The 'reasonable' rebels Conservatives say we've abandoned reason and civility. The Old South used

[applegrove]

The ‘reasonable’ rebels

Conservatives say we’ve abandoned reason and civility. The Old South used the same language to defend slavery.

By Eve Fairbanks at the Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/29/conservatives-say-weve-abandoned-reason-civility-old-south-said-that-too/?arc404=true

"SNIP.....

I grew up in a conservative family. The people I talk to most frequently, the people I call when I need help, are conservative. I’m not inclined to paint conservatives as thoughtless bigots. But a few years ago, listening to the voices and arguments of commentators like Shapiro, I began to feel a very specific deja vu I couldn’t initially identify. It felt as if the arguments I was reading were eerily familiar. I found myself Googling lines from articles, especially when I read the rhetoric of a group of people we could call the “reasonable right.”

These are figures who typically dislike President Trump but often say they’re being pushed rightward — sometimes away from what they claim is their natural leftward bent — by intolerance and extremism on the left. The reasonable right includes people like Shapiro and the radio commentator Dave Rubin; legal scholar Amy Wax and Jordan Peterson, the Canadian academic who warns about identity politics; the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt; the New York Times columnist Bari Weiss and the American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, self-described feminists who decry excesses in the feminist movement; the novelist Bret Easton Ellis and the podcaster Sam Harris, who believe that important subjects have needlessly been excluded from political discussions. They present their concerns as, principally, freedom of speech and diversity of thought. Weiss has called them “renegade” ideological explorers who venture into “dangerous” territory despite the “outrage and derision” directed their way by haughty social gatekeepers.

So it felt frustrating: When I read Weiss, when I listened to Shapiro, when I watched Peterson or read the supposedly heterodox online magazine Quillette, what was I reminded of?

My childhood home is just a half-hour drive from the Manassas battlefield in Virginia, and I grew up intensely fascinated by the Civil War. I loved perusing soldiers’ diaries. During my senior year in college, I studied almost nothing but Abraham Lincoln’s speeches. While I wrote my thesis on a key Lincoln address, Civil War rhetoric was almost all I read: not just that of the 16th president but also that of his adversaries.

.....SNIP"

It is gaslighting plain and simple.

[Downtown Hound]

1. No such thing as the "reasonable right."

Anybody reasonable would have ditched that movement long ago. If you still call yourself a right winger then you and reason had a parting of ways somewhere along the line.

[struggle4progress]

2. "Of course, everyone was very disappointed when Hitler invaded Poland and started gassing Jews!

But his opponents are such extremists, supporting Hitler is really the only reasonable choice!"

[Jake Stern]

3. The reasonable Republicans were slowly picked off or driven out over the past 5 decades

Until all that remained is the hideous monster we see today.

[ehrnst]

4. This is an amazing read. Thank you for sharing. This part particularly:

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that some contemporary commentators use antebellum reasoning cynically. Hard-right American commentators like David Horowitz have noted the tactical advantages of sounding “outraged” and “morally certain,” and of stressing their status as renegade thinkers to argue for right-wing policies such as much more restrictive immigration laws or institutionalized prejudice against Muslims. And he may indeed have learned this from elements of the left: a toxic “cancel” culture has existed there for a long time. But that doesn’t justify so disingenuously magnifying the threat. Others, I suspect, seek the reassurance of antebellum reasoning to help reconcile their ambivalent feelings about cultural and demographic changes. Still others may simply be disillusioned with contemporary politics, intuit that important conversations are somehow not being had, and long for a discourse anchored on simple, easily shared principles. They may have no racist sympathies nor even be particularly conservative. But that’s why the South came up with this form of argument in the first place. It conscripted allies who had no taste for distasteful things into what was cast as a much wider fight.

But today I see what Lincoln feared. Nearly daily, I read some new figure appealing to antebellum reasoning. Joining the reasonable right seems to render these figures desirable contributors to center-left media outlets. That’s because, psychologically, the claim to victimhood can function as a veiled threat. It tricks the listener into entering a world where the speaker is the needy one, fragile, requiring the listener to constantly adjust his behavior to cater to the imperiled person.