Russell Taylor: Ducking the Debate

Each generation throws up its share of people arrogant enough to believe history has nothing to teach them, as well as those wise enough to appreciate the limits of their own knowledge. The inevitable conflict between these two visions means we are destined to have the same arguments, and make the same mistakes, over and over again. In the fullness of time, this leads to exhaustion. People become tired of the endless naysaying and hope for some sort of resolution. They wonder why the decision-makers can’t stop their bickering and come up with a plan they all agree on.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Like settling a dispute over what to order in a Chinese restaurant. Can’t decide between rice and noodles? Screw it, order both. Except it’s not like that at all, because people’s differences are sometimes irreconcilable. What if the mere sight of rice gives you ‘Nam flashbacks? Suddenly the ‘order both’ approach is not a happy compromise, but the trigger for a psychotic episode. Okay, so maybe you shouldn’t be visiting Chinese restaurants if you have a rice phobia, but you get my drift. Asking people to be more tolerant of each other doesn’t resolve their differences; it just ignores them.

You find this argumentative leapfrogging in the abortion debate. Pro-choicers want pro-lifers to budge on their hard-line position, and think they’re being reasonable in offering to meet them in the middle. But pro-lifers don’t see any room for manoeuvre, because they consider abortion to be murder. Calling for them to compromise is the same as asking them to be less uptight about killing babies – and that’s a non-negotiable position as far as they’re concerned. By taking this approach, pro-choicers are trying to fast forward the debate beyond the nub of the issue, which is whether abortion is actually murder.

The political version of this ploy comes when someone says something like, “We all want public services to be run properly and our politicians to be responsible and honest. Let’s stop this Left versus Right nonsense and come up with a plan.” What this voice of reason has done is skirt around the dispute over the size and role of the state and start a discussion about how the government can best use all its money and power. Conservatives aren’t interested in having this conversation, because they don’t think the government should have all that money and power in the first place. It’s the equivalent of a guy with a wrecking ball trying to get past your objections to having your house demolished by asking you which part you’d like him to knock down first.

This is what we on the Right mean when we talk about not conducting the debate on the Left’s terms. Whether it’s done knowingly or not, leftists assume that all reasonable people must agree with them on the important issues, so any grown-up conversation can skip to the part where we decide how best to achieve them. Equality of outcome? Unless you’re a mouth-breathing redneck, it’s a no-brainer, so let the equalising commence. High taxes? Only toffs and bankers would object to them, so let’s decide how they should be spent. Global warming? We all know it’s real and can only be fixed by the government, so let’s get regulating.

The moment you try to haul the debate back to the point of divergence, the other side rolls its eyes with despair and accuses you of being unhelpful or, worse still, an ideologue – ideology being anything that stops them from getting their way. The repercussions of being an ‘ideologue’ are so severe that many people decide it’s not worth the hassle. When politicians, civil servants, the courts, the media, and all the so-called experts, are left-leaning, it’s easier to raise the security barrier and let the trucks of progressivism roll through, than endure the head-splitting racket of blaring horns and revving engines. Political correctness has been key to this process. It’s like a klaxon that goes off in your ear the moment you utter an erroneous thought. It drowns out honest debate and shifts the conversation further up the road, to where the big questions have already been settled in the Left’s favour.

The idea that ‘unhelpful’ opinion deserves to be silenced is what the impending regulation of the press is about. The media outlets most supportive of it are also the most liberal (in the American sense of the word). They assume – correctly, as it happens – that the regulators will be sympathetic to their beliefs and will gun down anyone who tries to escape their ideological Alcatraz. If they suspected for a minute that the regulators had conservative sympathies, press control would be the last thing on their minds.

Leftists see no hypocrisy in their position, because they are blessed with absolute moral certainty. That’s why their desire to fast forward the debate makes perfect sense to them. If you know you are in the right, then conversations about what ‘rightness’ looks like are a waste of time and those who insist on holding them are a nuisance. The worldview presented by the Daily Telegraph (yuck), the Daily Mail (oh God) or Fox News (Der Sturmer and The National Enquirer rolled into one) is beyond the Left’s comprehension.

When in power, New Labour avoided open debate by taking a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing approach. They marketed themselves as friends of freedom, while quietly sticking thousands of progressive laws on the statute book, with scant regard for the democratic process. To use the ever-popular war movie analogy, NuLab were like the German soldiers in The Eagle Has Landed, who infiltrate an English village disguised as Polish paratroopers, as part of a devilish plot to assassinate Churchill (war film aficionados will recognise Went The Day Well? as the superior model for this story). They are only exposed when one of their men rescues a child from a water mill and his jacket is torn, revealing the ill-considered SS uniform beneath. In a similar way (well, not that similar), Labour’s true intentions only became fully apparent when Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair and his ghastly Big State tendencies were revealed. Until then, we’d lived with the illusion that NuLab were responsible, fair-minded and largely committed to the free market.

This is why I was initially pleased to see Ed Miliband come out of the closet and announce himself as proper socialist. No creeping around in Polish uniforms for him. His Panzers came roaring out the treeline, all guns blazing. But then an impudent Tommy shouted something rude about his dad, so he drove to the nearest village and got on the phone to the Geneva Convention committee. Even with an avowed old-school socialist at the helm, it seems the Left still wants to avoid a fair fight, preferring subterfuge, deceit or setting up sympathetic authorities it can run to for help.

In the world of Internet blogs, this kind of underhandedness is evidenced by the ‘concern troll’, who claims to be on a particular group’s side, but works against it by questioning its goals and tactics, and urging it to change tack in a way that will harm its interests. A troll might say for instance, “I’m against press censorship, too, but why are we getting hung up on this issue when there are bigger fish to fry. It just makes us look like we’re sticking up for liars and rogues.” In this instance, his aim is to persuade opponents of press censorship to give up their fight and move onto something else.

If these shenanigans were the preserve of blog-dwelling misfits who still live with their parents, it wouldn’t really matter. But the same tactics are used by influential people in the press and in politics, with considerable effect on government policy. Take, for example, the so-called bag tax, which was in the news recently. Its media advocates dismissed it as being so trivial that only parochial NIMBYs would object to it, thus discouraging any opposition and paving the way for its introduction. Similarly, gay marriage, which many consider of little consequence to the majority of people, has been conflated in importance by persuading its opponents that it would be small-minded of them to stand in its way. This is classic concern troll behaviour.

This isn’t about brainwashing us into holding particular opinions (I don’t believe people are that gullible); it’s about avoiding honest debate by disrupting it or avoiding it altogether. Most people are inherently peaceable and would rather not have to argue their way through life, so it’s easier for them to believe that progressive reforms pose no threat than to constantly argue the odds. The Left counts on us becoming so war-weary that we’ll step aside and let them carry on their merry way. Well, we did that for thirteen years under New Labour, and it left us with a ruined economy, a bloated state, vandalised schools, runaway immigration, a rise in violent crime, a surveillance state, codes of speech and thought, and a culture of dependency and entitlement.

Debating the issues of the day can be tiresome and complicated, but it is necessary if truth and justice are to prevail.