Conservatives get demoralized, because they don’t know what to say

Another reader wrote to me on the subject of conservative disengagement or surrender, and I replied with an anecdote (which turned out to be prophetic) about the Likud politician Ehud Olmert:

Keeping up with your current theme on your blog, I’d like to briefly comment on your recent post, from a reader:

“Because advanced liberalism attacks on so many fronts simultaneously, those with any healthy respect for tradition—or even ordinary cultural sanity—are largely confused and demoralized.”

I think the real “confusion” lies in the fact that certain conservatives lack the intellectual rigor and/or curiousity to defend tradition. Admittedly, why should we defend it in the first place though? Tradition is good, valuable and informative, in an intuitive sense.

Could the demoralization be due to the fact that if you are expected to argue something, and don’t have a clear answer, it becomes a bit emotionally draining? The one who “loses the argument” will keep saying “I know I am right,” but really doesn’t know why.

Thinking about socialism, it is a bit demoralizing to have to argue against it because socialists have a repotoire of snappy one-liners that supports the intellectual appeal of their simplistic ideology.

Of course, this can go along with your analysis that it has become awfully futile to argue with pathological one-liners.

I think any intellectual movement needs to be as dramatically programmatic, as leftists have it, if the ideas are going to seep into people’s minds as moral, valuable, and virtuous in the current social order. But that’s the problem: conservatives ain’t that.

Anyway, I don’t want to sound defeatist, but I think this could be one root of the problem.

I agree that conservatives get demoralized in part because they often lack effective intellectual responses to the left. However, I don’t think that this points to the need for “programmatic” conservative responses (i.e., slogans), as the reader seems to be suggesting, but rather to the need for intelligent, effective arguments that get at the root of things. If a conservative is hit with a liberal or leftist argument to which he has no reply, that is a warning sign to him that he needs to do more thinking. There is nothing more demoralizing than seeing someone make a conservative-leaning argument, then get hit by some leftist attack, and then fold.

Here’s one example of this that comes to mind. On the Charlie Rose program several years ago, Ted Koppel was the guest along with Ehud Olmert, then the Likud mayor of Jerusalem. Olmert said something like, “How can we make peace with people who believe in terrorism?”, and Koppel, in that supremely pompous manner of his, said something like, “Surely you’re not suggesting that Arabs are inherently inferior people?” Olmert said nothing in reply, and the conversation moved on to other topics. Olmert, a seasoned politician in a country characterized by extremely tough and nasty politics, was stumped by a standard liberal attack. He lacked the guts and the presence of mind to shoot back: “I am saying that the Arabs do in fact have that belief in terror. You, Mr. Koppel, are turning reality on its head by acting as though someone speaking this truth about Arabs is a racist. This makes it impossible for us to discuss the reality of the terrorism problem. Shame on you for trying to suppress this vitally important discussion.” Had Olmert said something like that, Koppel (who is a classic bully) would have folded. Instead, it was Olmert who folded, and in so doing, probably lost whatever effectivess he might have had as a debater on the terrorism issue.

I am writing this at 12:30 a.m. on June 20. By sheer serendipity, on the same day, yesterday, when I wrote and posted the above anecdote about Ehud Olmert’s pathetic non-response to Ted Koppel’s intimidation a few years ago, and suggested that this meant the end of Olmert as an effective political force in Israel’s defense, a friend sent me the following excerpt from a story in Ha’aretz:

Ehud Olmert, representative of the Sharon government at the annual gathering of the Israel Policy Forum, stood on the stage and declared: “We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 19, 2005 04:42 PM | Send