Conor Friedersdorf has a new post on The Atlantic's website about the role that extreme rhetoric all too often plays in politics. His position is pretty well summed up by this passage: "... I hope you'll agree that the subset of people who treat politics as guerrilla warfare have a terrible win-loss record, and a warped, wrongheaded view of how winning in politics is done." I always enjoy reading his work, and this post is well-written and thoughtful. But he's dead wrong.
He writes that "Political winners persuade more people to join their coalition." That is true, you can win politically by persuading people to join your cause, your campaign, or your ideology. But there are other ways of winning. You can, say, make people afraid of ever leaving that same coalition. Or you can make people afraid of the other coalition. He is right that politicians like Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama don't win elections by with nasty, brutal campaigns, but I think he glosses over the role that nastiness and brutality can play in racking up fear-driven victories.
Seth Godin wrote an excellent post on the power that zealots have. People live their lives between sets of extremes, like cannibalism at one end of the spectrum and a dust-based diet at the other. As he says: "Most of us draw a line somewhere between the extremes. That means we're already compromising, we just argue about how much." The zealots make it just a little more comfortable to move just a little closer to one extreme or the other.
"Political and ideological gains don't come from being best at smashing faces through plate glass windows or winning news cycles or employing the most extreme rhetoric," according to Friedersdorf's post. I want to believe that, but I don't.
Image that you could arrange everyone in the country in a single, straight line. It would be like a schoolyard role-call, but instead of lining up according to last name it would be based on how passionate someone was about a given issue. At both ends there are the outliers. These are the people for whom this issue, whether they're for it or against it, is the single most important issue in the entire world. How many of these people are willing to smash windows and faces (metaphorically or even literally) over this issue? How many ready are willing to spew as much "extreme rhetoric" as they can squeeze out at anyone who will listen? It's probably not 100%, but it's not zero.
I admit that this is an very flawed analogy, but it can be a useful thought experiment. Consider the immigration debate. It has been too toxic for any politician to even touch for decades. But what if you removed the most extreme 5% from that debate? Or just the most extreme 1%? How small is the number of people who perennially mannage keep immigration reform off the table?
I share Friedersdorf's disgust with the process, but I believe that it's dangerous to underestimate the power of the Andrew Breitbarts and the Betsy McCaugheys of the world.
