A fallacy of composition

Tacitus is one of those nice conservatives I described in a previous post as akin to certain kinds of crime victims: they fall prey because they project their own normalcy onto people who are not normal. They just can't believe that any other conservative would act from a base of thought different than their own sane framework.

He recently posted a piece attacking my logic in decrying a particularly vicious kind of demagoguery in the presidential campaign -- namely, the identification of Democrats with the "terrorist agenda", thus revealing the "treasonous" nature of both their candidates and their voters.

In denying that this is taking place -- or at least that it is a serious problem -- Tacitus makes the same logical mistake (from the other side, as it were) as the rabid conservatives who in fact are genuinely denouncing Democrats as treasonous: that is, he confuses an irrational argument with a rational one.

First, there's the irrational argument:

[T]he meme that a Democratic '04 victory would be good for terrorists, on the grounds that this notion implicitly transforms Democratic voters into "genuine traitors."

This argument, he says, is identical in structure not only to my argument:

removing "Bush from office in the 2004 election....is not, as the unAmerican rabid right would have us a think, a capitulation to the terrorists. It is in fact the first step to seriously winning the war against them."

But also to his:

Personally, now that Bob Graham is out of the race, I don't see any Democrat -- save perhaps Wesley Clark -- whose election will do anything but harm the war on terror. There, I said it.

But structurally, these are not identical arguments at all. The latter two certainly are similar both in structure and the respectively partisan base of their content. But the first, irrational argument -- that [one side] or the other would be "good for the terrorists" -- is a smear, partly because it is predicated on two complete unknowns: (a) what the enemy actually hopes for, and (b) what in fact would be good (or bad) for them in the long run, regardless of their thinking on the matter; and therefore is groundless. But most of all it is a smear because it rather crassly demeans the motives of the opponents by associating their political success with that of terrorists. It identifies them with the nation's enemies.

There are two ways of smearing your opponents as traitors: You can call them that directly. Or you can identify them with the enemy. Regardless of your poison -- Ann Coulter or Victor Davis Hanson -- it amounts to the death of real debate. That isn't merely arguing over who would be most effective in prosecuting the war on terror. That's flat-out arguing that one side will simply betray us all. It's a smear, and it should be beneath "decent" conservatives.

One of the more interesting discussions of this came recently in the pages of American Conservative, in a piece by Doug Bandow titled " The Conservative Case Against George W. Bush,":

Some of Bush's supporters have been even worse, charging critics with a lack of patriotism. Not to genuflect at the president's every decision is treason. In two decades of criticizing liberal politicians and positions, I have rarely endured the vitriol that was routinely spewed by conservatives when I argued against war with Iraq over the last year. Conservative papers stopped running my column; conservative Web sites removed it from their archives. That was their right, of course, but they demonstrated that it was not just the Clintons who were fair-weather friends.

Arguing the wisest policy over the conduct of the war on terrorism -- a war that potentially affects us all directly -- is something all civic-minded Americans should be engaging in. Injecting accusations about the loyalty of one side or the other in the debate has no place in anyone's arguments, because it just shuts it down.

As Tacitus himself says:

The fact is that some policies -- and some candidates -- are indeed better or worse against terrorism. Honest people can disagree on which is which, but there's hardly anything wrong in arriving at (much less announcing) conclusions on the subject.

What Tacitus seems to miss here is that Democrats have been making essentially the same argument, but from the other side of the fence -- that Bush's policies are ineffective (or worse) in the war on terrorism -- and for simply making those arguments, their motives are impugned as being "helpful" to the enemy. Democrats have so far managed to question Bush without impugning his patriotism -- and as Tacitus suggests (it's the basis of his little joke that "a vote for reelection in '04 is a vote for bin Laden"), it would be ridiculous for them to do so. Republicans, in contrast, have indulged themselves in open smears of the opposition, which appear likely to only worsen as the election approaches.

Most of all, Tacitus wrongly correlates his argument with those I've cited from others, all of which explicitly identify Democrats with the enemy. Let's review.

First, there was Hanson:

So too we should expect a wave of desperate Saddamite attacks once Iraqis take control in July. October will be difficult as Baathists and al Qaedists hope to demoralize our electorate and bring in a Howard Dean or his clone and with him a quick American exit from Baghdad.

I also thought it worth noting this contribution:

Of course, Al-Quada and every other major terrorist organization are also rooting for a Democratic victory over President Bush. Do we see a disturbing pattern here? A vote for the Democrats in 2004 is a vote for Al Quada.

And how could this one go unmentioned?

Here's a hint to you, Eric: The gov't can't do anything to you over that ad, but that's the extent of your protection under the First Amendment.

The rest of us, however, aren't the gov't, in case you've forgotten, and quite few of us would be more than happy to wipe that nervous little grin off your traitorous mug -- with a belt sander.

And then there's this gem:

Here's a note I got recently from a friend and former Delta Force member, who has been observing American politics from the trenches: "These bastards like Clark and Kerry and that incipient ass, Dean, and Gephardt and Kucinich and that absolute mental midget Sharpton, race baiter, should all be lined up and shot.

And I haven't even brought in Coulter yet.

Of course, it must be observed that this tactic is not solely relegated to Republicans. Some yet-unnamed Democrats are using the same kind of smear to attack Howard Dean as well.

It's despicable, and it has no place in any corner of the debate. We should be able to argue, loudly, over whose policy will be most effective in fighting terrorism. If we believe in our good faith, we should be able to do so without fear of being accused of treason.

It has always been a given that, no matter how much we disagree on policy, we are all Americans, and are all united against our enemies. In the name of good faith, there are certain boundaries we don't cross. Questioning our political opponents' loyalty for doubting policy decisions is one of them. This is especially the case when it comes to the presidency.

Neither Lincoln nor the GOP hinted that a vote for McClellan was a vote for the Confederacy. Neither FDR nor the Democrats even dreamt of suggesting that the Nazis were secretly rooting for Thomas Dewey. The first time the "dissent is treason" meme appeared in a presidential election was in 1972, when Nixon's CREEP crew trotted it out and slimed McGovern with it. Fortunately, it went hiding under a rock, until Nixon's old crew, and sociopathic mindset, had the chance to re-emerge.

Now it's back with a vengeance. And it's being wielded by "marginal idiots" who just happen to be extraordinarily, even disproportionately, influential. And they run the gamut from Misha to Mike Savage to Katherine Parker to Rush Limbaugh to Ann Coulter, with all the many other similarly sociopathic gnomes in between. These people, and not Tacitus, are the voice of modern conservatism. Sad to say.

And this, in the end, is the real logical mistake that Tacitus makes: He sees his brand of conservatism as representative, when in fact it is exceptional. He naturally, and logically, argues that we can agree or disagree as citizens about whose policy is more likely to win in a war without violating the terms of a good-faith debate. As do I.

But many others, in contrast, leap from rational arguments over policy (my policy is more effective in winning the war) to irrational conclusions (his policy benefits the enemy and betrays the national interest; taken even further, he is a traitor and deserves to be hung). It's one thing to say that one policy is more or less effective; it's another altogether to impugn its intent.

[Liberals of course are no innocents to this kind of argument in other arenas; but in the case of the war, their arguments (or at least those of the leading candidates) have been substantively logical. Certainly we haven't seen much in the way of liberals accusing conservatives of being "objectively pro-Saddam" or "soft on terrorism" or "unpatriotic."]

Tacitus' argument boils down to this: I'm a conservative, and I don't think that way. Why would other conservatives?

But they do, don't they? A lot of them do. A lot more, it seems anymore, than those whose don't.

In your logic text, Tacitus, your error is called a composition fallacy. You can look it up.