kind of evidence to support a position in an argument, there is no longer any basis for argument. There is only basis for satire.

I’m sorry Fareed but there is no longer any basis for debate, only a basis for scorn. The Left must abandon its position as the civilized portion of the population, a position that has left it and its missions in shambles and move to fight the Right with all the tools it has at its command. Unfortunately civilized debate is no longer one of those tools because there is simply no opponent left to debate.

You may think it’s elitist for those on the Left to feel that way, but this blog simply points to the other side and sees that such is the case. The Right has neither the tools nor the moral insight, nor indeed the grasp of the concept of truth needed to make any kind of debate possible. All that’s left is outright war.