I wrote the following essay close to 15 years ago. I badly needs to be rewritten, but I’m not sure where to begin. For one thing I’m not even sure I still believe everything I wrote back then, and it’ tremendously incomplete.
I figure if I throw it to the wolves here at the SDMB it would shake things up enough to give me some insight on how to proceed. So which bits stink, which bits should I keep and what else should I say?
The main thing is that there’s a lotta red meat here to debate.
SQUEAKY WHEELS on IDEOLOGY
He who makes the first accusation of evil loses the argument. Evil is a rather elusive concept for how often the term is bandied about. It's easy enough to judge individual criminals as evil, but when rival political movements abuse the term there can be trouble. Those who pursue a political agenda driven by a set of interests or concerns will invariably encounter those who have competing interests or different ideas of what’s best. Having squared off as opponents, most of us will try to convey the advantages of our point of view while pointing out the deficiencies in theirs. But some people have trouble distinguishing between competition with opponents and conflict with enemies. If two groups are arguing over the same resource that they each want for themselves, the situation is easy enough to understand, if not to compromise on. But in disputes over policies or laws of the land, partisans will go far beyond arguing that their ideas have more advantages and fewer flaws than their opponents. No, we’re the heroes and they’re the villains. Our opponents are just out to hurt people. One side or the other may be misguided in some way, or there may be a sharp disagreement on priorities or likely results, or there may be those who consider the status quo virtually sacred and fear change, or perhaps the actions of a few zealots lead to unfair characterizations of the group.
Some may charge that unwelcome aspects of a policy is the true intent, as in “the government taxes us just so they can take our money” or “opponents of affirmative action want to roll back gains made by minorities”. But a political movement simply can’t have purely harmful or hostile intentions and have any viability, so warnings to the contrary are likely to be off-base. A mainstream movement needs to be seen as entirely benevolent to be successful, and a movement which can’t resist a hard-line agenda will be relegated to the fringes, the irony here being that it is these groups who will most loudly accuse their opponents of malevolence. A successful extremist movement like the Nazis is the exception which proves the rule, both in that they rose to power amid the vilest denunciations of the groups they targeted, and since then in providing an example for countless extremists to base their denunciations on. Quite clearly then, it is characteristic of extremists to portray their opponents as opposing extremists, polarizing the populace as they square off for conflict.
Our problems and the political landscape we deal with them in have evolved greatly in recent history. For so much of the past, people faced invasions by neighboring tribes or nations, were taxed or enslaved by greedy rulers, stood to lose more than they gained in revolts, enjoyed second-class status, or otherwise faced adversaries in situations which were black-and-white if not life-or-death. Conditions like this still prevail in much of the world, but in areas such as the West where has been much reform, the moderating weight of massed public opinion can deny power to anyone who could emerge as an “enemy”. Nevertheless, in a throwback to dark ages just past, many here persist in portraying any dispute as a violent conflict-in-waiting. In the real world, reconciliation awaits understanding and compromise; in the symbolic world of the extremist, roles of hero and villain are assigned to parties to the debate as though it were a great drama set to unfold--if not as a war then a “war”. It is the extreme extremist who goes beyond imagining a real war is in the works, but behaves as though one has actually begun. The only thing more amazing than how stupid these people are is how inevitable is seems to be.
A political movement is shaped like a pyramid. The bulk of its supporters are on or near the solid ground of moderation, but from their midst arises a smaller number who take a more uncompromising stance. The broader the base, the higher “off the ground” the true believers will be, until the tiny cluster at the top emerges as dangerous whackos on a mission. Recent examples abound of a movement being represented by its extreme extremists even as its mainstream distances itself from them: The Oklahoma City bombing and the murders at several abortion clinics have shown how quickly a war of words can lead to real killing. The beating of Reginald Denny (during the Rodney King riots) shows how extremism can escalate to violence with spontaneity, while the random killings of blacks by white supremacists show how deeply rooted it can be. The fatal bombing at the University of Wisconsin by Vietnam anti-war extremists and the Tate-LaBianca killings by the counterculture extremists that were the Manson family show that a killer can emerge from any movement if the numbers are large enough, even if that contradicts the movement’s ideals. But the 60’s movement which gave rise to these two examples had tens of millions of true believers whereas the anti-government gun-nut movement which begat the Oklahoma City bombing was much smaller. So it seems that some pyramids are steeper and narrower than others, the slope of the sides indicating how *inclined*, as it were, its members are towards violent extremism. [FULL TEXT](http://www.squeakywheelsblog.com/ideology)