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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe 'reasonable' rebels Conservatives say we've abandoned reason and civility. The Old South used
The reasonable rebels
Conservatives say weve 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. Im 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 couldnt 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 theyre 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 Lincolns 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
(12,618 posts)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
(118,356 posts)But his opponents are such extremists, supporting Hitler is really the only reasonable choice!"
Jake Stern
(3,145 posts)Until all that remained is the hideous monster we see today.
ehrnst
(32,640 posts)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. Thats 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.