The tactic works like this. When a progressive point or position is forwarded and conservatives dispute it, progressives don’t answer the objection on its own terms, refuting it with more facts, better logic, or even anecdote or humor. Instead, they address the conservative opponent himself—his motives, experiences, feelings, and aims. Not all of them, mind you, only the ones that, putatively, have led the conservative to oppose the progressive idea: his anxieties, insecurities, worries, and fervid imaginings.
Whatever principles, values, or concepts the conservative articulates, however urgent the reasoning, those things are, in fact, said to be a disguise, a cloak, a tool of deeper irrationality. This is the shift. We go from debate to diagnosis.
It’s a potent rhetorical weapon. It has worked well over many years. A Bible-believing person objects to same-sex marriage not because his Bible tells him so. He objects to same-sex attraction because it threatens him. He can’t accept it; he can’t deal with it. Maybe he has those impulses himself and has to repress them. Whatever—it’s his problem, and we needn’t respect it as an intellectual or religious contention. He doesn’t have an argument; he has a psyche, a troubled one.
The tactic changes the terms of controversy. It puts conservatives immediately on the defensive. They no longer have a point to make. Rather, they have a neurosis to disavow. They stand accused of a pathological condition, a culpable one in that it harms others. The progressives who have put them on the spot don’t have to contend with conservative principles or values, which would require them to accept conservatives as equal participants in the arena of debate. Just treat them as more or less twisted or confounded personalities. I’m rational, you aren’t—nice! How pleasurable it is, how tempting, to take this other course, to insinuate, imply, and impute a bias, an animus, a problem deep in the hearts and minds of the ones across the table and to watch them squirm and wriggle.
I’ve seen it happen many times. I’ve fallen prey to it myself, and I’ve kicked myself afterward for failing to reply, “Nope, sorry, that allegation doesn’t work with me—try answering my actual statement instead.”
Often, you see a projection at work, as when leftists assail one traditional institution after another and when a conservative rises to object, he’s said to be the aggressive one, the reactionary itching and aching to start a culture war. One might assume that this cheap ad hominem only shows the weakness of the progressive side, and perhaps that’s true. But when such a diversionary tactic works so well, the flaws in the thing that the tactic obscures don’t much relieve the conservative who has been so accused.
That latter accusation proceeded nonstop during the Trump years.
Any conflicts out there in the public square are because of conservative rubes, neurotics, and belligerents who refuse to follow the rational path to liberalism in all things. If they don’t like the idea of trans rights, they’re transphobes. If they cheer Trump’s wall, they’re nativists and xenophobes. Let’s convert every conservative belief into one pathology or another. Don’t debate these cretins—diagnose them and toss them into the basket of deplorables.
The temptation is even greater when the verdict is read and the liberal experiences the joy of falling safely on the side of the right-thinking, well-meaning ones. Every denunciation of a conservative implies the superiority of the liberal. Each time a right-winger is charged with hostility, bigotry, hate, or fear, the liberal can nod in agreement and mutter silently, “Yes, and I am certainly not like that.” There’s great nobility in speaking truth to power.
It’s getting harder to make it work, however. The tactic has a few embarrassing paradoxes that are becoming ever more overt. First, one has to comb through many, many institutions before one can find a staunch conservative at the helm. A few colleges, a few businesses, a few news/talk shows, a few magazines and newspapers ... not many in any field, wholly outnumbered by the liberal examples. One has to wonder why liberals bother to put conservatives down in this humiliating way when liberals and leftists control Hollywood, Silicon Valley, academia, public education, mainstream media, human resources, the art world, and so forth.
Second, if conservatives are, indeed, so benighted and screwy, why are any of them still around? Why weren’t they selected out of existence decades ago? Why hasn’t their inferiority disempowered them completely? How did Donald Trump ever win?
Liberalism has no good answer to these questions. Certainly, the diagnostic tactic doesn’t explain it. Liberals might answer that the survival of knuckle-dragging rightists is because of the lingering sins of America—white supremacy, the patriarchy, and the rest—but that explanation runs against the long-running dominance of liberalism in all the elite spaces. It’s 2022, not 1958. Liberalism won, and the win was complete a long time ago.
Or maybe not. Maybe liberals secretly, in their hearts, worry that conservatives are stronger than they are. Maybe they fear that the rightist has stouter convictions, deeper commitments, firmer beliefs, and happier faiths. Maybe, just maybe, liberals know that they have a loose grip on the present, that their 60-year conquest of American life is coming to a crisis and may collapse.
No, it’s not conservatives who are phobic, anxious, threatened, and ill-adapted to modern affairs: Look in the mirror, liberals.
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