The Silencing Read online

  Liberal writer Nina Burleigh profiled conservative women as “baby Palins” in a 2011 Elle magazine article. In addition to infantilizing conservative women, Burleigh portrayed her subjects as ungrateful traitors to their sex. “The young women I interviewed for this article share almost every goal of feminism. They want to be—and in many cases, already believe themselves to be—‘empowered’: educationally, financially, sexually,” Burleigh wrote. “But they resist any effort to put advancing their fellow women front and center. That means opposing everything from gender-based affirmative action, such as government-mandated quotas for female athletes under Title IX, to equal-pay-for-equal-work laws.”56 Somehow it escapes the illiberal left that it is possible to sincerely believe that conservative policies are best for all people, including women. Is it really so hard to understand that people can have differing yet reasonable opinions on these issues?

  TACTIC #2: DEMONIZING

  Demonizing is another favored tactic utilized by the illiberal left to delegitimize opponents. They simultaneously make racist and misogynist attacks against opponents and accuse opponents of being racists, bigots, misogynists, rape apologists, traitors, and homophobes. As we saw with Campbell Brown and Michelle Rhee, for any Democrat, liberal, or ideological agnostic who questions the sanctioned illiberal line, there’s another tactic: accusing dissenters of being closet conservatives.

  The purpose of demonizing opponents is to make them radioactive to the broader culture. The illiberal left uses character assassination to ensure their opponents won’t be treated as sincere or thoughtful contributors to the national conversation. The illiberal left doesn’t desire debate, it wants a monologue on one side and silence on the other.

  ALL DISSENT IS RACIST

  The illiberal left’s inability to treat differing viewpoints as valid leads them to demonize disagreement as racism. In September 2009, during a speech at Emory University, former President Jimmy Carter said that racist attitudes were driving criticism of President Obama. It wasn’t the first time he’d made such comments. The day before, Carter told NBC’s Nightly News, “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African-American.”57 Actor and liberal activist Robert Redford echoed Carter’s sentiments, saying that GOP congressional members want to “paralyze the system. I think what sits underneath it, unfortunately, is there’s probably some racism involved, which is really awful.”58 This line of argument depends on the fallacy that President Obama has endured uniquely hostile treatment while in the White House. In this alternate universe, no president has ever been harshly criticized by members of the opposing party or had their signature efforts opposed by Congress. We are asked to forget that Bill Clinton had his attempt at health-care reform demonized and destroyed by strident Republican opposition. Or that he was accused of having approved the killing of one of his best friends, Vince Foster, whose death was ruled a suicide. Indiana Republican Congressman Dan Burton, who ran the House inquiry into Foster’s death, said in 1998 of Clinton, “If I could prove 10 percent of what I believe happened [regarding the death of Vincent Foster], he’d be gone. This guy’s a scumbag. That’s why I’m after him.”59 An e-mail that circulated widely starting in 1998 accused Bill Clinton of being responsible for more than fifty suspicious deaths. It became such an urban legend that the website Snopes.com had to investigate and rule it “false.” There is also the fact that Clinton was one of only two presidents in American history to be impeached.

  Still, the notion that racism is the only possible reason Republicans would oppose President Obama has become such conventional wisdom that baseball legend Hank Aaron compared Republican opposition to President Obama to the KKK, telling an interviewer, “When you look at a black president, President Obama is left with his foot stuck in the mud from all of the Republicans with the way he’s treated. We have moved in the right direction, and there have been improvements, but we still have a long ways to go in the country. The bigger difference is that back then they had hoods. Now they have neckties and starched shirts.”60 By late 2013, MSNBC host Chris Matthews had labeled Obama’s critics racists at least twenty times on the air.61 In 2014, U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana said that Obama’s unpopularity in the state was due to the fact that “the South has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans.”62

  Isn’t it possible that conservatives oppose Obama because they oppose his policies? And isn’t it also true that the South is one of the more conservative parts of the country? It would have been more accurate for Landrieu to say that the South has not lately been the friendliest place for Democrats.63 When she made her claim, Landrieu was the only Democrat representing the Deep South in the Senate,64 And there was only one white Southern Democrat serving in the House: Georgia Congressman John Barrow, a pro-gun, fiscally conservative Democrat, running for his sixth term. Both Landrieu and Barrow ended up losing their elections in 2014, while the voters of South Carolina elected Republican African American Tim Scott to the U.S. Senate.65

  Almost needless to say, those who opposed the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) were labeled racists. Louisiana Democratic Party Chair and State Senator Karen Carter Peterson stood on the floor of the state senate and announced that opposition to the Affordable Care Act stemmed from “the race of this African-American president. . . . It comes down to the race of the president of the U.S., which causes people to disconnect and step away from the substance of the bill.”66 In 2014, Congressman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi walked the same road by claiming that his state’s governor opposed Obamacare “just because a black man created it.”67 In May 2014, West Virginia Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller accused the GOP of opposing Obamacare because the president is “the wrong color” in a Commerce Committee meeting.68 Earlier that same month, he said some lawmakers “don’t want anything good to happen under this president, because he’s the wrong color,” in a Senate Finance Committee hearing on transportation funding.69 Robert Scheer, contributing editor to the Nation and editor of Truthdig.com, attributed Republican governors’ rejection of Obamacare to a racist strategy “to deny healthcare” to “a working poor population that skews disproportionately black in the South.”70 Scheer neglected to account for the motivations of the few Democratic governors who refused to set up state healthcare exchanges to participate in Obamacare.71

  I supported Obamacare, but to think that Republicans and conservatives oppose it because the president is black is absurd. Just as with Bill Clinton’s healthcare reform plan, conservatives and liberals have different ideas about the role of government. While there are obviously people who oppose President Obama and his policies because they are racist, demonizing opponents of his agenda as such is a dishonest and divisive attempt to delegitimize dissent from the left’s worldview.

  But to the illiberal left it’s not just critics of the president who are “racist.” While campaigning for Obama’s reelection in 2013, DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz cast Mitt Romney’s positions on welfare reform and work requirements as racist, describing them as “a dog whistle for voters who consider race when casting their ballot.”72 MSNBC host Al Sharpton stated that critics of Attorney General Eric Holder were racists. Sharpton said that Republican Congressman Darrell Issa was applying the police tactic “stop and frisk” to Holder who “has been mishandled just like the young Black and Latino men (and women) who are demonized on our streets every day.”73

  While many may believe that Eric Holder was treated disrespectfully by Darrell Issa—count me among them—he wouldn’t be the first member of a presidential administration to suffer that fate before a congressional committee. And unless Sharpton can point to actual racist comments, we can assume that Holder’s treatment was driven far more by ideological and partisan differences than any racial prejudice (remember Republican animosity to President Bill Clinton’s attorney general Janet Reno?). As with all these
issues, members of the illiberal left prefer to smear people as racists rather than debating them on the merits.

  Many people thought that with the election of the first African American president, racial animus would decline in America. The opposite seems to have occurred. The illiberal left has exploited this issue in an effort to gain political and ideological advantages and finds racism against the president lurking behind every bush. When Republican Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin said in an interview with conservative radio host Bill Bennett that inner cities suffered from a “tailspin of culture . . . of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work; and so there’s a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with,”74 Congresswoman Barbara Lee called it a “thinly veiled racial attack.” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman accused Ryan of using a racist “dog whistle” and explained that the only reason Republicans opposed expanding Medicaid was because they were racist. He knew this because, as he asked rhetorically, “What do many Medicaid recipients look like—and I’m talking about the color of their skin, not the content of their character.”75 Ryan had been responding to a question about fatherhood—being a dad and having one. Krugman likes to cry “racist” in the most subtle ways. In a 2009 op-ed, he claimed that people who opposed Obama’s proposals were “probably reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing, or even to what they’ve heard about what he’s doing, than to who he is,” referencing cultural and “racial anxiety” in the next line.76

  The illiberal left simply didn’t know what to do with the Tea Party when it burst onto the scene, so they went with what usually works: they smeared them as a bunch of angry, uneducated racists.

  Chris Matthews wondered aloud on his show Hardball of Tea Party members, “Do they still count blacks as 3/5ths?”77 Iconic New York Congressman Charlie Rangel said that the Tea Party is made up of “mean, racist people” from former “slave-holding” states.78 Keith Olbermann declared that, “If racism is not the whole of the Tea Party, it is in its heart.”79 Left-wing darling Representative Alan Grayson (D-FL) compared the Tea Party to the Ku Klux Klan. When Tea Party and Republican leaders complained, Grayson didn’t back down, saying, “If the hood fits, wear it.”80 In the Washington Post, columnist Colbert King wrote, “But don’t go looking for a group by the name of New Confederacy. They earned that handle from me because of their visceral animosity toward the federal government and their aversion to compassion for those unlike themselves. They respond, however, to the label ‘tea party.’ By thought, word and deed, they must be making Jefferson Davis proud today.”81 And so it went.

  At one point, President Obama said in an interview that race was probably a “key component” in opposition to his presidency among the Tea Party.82 It had been well chronicled that the Tea Party was born of frustration with Washington—both Republicans and Democrats—and was primarily fueled by economic worries. Yet Obama could only conceive of opposition that was driven by racism. New York Times reporter Kate Zernike reported on the Tea Party movement in a 2010 book, Boiling Mad. “What brought most people out for the tea party was real concern about the economy, about the [national] debt,” Zernike told the Christian Science Monitor. “I think people need to understand the need to have a conversation around that issue. Also, these are people who feel like they have history and economic arguments on their side. So you need to understand what they are saying. [Those who want to argue with them] will need to [come prepared] to argue on the facts and the ideas.”83 Or you could just call them racist.

  Instead of talking about hidden racist signals, or dog whistles, or smearing opponents, how about engaging them and arguing over the substance of welfare reform to figure out what works and what doesn’t?

  DISSENT IS MISOGYNIST

  What used to be mere policy disagreements between Republicans and Democrats on abortion, equal pay, the minimum wage, and government funding of contraception are now described as being part of a “War on Women.” According to the illiberal left, nobody opposes abortion out of a concern for the unborn. As the National Organization for Women and NARAL Pro Choice regularly tell us, “pro-life” Republicans are “right-wing extremists” and “anti-women.” And if the “pro-life” Republicans are men, obviously their convictions stem from their desire to control women or a deep-seated misogyny. But think about that for a minute. If you think an unborn child has a right to life, that’s hardly an “extreme” position or a misogynistic one. That’s a difference of opinion on a very serious subject that deserves respect.

  But that’s rarely how it’s treated by the illiberal left. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi intoned about the “War on Women” at a 2011 feminist event alleging that, “abortion is one issue [in the war] but contraception and family planning and birth control are opposed by [Republicans] too.”84 Never mind that opposing family planning or trying to keep women from buying birth control is not an agenda item for the GOP. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has an entire webpage devoted to the “War on Women,” defined as “the legislative and rhetorical attacks on women and women’s rights taking place across the nation.” It’s more than a little odd that an organization founded to protect free speech would characterize people expressing disagreement about abortion as “rhetorical attacks on women,” that deserve to be demonized under the “War on Women” banner.

  But the “War on Women” isn’t just about abortion. It’s a catchall tactic to portray everything conservatives do as akin to misogyny. Feminist writer Amanda Marcotte wrote in the American Prospect that watching the hit television show Mad Men felt “familiar” because Republicans are still trying to promote the sexist values of the 1960s.85 Salon.com editor Joan Walsh warned in 2013 of the “GOP’s economic war on women”86 pointing to GOP positions on food stamps, the minimum wage, and mandatory paid sick leave and family leave. Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz borrowed the terminology of domestic abuse to attack Republican Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin. “Republican Tea Party extremists like Scott Walker . . . are grabbing us by the hair and pulling us back,” she said. Wasserman Schultz also claimed “Walker has given women the back of his hand. I know that is stark. . . . But that is reality.”87 Disagreeing with Democrats is drastically different from hitting a woman or dragging one by her ponytail, even metaphorically. In the illiberal left paradigm, disagreement is violence. In this upside down world, a conservative Republican who is married and has five daughters, like former Virginia attorney general and gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli, can be dismissed by the likes of Al Sharpton as an “anti-woman crusader”88 and by a writer at the Daily Kos as “notoriously anti-woman.”89 Really? The 54 percent of white women90 who voted for Cuccinelli in his 2013 race against Terry McAuliffe for Virginia governor apparently didn’t get that memo.

  Though, as Cuccinelli’s female voters weren’t liberal, they too would be written off as “anti-woman.” There’s a special contempt reserved for conservative women for their alleged self-hating opposition to “women’s rights.” Ann Romney learned this when she wrote a USA Today op-ed for Mother’s Day. Newsweek/Daily Beast columnist Michelle Goldberg told an MSNBC panel that Romney’s cheerleading for motherhood (on Mother’s Day no less) was “insufferable” and reminded her of Hitler and Stalin and authoritarian societies that gave awards to women who had big families. Goldberg later expanded on her views, saying “bombastic odes to traditional maternity have a sinister ring, especially when they come from people who want to curtail women’s rights.”91

  The routine criticism of those serving in positions of influence is also frequently demonized as sexism when directed at a liberal woman. After Fox News host Bill O’Reilly said State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki “looks way out of her depth” and “doesn’t look like she has the gravitas for the job,” he was immediately labeled a sexist. Marie Harf, Psaki’s deputy, fired back from the State Department podium, saying O’Reilly used “sexist, persona
lly offensive language that I actually don’t think [he] would ever use about a man.”92 Clearly, Harf doesn’t watch O’Reilly’s show because anyone who has seen it knows he is an equal opportunity critic. For example, Bill once called Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank “beneath contempt” and lamented that the paper “would employ a guy like that.” My guess is that Harf knows this and is just invoking sexism to divert attention from the fact that O’Reilly’s criticism hit a little too close to home.

  Taking issue with the credibility of favored illiberal left “facts” all but guarantees one will end up on the receiving end of an illiberal smear campaign. Various professors and journalists—liberal, conservative, and in between—have been called “rape apologists” for bringing attention to questionable campus rape statistics and complaining about the lack of due process for men accused of rape on campus. In addition to having his job threatened, Washington Post columnist George Will was called a “rape apologist” for questioning whether college campus rapes are being handled in a way that is creating a culture that fuels false reporting.93 Pointing out difficult truths can also invite the “rape apology” smear. Liberal Slate columnist Emily Yoffe ignited a firestorm with a piece advising college women not to drink to the point of incapacitation as a way to protect themselves from sexual assault.94 “The post was predicated on the true-but-fraught fact that some rape takes place in drunkenness that wouldn’t have taken place in sobriety, in that more than 80 percent of sexual assaults on campuses involve alcohol,” reported the Atlantic’s James Hamblin. “Yoffe’s writing was described in Feministing as ‘a rape denialism manifesto’ and distilled in the Daily Mail to banal victim-blaming: ‘Don’t drink if you don’t want to get raped.’”95