A friend pointed me to a letter to the editor published in the Badger Herald, an independent newspaper published at the University of Wisconsin , widely tweeted with such comments as “Motherfucker, what the fuck” and “how do people like this actually exist?” It argues that rape culture is, in the writer’s words, “non-existent.” I provide the link for documentation purposes only; you should most decidedly not click on it, especially if you are a woman vulnerable to rape-trauma triggers, or a woman, or, actually, if you are a human being. The letter, from a junior majoring in political science, goes on to say that the term “rape culture” merely “aggressively paints men as dangerous and as the root of evil,” and complains “women feel the need to exploit anything that may be rape for publicity.”
I’ll say no more about this “argument.” I bring it up to make a broader point about right-wing rhetoric. It is this: Have you ever noticed how conservatives who say the most controversial things imaginable consistently frame such utterances as self-evident, as simple “truth,” explaining with unshakable confidence that anyone who disagrees with them… no, scratch that. Start over:
Have you ever noticed how conservatives who say the most controversial things imaginable think no one actually disagrees with them?
They will admit that, yes, people might claim to disagree. But they will explain, if pressed, that those who do so are lying, or nuts, or utter the non-truths they utter out of a totalitarian will to power, or are poor benighted folks cowed or confused by those aforementioned totalitarians. (Which, of course, makes the person “finally” telling “the truth” a hero of bottomless courage.) Or the people who disagree are simply stupid as a tree stump. This is why “agree to disagree” is not a acceptable trope in the conservative lexicon. A genuine right-winger will be so lacking in intellectual imagination—in cognitive empathy—that imagining how anyone could sincerely reason differently from them is virtually impossible.
Here’s what that kid from Wisconsin, whom I won’t even dignify with more publicity by typing his name, writes of what he’s about to argue: “I know that people are out there on the fringe of reality who are going to criticize me for what I’m about to explain—but somebody has to explain this.” He also says, “if you put a spotlight on rape, you don’t understand the real issue.”
You could disagree. But that would place you on the fringe of reality. Someone who doesn’t understand the real issue.
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How characteristic is this of the right-wing mind? Consider that it was the entire point of Barry Goldwater’s election slogan “In your heart you know he’s right.” And consider a 1956 circular for Human Events: it read, “conservatives are already in the majority—in your state, in almost every state.” The third-party candidate Human Events backed that year, T. Coleman Andrews, who was campaigning to ban the federal income tax, got only 6.1 percent in his best state. But that must have been because the liberals were just that perfidious. Such was the argument, in 1964, of Phyllis Schlafly’s A Choice, Not An Echo, about why a conservative had never won Republican presidential nominations. In their heart, everyone knew conservatism was right. If Gallup polls said otherwise, that was only because, Schlafly wrote, Gallup “asked a lot of questions of a very few people” in order to “come up with answers that pleased the New York kingmakers.” (Her insight has proven an imperishable one on the right, as Mitt Romney learned to his detriment.)
I witnessed the radicalism of conservatives’ lack of cognitive empathy firsthand in, of all places, William F. Buckley’s dining room. Not from Buckley himself, he of relatively blessed memory, considering the conservative competition these days—he was one of the few conservative thought leaders with a history of treating liberals, including me, with intellectual respect. From another of Buckley’s guests, a National Review donor who honestly looked a little bit like this guy. I had been invited to dine (I was served by a butler!) at one of Buckley’s fortnightly “stag” dinner parties, and hold forth on my book about Barry Goldwater. Old Moneybags buttonholed me on the way out. The dialogue honestly went like this:
“So—you’ve read Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative?”
“Yes. I have a whole chapter about it in my book.”
He looked at me searchingly. The sincerity, really, was aching. “And it didn’t make you a conservative?” He honestly couldn’t believe it could be so. It was beyond his poor powers of epistemological empathy to comprehend.
